Little Bighorn: The June Day in Eighteen Seventy-Six

The battlefield is fifteen miles south of the interstate on a dry prairie hillside above the Little Bighorn River. On June twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led five companies of the Seventh Cavalry into an engagement with a large encampment of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. By mid-afternoon, Custer and the roughly two hundred ten men under his direct command were all dead.

The battle was the last major military victory of the Plains tribes against United States forces, and it happened because Custer divided his regiment, underestimated the size of the encampment, and attacked without waiting for reinforcements. The village the soldiers attacked was defending itself. The warriors who fought there, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, and many others whose names are less often recorded, were protecting their families from a military campaign that had been sent specifically to force them onto reservations.

The outcome of Little Bighorn did not change the trajectory of that campaign. Within a year, most of the survivors had been either killed or confined to reservations. Crazy Horse surrendered in the spring of eighteen seventy-seven.

He was killed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska in September of that year while in custody. Sitting Bull escaped to Canada and returned in eighteen eighty-one. He was killed by Indian police in eighteen ninety.

The National Monument at Little Bighorn has a memorial to the Indian warriors as well as to the cavalry. It was added in two thousand three, after decades of advocacy. The marble markers for both sides stand in the same grass.