Custer, George Armstrong

Custer, George Armstrong (1839–1876), U.S. military leader in the Civil War and Indian wars.An 1861 West Point graduate, Custer rose to fame and high rank during the Civil War as a flamboyant and successful cavalry chief. He ended the war a major general at the age of twenty‐five. In the postwar regular army he was a lieutenant colonel in command of the 7th Cavalry. His introduction to the Plains Indians Wars came in Kansas in 1867. The campaign ended in failure and court‐martial on charges of misconduct. Sentenced to a year's suspension, Custer was recalled in the fall of 1868 by Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan to lead his regiment in a winter campaign against the southern Plains tribes. At the Battle of the Washita, 27 November 1868, Custer surprised and destroyed Black Kettle's Cheyenne village and laid the groundwork for his reputation as an Indian fighter.

Assigned to Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory, Custer led the 7th in the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873, protecting surveyors of the Northern Pacific Railroad; he fought two actions with Sitting Bull's Sioux. In 1874, Custer's Black Hills Expedition discovered gold. The rush to the hills, part of the Great Sioux Reservation, inflamed the Sioux and led to the Sioux War of 1876. The 7th Cavalry formed part of Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry's column, one of three converging on the Indians. On 25 June, Custer attacked a large camp of Sioux and Cheyennes at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He and the five companies under his immediate command, about 225 men, were wiped out. The other seven companies, under Maj. Marcus A. Reno, held out on a hilltop four miles away until relieved two days later. Custer's actions at the Little Bighorn were and remain bitterly controversial, but he and his “last stand” gained lasting renown.
[See also Crazy Horse; Sitting Bull.]

Bibliography

Robert M. Utley , Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier, 1988.
Paul Andrew Hutton, ed., The Custer Reader, 1992.

Robert M. Utley