Who won the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
The Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho won. On 25 June 1876, beside the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, warriors from a huge village inspired by Sitting Bull and led in the fight by Crazy Horse and others destroyed five companies of the US 7th Cavalry and killed their commander, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.4
The National Park Service sees in it the clash of two vastly dissimilar cultures: the buffalo and horse culture of the northern plains tribes and the industrial United States. On a hot June afternoon in Montana, a cavalry regiment rode down toward a village of some 8,000 people, and much of it never rode back.5
See also: The Battle of Isandlwana · The Battle of the Alamo · The Wounded Knee Massacre
The Great Sioux War
The road to the Little Bighorn began with a broken treaty. The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 had set aside a great reservation in what is now western South Dakota, including the Black Hills, sacred to the Lakota. In 1874 Custer himself led an expedition into the Black Hills, prospectors with it found gold, and miners poured in in violation of the treaty. The Lakota refused to sell, so the government ordered every band to report to a reservation by 31 January 1876 or be treated as hostile. The deadline passed with virtually no response, and the matter was handed to the army.6
Bands that had never accepted the reservations, led by Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Lakota and Crazy Horse of the Oglala, gathered on the plains of Montana, and as spring came many more Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and some Arapaho left the agencies to join them. At a Sun Dance about two weeks before the battle, Sitting Bull saw a vision of soldiers falling upside down into his camp, and foretold a great victory.7
Three columns
General Philip Sheridan sent three columns to drive the bands back to the reservation. Colonel John Gibbon marched east from Fort Ellis with about 450 men; General George Crook came north from Fort Fetterman in Wyoming with around 1,000; and General Alfred Terry left Fort Abraham Lincoln on 17 May with 879 men, most of them the 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer. Each column was expected to meet perhaps 800 to 1,500 warriors at most.8
The first blow fell on Crook. On 17 June, on Rosebud Creek, Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, Crazy Horse among them, fought his column for some six hours and forced it to withdraw. On 22 June Terry sent Custer and all 12 companies of the 7th Cavalry up the Rosebud on a wide flanking march, while he and Gibbon came up the Bighorn from the north to block the bands' escape.9
Custer divides his command
By the morning of 25 June Custer's Crow and Arikara scouts had found the village from the Wolf Mountains, about 12 miles away. It was enormous: modern historians, the Park Service notes, estimate some 8,000 people, with 1,500 to 1,800 warriors. Custer had planned to rest his men that day and attack at dawn on the 26th, but when he learned that some warriors had seen his troopers, he feared the village would scatter and decided to attack at once.10
Around noon he split the regiment. Captain Frederick Benteen took three companies, about 125 men, off to the southwest to scout and "pitch into anything" he found. Major Marcus Reno took three companies, about 140 men, with the Arikara scouts, and was told to charge the southern end of the village and that he would be supported by the whole outfit. Custer kept five companies, about 210 men, and rode north along the bluffs, while another 125 men brought up the slow pack train with the reserve ammunition.11
Reno in the valley
Reno crossed the river about two miles south of the village and advanced down the valley. The warriors were surprised but counterattacked fast. Reno dismounted his men into a skirmish line, then, as mounted warriors swept around his left, pulled back into the timber by the river and then ordered a second retreat, a scramble back across the river and up the bluffs on the east side. Warriors rode alongside the fleeing soldiers and shot them or pulled them from their saddles, and the rear of the column suffered heavily.12
On the bluffs Reno's shaken survivors were joined by Benteen, who had found no Indians to the south and had received Custer's last written message: "Come on. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs. P.S. Bring Packs." A company under Captain Thomas Weir pushed north to a high point now called Weir Point, a mile and a half away, and saw dust and smoke over the ridges where Custer had gone, but warriors drove them back.13
The last stand
What happened to Custer's five companies has been reconstructed from Native accounts and the evidence left on the ground, cartridge cases, bullets, arrowheads and bones, and much of it is still conjecture. Custer seems to have ridden down Medicine Tail Coulee toward a ford into the village, where there was skirmishing, before the battalion fell back onto the high ground of Calhoun Hill and moved north along what is now called Battle Ridge.14
Warriors led by Crazy Horse and many others crossed the river and closed in from several sides. Companies C and L fought at the southern end of the ridge before they were overwhelmed, Company I died on its eastern slope, and Company E may have been destroyed in a ravine. About 40 of the 210 men gathered with Custer on the hill where the stone monument now stands, broke out in a last attempt to escape, and were killed within minutes. Every man under Custer's immediate command died.15
Reno and Benteen's men, with the pack train, dug in on the hilltop and held out under fire from the afternoon of 25 June until the evening of the 26th, when the village packed up and moved off south, warned that Terry's column was coming. On 27 June Terry and Gibbon reached the valley and found Custer's dead on the ridges.16
How many died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
The National Park Service counts 268 killed on the army side, soldiers, civilians and scouts of the 7th Cavalry, including Custer and every man of the five companies with him. Native losses were far lighter: the Park Service estimates 60 to 100 Lakota and Cheyenne dead, while Britannica counts about 50 known deaths among Sitting Bull's followers.17
On 28 June Reno's men buried Custer's command where they fell, and the steamer Far West carried 52 wounded soldiers down the rivers; it reached Bismarck on 5 July with news of the disaster.18 › Battle of Isandlwana, 1879
Why did Custer lose? The army had expected each column to meet perhaps 800 to 1,500 warriors; the village held some 1,500 to 1,800, all of them defending their families, and the Park Service credits superior numbers and overwhelming firepower with ending Custer's part of the battle. By splitting the regiment into pieces that could not support each other, Custer left each to face that strength alone.19
Why was the Battle of the Little Bighorn important?
For the Lakota and Cheyenne it was, in the Park Service's words, a momentary victory. Custer's death became a rallying point for the United States, which sent more troops onto the northern plains; most of the bands surrendered within a year, and the government took the Black Hills without compensation.20
Band after band surrendered. Crazy Horse, near starvation with more than 1,100 followers, surrendered at Fort Robinson on 6 May 1877 and was killed at Fort Robinson that September while soldiers tried to imprison him. In May 1877 Sitting Bull led his followers across the border into Canada; after four years of dwindling numbers and famine, he surrendered in 1881.21 › The Greatest Last Stands in History
Sitting Bull was killed on 15 December 1890, when Indian police came to arrest him during the Ghost Dance unrest. Two weeks later, on 29 December, soldiers of the same 7th Cavalry killed at least 84 Lakota men, 62 women and 16 children, by the Park Service's count, at Wounded Knee.22
The battlefield today
The battlefield became a national cemetery under the War Department in 1879, and in 1881 a granite memorial to the 7th Cavalry was raised on Last Stand Hill over the mass grave of the soldiers. For a century the site told largely one side of the story, with headstones marking where each soldier fell. In 1991 Congress renamed it Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and ordered an Indian Memorial, which was dedicated in 2003 under the theme "Peace Through Unity," its Spirit Gate facing the cavalry monument.23 › Battle of the Alamo, 1836
