Battle of the Little Bighorn

Fought on June 25 and 26, 1876, along Montana Territory's Little Bighorn River, the clash pitted allied Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors against the United States Army's 7th Cavalry Regiment. Many know it as Custer's Last Stand, while the Lakota and other Plains tribes called it the Battle of the Greasy Grass. The site lay within the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, and the outcome, a defeat for American troops, made this the defining clash of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

It is worth noting that most engagements of that war, this one included, unfolded on ground the Lakota had seized from other native peoples since 1851. The Crow tribe held treaty rights to the area, and the Lakota presence there lacked their approval. As early as 1873, Blackfoot, a Crow chief, urged the U.S. military to act against these encroaching outsiders. The Lakota push into territory belonging to smaller tribes stemmed directly from their own displacement by the United States near Fort Laramie, compounded by anger over white settlers moving into the Black Hills, ground the Lakota hold sacred. Washington found this existing rivalry among native groups a convenient tool for expansion, securing solid alliances with the Arikaras and Crows throughout the Lakota Wars as a result.

Victory belonged decisively to the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho fighters, guided by prominent war leaders such as Crazy Horse and Chief Gall and driven by the spiritual visions of Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake). Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who had held rank as a brevetted major general in the Civil War, led 700 men of the 7th Cavalry into a catastrophic loss. Five of the regiment's twelve troops were annihilated entirely, and Custer himself died in the fighting, alongside two brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law. Altogether, American losses numbered 268 killed and 55 gravely wounded, six of whom later succumbed to their injuries; among the dead were four Crow scouts and no fewer than two Arikara scouts.

Reaction to the wider war shifted considerably once news of the battle spread. Libbie Custer, the general's widow, devoted herself to polishing his legacy, and over subsequent decades both Custer and his men gained standing as heroes in the national imagination. Scholars have since examined the engagement, and Custer's conduct within it, in great depth. That heroic image began to fade following Libbie Custer's death in 1933 and the 1934 release of Frederic F. Van de Water's Glory Hunter - The Life of General Custer, the first work to portray him without heroism attached. Between these developments, the disillusionment bred by economic depression, and a broader reassessment of history, perceptions of Custer and his downfall along the Little Bighorn grew notably more complicated. Today, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument stands as a tribute to combatants from both sides of the fight.

Battle

The engagement opened when Major Reno's second detachment, comprising troops A, G, and M, moved forward under written orders from Custer that Lt. William W. Cooke had drafted. Custer's Crow scouts had warned that Sioux tribe members were spreading word of the soldiers' approach through the village. Reno launched his assault after being commanded to press ahead, though these instructions rested on scant information about how large the village actually was, where it sat, or whether the warriors would flee or hold their ground. The goal, simply put, was to catch the Native Americans and force them into combat. Around 3:10 in the afternoon on June 25, Reno's men splashed across the Little Bighorn at what is now called the mouth of Reno Creek. Almost at once it became clear that the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne were not scattering but standing firm in considerable numbers.

Racing northwest across open terrain, Reno's column found cover in the dense trees lining the river's southern edge. That same screen of timber, positioned to his front and right, concealed his men as they thundered forward, initially in two companies of roughly forty men riding side by side before all three joined into a single charging line. The trees also blocked any sight of the encampment until Reno's force rounded a bend and suddenly found itself within arrow range of the village. Hunkpapa Sioux occupied the lodges in that section. Because the trees hid the settlement so effectively, neither Custer nor Reno grasped how far it extended, how deep it ran, or how large it truly was. Once Reno broke into open ground facing the village's southern edge, he pushed his Arikara and Crow scouts ahead along his vulnerable left side. Only then did the true scale of the camp become apparent, prompting Reno to halt his advance several hundred yards short, convinced he was riding into what he would afterward call a trap.

Following standard cavalry practice, he had his troopers dismount and form a skirmish line. Every fourth soldier held horses for those firing, spacing between troopers ran five to ten yards, and officers positioned themselves behind the line with horse-holders further back still. This arrangement cost Reno a quarter of his available firepower. As his men poured flanking fire into the village, killing by some accounts several wives and children belonging to the Sioux chief Gall, known as Phizí in Lakota, mounted warriors began pouring out to meet the threat. While the tree line and river bend protected Reno's right side, the attacking Indians concentrated on his center and his exposed left flank. Twenty minutes of fighting at range cost Reno only a single casualty, yet the numbers arrayed against him kept growing, by his own estimate reaching five to one, and no reinforcement came from Custer. Trooper Billy Jackson later described how the Indians had begun gathering in open ground shielded by a low hill positioned to the left of Reno's position and the right of their village. From there, more than five hundred warriors surged against the rear and left of Reno's line, collapsing his exposed flank and forcing a chaotic retreat into the timber along the river's bend. Trapped there, Reno's men faced an attempt by the Indians to burn them out using fire set in the surrounding brush.

Disaster struck when Bloody Knife, Reno's Arikara scout, took a bullet to the head, spraying blood and brain matter across Reno's face. Badly shaken, Reno ordered his men to dismount, then remount, before declaring that anyone wishing to escape should follow him. What followed was a disorganized flight along the river for roughly a mile, with the wounded left behind and no effort made to hold off Indians picking off soldiers from behind. Cheyenne warriors struck at close range almost immediately, adding to the chaos. Crossing the river meant scaling an eight-foot bank, and some horses tumbled backward onto others below. The soldiers faced gunfire from distance and, at close quarters, were dragged from their mounts and beaten about the head. Reno later stated that three officers and twenty-nine troopers died during this retreat and the subsequent river crossing, with one additional officer and between thirteen and eighteen men unaccounted for, most having been abandoned in the timber, though many eventually caught up with the rest of the command.

On the high ground now called Reno Hill, Reno's battered survivors, still climbing up from the valley floor, met Captain Benteen's arriving column of troops D, H, and K coming from the south. Benteen's men had been on a scouting mission to the side when