The Apsaalooke Scouts: The Battle the Crow Remember Differently

When Lieutenant Colonel Custer rode into the Little Bighorn valley on June twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six, six Crow men rode with him. Their names were Curly, White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasin, Half Yellow Face, and White Swan. They were not soldiers. They were scouts, hired by the Army because they knew this country and because the Crow Nation had long been at odds with the Lakota who controlled the region. For the Crow, scouting for the United States Army was a calculated strategic choice in a conflict that had been reshaping the northern plains for decades.

The Crow scouts saw what was coming before anyone else did. The size of the camp on the Little Bighorn, the number of warriors, the tracks spreading across the valley floor, all of it told them that the column was walking into something it could not handle. Several of the scouts tried to communicate this to the officers around them. The communication did not change the plan.

None of the six Crow scouts took part in the final engagement; Custer released them from his command before the attack, and all six survived the battle. Curly brought the first word of the disaster to the steamboat Far West on the Bighorn River, making him the first person outside the battle to carry news of what had happened to Custer's five companies. His account of those final hours, collected years later by historians, is among the most detailed records that survive. The accounts of the other scouts, gathered over the following decades, are similarly precise about the terrain, the movement of warriors, and the sequence of events on the ridgeline.

For much of the century after the battle, those accounts were dismissed, minimized, or simply ignored in the interpretive materials at the battlefield. The Army preferred its own story. Little Bighorn College in Crow Agency, the tribal land-grant institution a few miles from the monument, has spent decades working to restore the Crow scouts to the full complexity of their role. The battlefield's own interpretation has improved. But the names on the stone markers are still overwhelmingly cavalry.