Little Bighorn, Battle of the (1876).This clash between U.S. cavalry and Sioux and Cheyenne Indians has gained renown in both history and legend. Although a triumph for the Indians, the disaster celebrated as “Custer's Last Stand” so outraged the American people that the army launched a counteroffensive that ended warfare 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 “nontreaties” in the “unceded” Powder River country to the west. After discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874, the government sought to buy the hills from the reservation chiefs. The attempt failed in large part because of the opposition of the nontreaty chiefs. To destroy their independence, the government ordered all Indians to their agencies by 31 January 1876 or face military action. The nontreaties did not comply.

Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry marched with one of three columns that converged on the unceded territory. Battlefield reverses turned back Gen. George Crook, but Gen. Alfred H. Terry and Col. 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 and position themselves to head off any Indians flushed by Custer.

On 25 June, before Terry and Gibbon were in position, Custer found and attacked the Indian village on the Little Bighorn. It contained about 7,000 people, 2,000 fighting men. Custer's regiment numbered about 600, which he divided into three battalions, one under Maj. Marcus A. Reno, one under Capt. Frederick W. Benteen, and one under his personal command. Benteen departed on a mission to ensure that no Indians camped in the valley above the main village. Custer and Reno approached the village itself, which Custer apparently intended to strike from two directions. While 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 at the other end of the village. They caught him in broken terrain east of the river. Within an hour, all five 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, in defeat Custer gained an immortality that no victory could have conferred.
[See also Plains Indians Wars; Army, U.S.: 1866–99.]

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