Montana: Little Bighorn

⚔️ Last Stand: The Little Bighorn Battlefield

We’d been driving across Montana for what felt like several geological epochs, and I’ll be honest — by this point my enthusiasm for yet another roadside historical marker had worn somewhat thin. But the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument turned out to be something else entirely. Something that actually made us put down the travel mugs and pay attention.

The site sits in the rolling, wind-scoured grasslands of southern Montana, in a shallow valley carved by the Little Bighorn River — a modest, quietly unremarkable stretch of water that would not merit a second glance were it not for what happened here on the 25th and 26th of June, 1876. On those two days, more than 260 United States Army soldiers and attached personnel — scouts, interpreters, civilians — were killed in battle. Every single man in Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s immediate command died here. Every last one.

The monument itself is a thoughtful, well-organised affair, with museum exhibits, an interpretive centre, and ranger-led programs that together do a decent job of unpacking an extraordinarily complicated event. We joined one of the ranger-led tours and I’m glad we did, because this is not a story you can fully absorb from a leaflet.

To understand what happened, you need a bit of background — and quite a lot of it, frankly.

By the mid-1870s, the United States government had been attempting, with varying degrees of violence and broken promises, to confine the Native American peoples of the Northern Plains onto reservations for the better part of two decades. The Lakota Sioux, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Arapaho had been granted the Black Hills of Dakota — Paha Sapa to the Lakota, a sacred landscape at the centre of their world — under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The United States government, with the kind of institutional bad faith that seems to have been something of a speciality, then sent General Custer himself on an expedition into the Black Hills in 1874. Gold was found. Prospectors flooded in. The government, rather than honouring the treaty, decided the sensible solution was to simply take the land back. As one does.

The Lakota and Cheyenne, unsurprisingly, declined to cooperate. Thousands of warriors, led by figures including Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall, refused to return to the reservations and gathered instead in a massive encampment along the Little Bighorn River — the largest gathering of Native American warriors the Northern Plains had ever seen, estimated at somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 fighting men, with a total village population of perhaps 10,000 people.

The US Army, which had a somewhat inflated opinion of its own capabilities in this regard, sent three columns to converge on the encampment and force submission. General Alfred Terry commanded one column, General George Crook another, and Colonel John Gibbon a third. Custer’s 7th Cavalry rode as part of Terry’s force — around 700 men in total, though Custer took only approximately 650 into the actual engagement.

Custer was, by any measure, a complicated figure. A genuine hero of the Civil War, he’d been the youngest general in the Union Army at 23, famous for his reckless cavalry charges and his extraordinary luck in surviving them. His ego was the size of Montana, his hair famously extravagant, his fondness for the dramatic gesture essentially unlimited. He had also, more than once, court-martialled, suspended without pay, and generally demonstrated a relationship with military regulations that was, let us say, selective.

On the morning of the 25th of June, Custer’s scouts found the encampment. It was considerably larger than expected. A sensible man might have paused. Custer, however, decided to attack immediately, fearing that the warriors would simply melt away into the landscape if given time. He divided his regiment into three battalions — one under Major Marcus Reno, one under Captain Frederick Benteen, and one he led himself — and launched a coordinated assault.

It did not go well.

Reno’s attack on the southern end of the village was repulsed almost immediately. The warriors — vastly more numerous, fighting to protect their families, and armed with weapons including repeating Winchester rifles that outclassed the Army’s single-shot Springfield carbines — counter-attacked ferociously. Reno retreated with heavy losses to a defensive position on the bluffs above the river, where he was later joined by Benteen’s column.

Custer, meanwhile, led his five companies of roughly 210 men around to the north, apparently intending to attack the village from that direction. What happened next has been debated by historians ever since, because nobody on Custer’s side survived to explain it. What we know is that within perhaps an hour, every man in Custer’s immediate command was dead. Sitting Bull, who had spent the battle in the village performing spiritual duties, later described the fighting as being like a buffalo hunting the hunters. Crazy Horse led a devastating flanking attack. Gall hit the command from the south. The soldiers were overwhelmed, driven back, and killed to a man on and around the hill that is now called Last Stand Hill.

It was the most significant military defeat the United States Army suffered in the entire course of the Indian Wars, and one of the most dramatic single engagements in American military history.

We walked the ground, which is something I’d recommend to anyone with functioning legs and a tolerance for wind — there’s a fair amount of it. White marble markers dot the hillside, each one placed where a soldier’s body was found. Custer’s marker is where you’d expect — at the top, naturally; he was nothing if not consistent about positioning himself prominently. The markers are oddly affecting. Each one is just a name and a rank, the arithmetic of disaster made visible in the grass.

What struck us — and what the interpretive centre handles well, to its credit — is that this is no longer presented simply as a tale of American military tragedy. It is also, and equally, a story of Native American resistance and, in the short term at least, a remarkable victory. In 1999, the monument added markers for the Native American warriors who also fell here — red granite stones, a counterpoint to the white marble. It feels right.

The broader context, of course, is the one that makes the whole thing genuinely sombre rather than merely dramatic. The Northern Plains Indians called this battle the Battle of the Greasy Grass. For them, it was a victory — a moment of extraordinary collective courage and military skill in defence of a way of life that stretched back beyond counting. But it was, as history would demonstrate with characteristic brutality, the last substantial victory they would win. The Army returned in force. Within a year, Sitting Bull had fled to Canada. Crazy Horse surrendered in May 1877 and was bayoneted in custody four months later under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. The great encampment dispersed. The Black Hills were taken. The reservations filled.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, which the newspapers called Custer’s Last Stand and which turned Custer into a peculiarly American kind of martyr — celebrated in paintings, novels, films and theatrical productions for decades — was, from the Native American perspective, the last great armed effort of the Northern Plains peoples to preserve their ancestral way of life.

The monument commemorates all of it. The defeat and the victory. The folly and the courage. The end of something that cannot be recovered.

We stood on Last Stand Hill for a while, looking out across the valley. The grass was very green. The wind was doing what Montana wind does, which is blow constantly and with considerable personal commitment. A hawk was drifting in wide circles over the river.

It is a genuinely extraordinary place to stand.