Marcus Albert Reno served as a United States Army officer under George Armstrong Custer during the Great Sioux War against the Lakota (Sioux) and Northern Cheyenne. The Battle of the Little Bighorn represented one of the most infamous defeats in U.S. military history, and Reno's role in this engagement has been the subject of longstanding controversy regarding his command decisions and tactical choices.
During the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Reno did not support Custer's battlefield position. Instead of advancing with Custer's main force, Reno maintained a defensive formation with his troops approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) away from Custer's position. This separation of forces and Reno's decision to establish a defensive stance rather than engage offensively became central to the historical debate surrounding the battle's outcome.
Reno's tactical decisions at the Little Bighorn have generated extensive historical scrutiny and controversy. His defensive positioning, while protecting his own command, left Custer's immediate force without the additional support that might have altered the course of the engagement. The battle resulted in one of the most significant defeats of the U.S. Army in its conflicts with Native American forces, and Reno's command decisions remain a focal point of historical analysis regarding how the defeat occurred and what role his actions played in determining the outcome.
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.
{"us":{"killed":47,"wounded":52}}
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.