The Battle of the Little Bighorn

After fierce fighting in 1865–1867, several Lakota leaders signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which created the Great Sioux Reservation in the western half of present-day South Dakota, including the Black Hills, sacred to the Lakota. Leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse rejected the reservation system, and many bands that had not signed the treaty continued to hunt on unceded lands.

In 1874 Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills, inside the reservation; geologists found gold, and miners poured in, in direct violation of the treaty. The United States offered to buy the Hills; the Lakota rejected the price. In the winter of 1875, the government declared that bands not on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile, and the army launched a campaign with three columns to force them back.

The Lakota and Cheyenne had gathered in large numbers along the Little Bighorn after their annual Sun Dance, where Sitting Bull had a vision of soldiers falling into the village. Custer, ordered to approach from the south, believed his regiment had been detected and attacked on June 25 without waiting for the other columns. He split his command. Major Marcus Reno’s battalion charged the south end of the village, was driven back across the river with heavy losses, and dug in on the bluffs, where Captain Frederick Benteen joined him. Custer led five companies north along the ridges east of the river. Overwhelmed by superior numbers and firepower, his entire command was killed. Reno and Benteen’s men were besieged until the village moved away on the evening of June 26.

News of Custer’s defeat shocked the nation, which had not believed Plains peoples capable of destroying a modern cavalry force. The army sent more troops; most of the bands declared “hostile” surrendered within a year, and Sitting Bull led his followers into Canada.

The National Park Service calls the battle “a momentary victory” for the Lakota and Cheyenne. The government took the Black Hills without compensation — a seizure the Lakota have contested ever since. In popular culture, “Custer’s Last Stand” became a heroic myth; the battlefield, now Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, today commemorates both the soldiers and the Native warriors who fought there.