Little Bighorn: Two Ridges, Two Hundred Years of Argument

You are passing within a few miles of one of the most consequential and most misunderstood pieces of ground in American history, and it deserves more than a quick paragraph.

June twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six. The United States government had been trying to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota since eighteen seventy-four, when George Armstrong Custer led a military expedition into the Hills, confirmed the gold rumors, and set off a rush of illegal white settlement into treaty-protected territory. The Lakota refused to sell. The government essentially declared that any Lakota bands not on the reservation by January thirty-first, eighteen seventy-six, would be considered hostile and subject to military force. Thousands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho responded to this ultimatum by gathering in a massive camp along the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana. The camp was one of the largest gatherings of Indigenous people the Great Plains had ever seen, with estimates ranging from five thousand to fifteen thousand people, of whom at least fifteen hundred to two thousand were warriors.

Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota spiritual leader, had held a sun dance earlier that month and received a vision: soldiers falling into the camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky. He interpreted this as a sign of a great victory to come.

The Army's plan was a three-pronged operation designed to surround and force the gathered bands back to the reservation. The Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, was one prong. On the morning of June twenty-fifth, his scouts told him the camp was enormous, far larger than expected. He attacked anyway, dividing his regiment into three columns. He sent Major Marcus Reno to charge the southern end of the camp. He sent Captain Frederick Benteen to sweep to the left and block escape. And he led five companies of approximately two hundred ten men along the bluffs above the river to attack what he believed was the northern end of the camp.

Reno's charge was quickly turned back. The warriors were not fleeing. Benteen eventually joined Reno on the bluffs. Both columns dug in and held on for two days. Custer's column was destroyed. The warriors, led by Crazy Horse in a flanking movement and Gall driving up from the river, shattered Custer's companies in what contemporary accounts suggest was under an hour. Every man in his immediate command was killed.

If you stop at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, you will find something more honest than most battlefield memorials. White marble markers stand where soldiers fell. Red granite markers, added in nineteen ninety-nine after a long campaign by tribal members, stand where warriors fell. The monument now carries both stories, officially and with genuine attention. This was not a story of brave cavalry overwhelmed by savage attackers. It was a story of a people defending their land and their treaty rights against a government that had already broken every agreement it made, and doing so with extraordinary effectiveness. They won the battle completely. They lost the war the following winter. The ground holds both truths simultaneously.