The Custer Expedition: The Survey That Started a War

In the summer of eighteen seventy-four, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a column of approximately twelve hundred soldiers, scouts, scientists, and reporters into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. He had no legal authority to be there. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight had guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota in language that excluded American citizens from the territory without Lakota consent. The expedition entered anyway, under orders justified as a reconnaissance to survey the route for a military post.

Two practical miners accompanied the column.

On August second, eighteen seventy-four, the official dispatch confirmed gold in the Black Hills. Custer's own account was sent to the press, and the New York Tribune correspondent embedded with the expedition filed a front-page story. The news traveled faster than the column.

By the spring of eighteen seventy-five, thousands of prospectors had entered treaty-protected territory. President Grant's administration made limited efforts to stop them; those efforts failed. The federal government then attempted to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota at prices the government determined. The Lakota refused to sell. The Army declared that non-reservation Lakota would be considered hostile after January thirty-first, eighteen seventy-six.

The Great Sioux War began that spring.

In June of eighteen seventy-six, Custer divided his Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory and ordered an attack on a combined Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho encampment. He was killed in the engagement, along with approximately two hundred sixty of his men. The Lakota and Cheyenne victory at the Little Bighorn was the direct consequence of the political situation Custer's eighteen seventy-four expedition had produced.

He died of what he had started.