Little Bighorn, Battle of The

Little Bighorn, Battle of The (25–26 June 1876), clash between U.S. cavalry and Sioux and Cheyenne Indians, renowned in history and legend.Although a triumph for the Indians, the disaster celebrated as “Custer's Last Stand” so outraged whites that the army launched a determined counteroffensive to end Indian resistance on the northern Plains.

The Sioux War of 1876 originated in the Treaty of 1868, which established the Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory. Part of the seven tribes of Lakota Sioux and their Cheyenne allies settled on the reservation, while the rest gathered with Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other “nontreaty Indians” in the “unceded” Powder River country to the west. After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874, the government sought to buy the hills from the reservation chiefs. The attempt failed largely because of the opposition of the nontreaty chiefs. To destroy their independence, the government ordered all Indians to go to their agencies by 31 January 1876 or face military action. The nontreaty chiefs did not comply.

Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer (1839–1876) commanded the Seventh Cavalry, which marched with one of three columns that converged on the unceded territory. Battlefield reverses turned back General George Crook, but General Alfred H. Terry and Colonel John Gibbon united on the Yellowstone River at the mouth of the Rosebud Creek and formed plans to strike the Indians, thought to be in the Little Bighorn Valley. Custer would march up the Rosebud and hit from the south, while Terry and Gibbon would ascend the Yellowstone and Bighorn to head off any Indians flushed by Custer.

On 25 June, before Terry and Gibbon were in position, Custer attacked the Indian village on the Little Bighorn, which contained about 7,000 people, including 2,000 fighting men. Custer's regiment numbered about 600, which he divided into three battalions. While Captain Frederick W. Benteen departed on a mission to ensure that no Indians camped in the valley above the main village, Custer and Major Marcus A. Reno approached the village from two directions. When Custer and five companies rode downstream behind masking bluffs, Reno and three companies charged the upper end of the village. Although surprised, the warriors rallied and threw Reno's small command back across the river with heavy casualties. Reno's retreat freed the Indians to concentrate on Custer. Within an hour, all five of Custer's companies, 210 men, had been wiped out. No man survived. Joined by Benteen, Reno held hilltop positions four miles to the south through the next day, when the Indians, discovering Terry's approach from the north, pulled off to the south.

The disaster promptly set off a controversy that still rages. Whether a reckless glory‐hunter or a capable field commander victimized by bad luck, Custer in defeat gained an immortality that no victory could have conferred. Controversy still rages, and the Little Bighorn battlesite remains contested terrain, a monument to the tortured and tragic history of Indian‐white encounters.
See also Expansionism; Gold Rushes; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars.

Bibliography

John S. Gray , Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876, 1976.
John S. Gray , Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed, 1991.
Paul Andrew Hutton, ed., The Custer Reader, 1992.

Robert M. Utley