Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who led the 7th Cavalry, lost his entire command to Lakota warriors after falling on them unexpectedly in their own territory. The only army survivor of the battle was a horse, Comanche, who became the 7th Cavalry\u2019s mascot, trotted out draped in ceremonial black for years after the event itself.<\/p>\n
The road to the Little Bighorn started during the Civil War. In 1862, Santee warriors in Minnesota rose up against settlers there after the U.S. government, financially strapped by the Civil War, stopped providing the food promised to the Santees by treaty. Soldiers put down the \u201cSantee Uprising\u201d\u2014now known as the Dakota War\u2014brutally, and terrified survivors fled west to what is now Montana to take shelter with their relatives, the Teton Lakotas.<\/p>\n
The Tetons welcomed their eastern relatives but discounted their horrific tales of the revenge enacted on the Santee insurgents (although the army had, in fact, hanged 38 Santees in December 1862 in the largest mass execution in American history). The Tetons rarely saw an American, and they could not believe the lone traders who passed through their territory were a threat.<\/p>\n
Teton nonchalance ended abruptly in November 1864, when Northern Cheyennes, their allies to the south, straggled into Teton villages with even worse stories than the Santees had told: stories of the massacre of women and children at Colorado\u2019s Sand Creek, where drunken soldiers first killed surrendering Cheyennes and then mutilated their bodies, taking human remains as trophies. By 1864, American miners were pushing into Teton territory over the new Bozeman Trail that stretched from the old Oregon Trail up to the Montana gold fields. Stories of the Sand Creek Massacre convinced the Tetons that the interlopers must be resisted.<\/p>\n
By 1865 the conflicts, now known as the Lakota War, had escalated to the point that after Confederate General Robert E. Lee\u2019s surrender at Appomattox Court House, army leaders transferred General William Tecumseh Sherman from the southern battlefields to the Plains. To his intense frustration, he found it impossible to protect both the Union Pacific Railroad, which stretched across the middle of the country, and the Bozeman Trail, which went north, from Lakota attacks.<\/p>\n
Caught between these two necessities, the government chose to protect the railroad. In 1868 it abandoned the Bozeman Trail, allowing the Lakotas to control what became known as the Great Sioux Reservation. This reservation covered most of the land from the Missouri River that runs through the center of what is now South Dakota west to the Big Horn Mountains. The treaty each side signed guaranteed that land to the Lakota forever.<\/p>\n
Forever turned out to be short.<\/p>\n
Rising Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse vowed to keep Americans off their land, but miners wanted gold and businessmen wanted railroads. By 1874, army officers decided to build a fort in the Black Hills to intimidate the warriors skirmishing with intruders. In 1875 they sent out the Boy General, George Armstrong Custer, along with a thousand soldiers, teamsters, scouts, and reporters, to find a place to build. Custer brought back ideas for a fort, but more importantly, he also brought back news of gold in the hills\u2014hills that belonged to the Lakotas.<\/p>\n
Within months, prospectors in the Black Hills had thrown up boomtowns like Deadwood, which attracted about twenty thousand people in its first year. The government tried to buy the Black Hills, but Lakota leaders refused. \u201cWe want no white men here,\u201d Sitting Bull said. \u201cThe Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Government officials interpreted Lakota refusal to sell as hostility. In December 1875, authorities told Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other \u201chostiles\u201d to report to agencies more than 250 miles away on the eastern side of the reservation by the end of January, or to expect war. For their part, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who had never frequented the agencies, made no attempt to set off on a long journey in the brutal cold of a Dakota winter. It\u2019s not clear they even got the message.<\/p>\n
So on February 1, 1876, the War Department commanded the army to subdue the \u201chostile\u201d Lakotas. A month later, General George Crook led 800 men into Lakota territory, hoping to fight the Indigenous Americans while their ponies were still weak from the winter. In mid-March, half of Crook\u2019s men attacked a camp of Cheyennes on the Powder River, mistaking it for a village of Crazy Horse\u2019s men. Cheyenne survivors took refuge with Sitting Bull, who had had enough. \u201cWe are an island of Indians in a lake of whites,\u201d he told his people. \u201cWe must stand together, or they will rub us out separately. These soldiers have come shooting; they want war. All right, we\u2019ll give it to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull sent runners across the reservation, calling men who wanted to fight to meet at the Rosebud River to stand against the soldiers. By spring 1876, thousands of men had rallied to him. In early summer 1876, Sitting Bull\u2019s camp was the largest in Lakota history; there were at least 1,400 lodges, with individual men sleeping on their own or as guests in others\u2019 tepees.<\/p>\n
Badly underestimating the number of warriors he faced, Crook planned a three-pronged attack. Columns from west, east, and south would converge where the Lakota were hunting. Crook\u2019s plan was crippled on June 17, when his own column, moving up from the south, crossed Lakota warriors near the Rosebud River. In a confusing battle obscured by dust and gunpowder, the Lakotas managed to knock Crook\u2019s men out of the campaign for the next six weeks.<\/p>\n
Those weeks would prove crucial. As the other two columns continued their march, Indigenous Americans celebrating the outcome of the Battle of the Rosebud continued to pour into Sitting Bull\u2019s camp, bringing the numbers up to about 7,000 people, 1,800 of whom were warriors. In the vibrant atmosphere, families visited, couples courted, and warriors danced. The numbers meant that the Lakotas and their allies had to keep moving to provide enough food for the horses. By June 24, they had settled on the river they called the Greasy Grass, the one soldiers knew as the Little Bighorn.<\/p>\n
Unaware of the two columns approaching, the Lakotas were watching Crook\u2019s soldiers but knew his battered troops were hunkered down. On June 25, a hot, buggy day, the Lakotas were lazing, the women digging wild turnips and the men swimming and lying about in the heat, when Custer\u2019s troops fell on one end of their mile-long encampment. The soldiers cut down some women and children, but the Lakotas mounted their horses quickly.<\/p>\n
Custer had divided his men into three battalions. He had sent one under Captain Frederick Benteen up the valley and out of action, and sent one under Major Marcus Reno to attack the camp. Recovering from their initial surprise, the Lakotas chased Reno and his men into the bluffs on the other side of the river. Then Custer\u2019s battalion entered the fight. Custer ordered his men to dismount. The Lakotas promptly stampeded the army horses. Then, surrounding the desperate troops, the Lakotas killed the soldiers to a man. The U.S. Army lost 263 men that day, the Lakotas about 40.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel sorry that too many were killed on each side,\u201d Sitting Bull said, \u201cbut when Indians must fight, they must.\u201d<\/p>\n