The Battle of the Little Bighorn: The Ground Itself

June twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth, eighteen seventy-six. The Little Bighorn River runs through dry grass country in southeastern Montana, in the land the Crow call Apsaalooke and the Lakota had been hunting for years. On those two days, it became the site of the most decisive Indigenous military victory in the history of the plains wars, and the most studied and disputed battle in American military history.

The background is a broken treaty. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight had guaranteed the Lakota the Black Hills and the Powder River country as unceded territory. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in eighteen seventy-four, the United States government attempted to purchase the land, failed, and then ordered all Lakota and allied peoples to report to reservations by January of eighteen seventy-six. The majority refused. The Army was sent to compel compliance.

General George Crook, General Alfred Terry, and Lieutenant Colonel George Custer were converging on the Powder River country with three columns when Custer's Seventh Cavalry located the village on the Little Bighorn on June twenty-fifth. What Custer found was not a scattered hunting camp. It was one of the largest gatherings of Plains peoples in the nineteenth century, possibly seven thousand people or more, including approximately two thousand warriors. Historians have debated the exact figure, and the range in published sources runs from twelve hundred to three thousand fighters present.

Custer divided his command and attacked. Exactly what happened to his own battalion of approximately two hundred ten men in the ninety minutes that followed is unknown, because no one in that battalion survived to describe it. The battlefield itself, the land, the ridge lines, the ravines, the evidence the ground holds, is the primary document.

The National Monument at Little Bighorn now includes a memorial to the warriors who fought there, installed in two thousand and three. For more than a century it memorialized only Custer's dead. The stone markers indicating where soldiers fell are white. The Indian Memorial is red granite. The ground holds both stories, and neither one explains the other.