Battle of the Little Bighorn

On 25–26 June 1876, beside the Little Bighorn River in what was then Montana Territory, a large encampment of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho defeated the US 7th Cavalry Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Custer and every man in the five companies under his direct command were killed. Known to the Lakota as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and to generations of Americans as "Custer's Last Stand", it was the most important engagement of the Great Sioux War, yet the victory did not prevent the loss of the Lakota homeland.

White encroachment on Lakota lands, above all in the Black Hills, which the Lakota regard as sacred, led to growing conflict on the northern Plains. In 1876 the army sent three columns, under John Gibbon, George Crook and Alfred Terry, to drive Lakota and Cheyenne bands that had left the reservations back onto them. Many had gathered around the Hunkpapa holy man Sitting Bull, who was said to have seen, during a Sun Dance in early June, a vision of soldiers tumbling into his camp. On 17 June Crook's column was checked at the Rosebud and pulled back, but the other commanders did not know this. The battlefield itself lay on land reserved by treaty for the Crow, traditional enemies of the Lakota, and Crow and Arikara men served the army as scouts.

On 22 June Terry sent Custer and the 7th Cavalry, about 600 officers and men, up the Rosebud to locate the camp. His scouts spotted it at dawn on 25 June and warned that it was the largest they had ever seen. Believing his column had been discovered, Custer decided to attack at once rather than wait. He split his twelve companies into battalions under Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, a pack-train escort and five companies under his own command.

At around 3 p.m. Reno crossed the river and charged the southern end of the village. Meeting far larger numbers than expected, his men dismounted and formed a skirmish line, then remounted and fled in disorder across the river to the bluffs, losing dozens of men. Benteen's battalion joined them there, together with the pack train, and some 350 soldiers dug in on what became known as Reno Hill.

What happened to Custer's own battalion is known only from Native testimony and archaeology, since none of his men survived. Warriors led by leaders including Crazy Horse and Gall overwhelmed the companies, probably within an hour, and the final resistance came on what is now called Last Stand Hill. The Lakota and Cheyenne then attacked Reno and Benteen until dark and through much of 26 June, withdrawing as Terry's column approached on 27 June.

The 7th Cavalry lost 16 officers and 242 troopers killed or mortally wounded, among them two of Custer's brothers, as well as a nephew and a brother-in-law. Native losses are uncertain: estimates have ranged from about 36 to as many as 300, with modern research identifying 31 warriors by name. Several women and children were also killed during Reno's charge.

The news reached the eastern states as the country celebrated its centennial and caused a sensation. Congress responded in August 1876 by cutting off rations to the Sioux until they ceded the Black Hills, and an act of 1877 took the land. In the end, however, the army won the war. Custer was long portrayed as a hero, an image his widow Libbie promoted, but from the 1930s historians judged him more critically. In 1991 the site was renamed the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and an Indian Memorial honours the Native combatants. The Sioux Wars continued until 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Our 1878 map shows the United States two years after the battle.