Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument preserves the site of the June 25 and 26, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn, near Crow Agency, Montana, in the United States. It also serves as a memorial to those who fought in the battle: George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry and a combined Lakota-Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho force. Custer National Cemetery, on the battlefield, is part of the national monument. The site of the connected military action led by Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen is also part of the National Monument, but is about 3 miles (4.83 km) southeast of the main site.
As part of a series of censorship actions at several National Park Service sites, in February 2026 the Trump Administration removed interpretive signage that described the background of the Battle of Little Bighorn and Native American boarding schools. Changes were opposed by the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council.
The geography of the site is complex, consisting of dissected uplands, rugged bluffs, the Little Bighorn River, and adjacent plains. Vegetation varies widely from one area to the next.
June 25 and 26, 1876: Battle of the Little Bighorn
1877: Custer, who had been buried there, was reinterred in West Point Cemetery.
January 29, 1879: The Secretary of War first preserved the site as a U.S. National Cemetery, to protect graves of the 7th Cavalry troopers buried there.
December 7, 1886: The site was proclaimed National Cemetery of Custer's Battlefield Reservation to include burials of other campaigns and wars. The name has been shortened to "Custer National Cemetery".
November 5, 1887: Battle of Crow Agency, three miles north of Custer battlefield
April 14, 1926: Reno-Benteen Battlefield was added.
July 1, 1940: The site was transferred from the United States Department of War to the National Park Service
March 22, 1946: The site was redesignated "Custer Battlefield National Monument".
October 15, 1966: The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
1976, The American Indian Movement (AIM) protested the centennial commemoration of the site, arguing that the site revered Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn as a part of a heroic saga of American history and expansion into the American West while those who revered it had been truly "celebrating an act of genocide".
August 11, 1983: A wildfire destroyed dense thorn scrub which over the years had seeded itself about and covered the site. This allowed archaeologists access to the site.
December 10, 1991: The site was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument by a law signed by President George H. W. Bush.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
This page covers Battle of Little Bighorn — Reno's Timber Stand. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
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