The 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand and known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. It took place on June 25–26, 1876, along the Little Bighorn River in the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana Territory. The battle, which resulted in the defeat of U.S. forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.
Most battles in the Great Sioux War, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, were on lands those natives had taken from other tribes since 1851. The Lakota were there without consent from the local Crow tribe, which had a treaty claim on the area. Already in 1873, Crow chief Blackfoot had called for U.S. military actions against the native intruders. The steady Lakota incursions into treaty areas belonging to the smaller tribes were a direct result of their displacement by the United States in and around Fort Laramie, as well as in reaction to white encroachment into the Black Hills, which the Lakota consider sacred. This pre-existing Indian conflict provided a useful wedge for colonization and ensured the United States a firm Indian alliance with the Arikaras and the Crows during the Lakota Wars.
The fight was an overwhelming victory for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who were led by several major war leaders, including Crazy Horse and Chief Gall and had been inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake). The U.S. 7th Cavalry, a force of 700 men commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (a brevetted major general during the American Civil War), suffered a major defeat. Five of the 7th Cavalry's twelve troops were wiped out and Custer was killed, as were two of his brothers, his nephew, and his brother-in-law. The total U.S. casualty count included 268 dead and 55 severely wounded (six died later from their wounds), including four Crow Indian scouts and at least two Arikara Indian scouts.
Public response to the Great Sioux War varied in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Custer's widow Libbie Custer soon began to work to burnish her husband's memory, and during the following decades, Custer and his troops came to be widely considered to be heroic figures in U.S. history. The battle and Custer's actions in particular have been studied extensively by historians. Custer's heroic public image began to tarnish after the death of his widow in 1933 and the publication in 1934 of Glory Hunter – The Life of General Custer by Frederic F. Van de Water, which was the first book to depict Custer in unheroic terms. These two events, combined with the cynicism of an economic depression and historical revisionism, led to a somewhat revised view of Custer and his defeat on the banks of the Little Bighorn River. Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument honors those who fought on both sides.
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 Northern Cheyenne Exodus — Little Wolf's Party Reaches Montana 1879. 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:
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