Little Bighorn: Sixty Miles and a World Away

Sixty miles southeast of Billings, the Little Bighorn River runs through the dry benchlands of the Crow Reservation. On June twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led five companies of the Seventh Cavalry into a combined Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne encampment along that river. By the following day, Custer and all the men under his immediate command, approximately two hundred ten soldiers, were dead.

The battle came from a sustained confrontation between the United States government and the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples over treaty rights in the Black Hills region. The second Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight had guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota, but the discovery of gold in eighteen seventy-four brought miners in defiance of the treaty. The government then demanded that all Lakota bands return to their agencies. Those who refused, led by Sitting Bull, became the military's target in the summer campaign of eighteen seventy-six.

Crow scouts rode with Custer's forces that day. The Sioux and Cheyenne encampment lay within traditional Crow territory, and the Crow had their own long conflicts with the Lakota. Among those scouts: Curly, Half Yellow Face, Goes Ahead, White Man Runs Him, and Hairy Moccasin. They warned Custer of the encampment's size. He proceeded anyway.

The battlefield is now a national monument managed by the National Park Service. Congress renamed it from Custer Battlefield to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in nineteen ninety-one, and an Indian Memorial was added in two thousand three, honoring the Native warriors who fought and died there. The Crow Reservation surrounds it.