On 25 June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the US 7th Cavalry against a great camp of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. He split the regiment, and the warriors drove back Major Marcus Reno's attack on the village and then surrounded and killed Custer and the roughly 210 men with him. Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen held out on the bluffs until the camp moved away on the evening of 26 June. It was the worst defeat of the US Army in the Plains Wars, and the high point of Lakota and Cheyenne power.
Gold in the Black Hills
The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 had set aside a great reservation for the Lakota, including the Black Hills, which were sacred to them. In 1874 an army expedition under Custer found gold there, and miners poured in, in breach of the treaty. The Lakota refused to sell the Black Hills, and the government ordered every Lakota band to report to a reservation by 31 January 1876 or be treated as hostile. Bands led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who rejected the reservation system, ignored the order, and in the spring many more people left the agencies to join them.1
General Philip Sheridan sent three columns into Lakota country: Colonel John Gibbon from Fort Ellis in Montana, General George Crook from Fort Fetterman in Wyoming, and General Alfred Terry from Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory, with Custer's 7th Cavalry as the bulk of his force. Earlier in June, at the Sun Dance, Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers falling upside down into his camp, which he took as a promise of a great victory. On 22 June Terry detached Custer to follow the trail of the great camp and approach it from the south and east.2
Custer divides the regiment
Custer meant to rest his men on 25 June and attack at dawn on the 26th, but he believed his regiment had been spotted and feared the camp would scatter, so he attacked at once. According to the National Park Service, he sent Captain Benteen with three companies, about 125 men, to scout to the southwest, gave Major Reno three companies, about 140 men, and kept five companies, about 210 men, under his own command, while a further 125 or so guarded the pack train. Britannica's account, by the historian Gregory Urwin, gives the same division and says it left the three parts of the regiment unable to support one another.3
Reno crossed the river and rode at the southern end of the camp. The warriors turned out quickly; Reno dismounted his men in a skirmish line, fell back into the timber by the river and then retreated across the river to the bluffs, losing heavily as warriors rode down the fleeing troopers. Benteen, who had found nothing to the south, joined him there; the park service quotes Custer's last written message to Benteen: "Come on. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs."4
Custer's last stand
What happened to Custer's battalion is pieced together from Lakota and Cheyenne accounts, archaeology and the positions of the bodies, and much of it is still uncertain. The park service describes Custer riding north along the bluffs to Medicine Tail Coulee, some skirmishing at the ford, and the companies being overrun one by one along what is now called Custer or Battle Ridge. About 40 men reached the hill where the monument now stands and were killed there; every one of the roughly 210 soldiers with Custer died, and so did Custer himself. Britannica notes that Native American accounts single out the courage of Crazy Horse, the Oglala leader, among many others.5
From Weir Point, a promontory north of Reno's position, troops sent to find Custer saw dust and smoke over the field before masses of warriors forced them back. Reno and Benteen were besieged on what is now Reno Hill from the afternoon of 25 June until dusk on the 26th, when the whole camp moved off to the south. Terry and Gibbon's column relieved the survivors on 27 June.6
How many fought and fell
Estimates of the warriors vary. The park service says the army expected to meet 800 to 1,500 warriors, and Britannica gives army intelligence's estimate as 800. The park service cites modern estimates of a camp of around 8,000 people with 1,500 to 1,800 warriors, while Urwin in Britannica puts the warriors who fought at some 2,000. HistoryNet's Ask Prof. History column counts 259 dead in the 7th Cavalry. Native losses are harder to fix: Britannica gives about 50 known deaths, and the same HistoryNet column cites a name-by-name list of 31 warriors, six women and four children.7
The victory was short-lived. The shock of the defeat brought more troops onto the northern plains, most of the bands surrendered within a year, and the Black Hills were taken by the United States without compensation to the Lakota. Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument now preserves the field, and Britannica dates the national monument to 1946 and the Indian Memorial there to 2003. The full story is in our article on the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the fight sits among history's most famous last stands.8
Also on this day
- 1862: Seven Days Battles. Near Richmond, Virginia, a week of battles pitted Lee's Confederates against McClellan's Union Army of the Potomac.
