Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument recalls Plains Indian War

On January 29, 1879, the Custer Battlefield National Monument was established in Montana. From the article:

"Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument recalls Plains Indian War

LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD — White headstones marking the casualty sites of the 7th Cavalry jut from the buffalo grass atop Last Stand Hill as tourists, destined for the Black Hills or Yellowstone National Park or somewhere else stream in for a quick stop off Interstate 90.

In the hot prairie air with the Little Bighorn River winding silently through cottonwoods stands below, some visitors produce cellphones to take pictures of the marker that bears Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s name.

The fascination with Custer and the battle that happened here 139 years ago is still strong, but time has drawn a veil over the horrors.

Men were mutilated on these slopes — their genitals cut from their bodies and stuffed in their mouths, their limbs hacked off, their faces smashed to bloody pulps. Sioux and Cheyenne women and children were gunned down and left for dead by U.S. Army soldiers. Indian warriors bled out in these fields.

This wasn’t cowboys and Indians. It wasn’t John Wayne, either.

This was war.

“The Little Bighorn battle was about the U.S. government forcing the Sioux and Cheyenne back to the reservations,” said Ken Woody, Little Bighorn Battlefield chief of interpretation. “Here, a flamboyant Civil War hero was wiped out. This became a hot spot that represented all the broken treaties and bad land deals.”

Today, Woody calls the Little Bighorn Battlefield a “living monument.” Over time it has come to memorialize the many Indian warriors who fought and died here, as well as pay tribute to the losses of the 7th Cavalry.

But as the site’s cultural significance continues to evolve, the battle that occurred here remains the same haunting reminder of a brutal period in America’s past.

Campaign of 1876

The U.S. Army’s campaign against the Lakota and Cheyenne Indians in the summer of 1876 came as the Plains Indian Wars were winding down. The 7th Cavalry, led by Custer, was dispatched from Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory as part of an expedition under the command of Gen. Alfred H. Terry.

Terry’s column was to converge on the Indians in southwest Montana with expeditions from Fort Ellis in Montana Territory and Fort Fetterman in Wyoming Territory. The columns were to meet at the mouth of the Little Bighorn River on July 26.

Custer had won high regard for his heroics as a brigadier general for the Union during the Civil War. A West Point graduate, Custer fought in the First Battle of Bull Run and at Appomattox. He was present at Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender.

Custer was, at 23, the youngest general in the Union Army. Unlike many other generals, he insisted on leading his men into battle. Custer wore a velveteen jacket with golden loops, a bright red tie and kept his hair long. His conspicuous appearance was intentional. Custer wanted his men to know at all times where he was on the battlefield. He believed that if he shared in the danger, his command would fight even harder.

After the Civil War, Custer was assigned duty in the Western Territories. The Campaign of 1876 was fought by the U.S. Army to force the Cheyenne and Sioux onto reservations and to eliminate the remaining bands of “hostiles” led by Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Sioux.

Sitting Bull had witnessed the breaking of the Fort Laramie Treaty by the U.S. government. Signed on April 29, 1868, the treaty guaranteed the Black Hills and hunting grounds in South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana to the Sioux. But the discovery of gold in the Black Hills and the stream of settlers passing through the Powder River Country, which had been deeded to the Sioux, brought conflict.

Pursued by Gen. George Crook’s column, the Sioux-Cheyenne warriors fought back the Army’s advance on June 17 at the Battle of the Rosebud. Emboldened, the warriors moved west to the Little Bighorn River, a place they called the Greasy Grass. There, Sitting Bull’s force, which included bands led by Crow King, Crazy Horse, Gall, Low Dog, Spotted Eagle and Wooden Leg, would fight to defend their way of life.

Following word of Crook’s defeat, Gen. Terry decided to accompany Col. John Gibbon’s force west along the Yellowstone River. The approximately 600 men of Custer’s 7th Calvary would search for the Sioux-Cheyenne force along Rosebud Creek. Terry would proceed south along the Bighorn River, with plans to converge on the Indians at the mouth of the Little Bighorn on July 26.

The 7th Cavalry moved quickly along Rosebud Creek, finding sign of a large Indian force. Scouts discovered Sitting Bull’s encampment in the valley of the Little Bighorn River near daybreak on June 25. There were more than 1,000 lodges in several large circles. They estimated the camp contained as many as 8,000 Indians, perhaps 2,000 warriors among them.

Terry had instructed Custer to proceed south to the headwaters of the Tongue River before turning west to the Little Bighorn, but Custer feared his proximity to the Indian force had already given away his position. Additionally, Custer believed the diversion would take too much time for his column to arrive to meet Terry’s at the mouth of the Little Bighorn on June 26.

Several of Custer’s scouts, including Mitch Boyer — the French-Sioux guide mentored by frontiersman Jim Bridger — warned against an attack. The Sioux-Cheyenne force seen in the valley was the greatest gathering of Indian warriors they had seen. “You and I are going home today,” Crow scout Half Yellow Face told Custer, “and by a trail that is strange to us both.”

Despite the overwhelming odds, Custer believed his troops would succeed. The U.S. Army’s long campaign against the Plains Indians was rife with stories of small army forces overcoming large groups of Indian warriors. So with the objective of the campaign in sight, Custer decided to attack.

Custer divided his force into three battalions. He assigned three companies each to Maj. Marcus Reno and Capt. Frederick W. Benteen. Custer kept five companies under his command. The final company was ordered to defend the slow-moving pack train that carried the column’s reserve ammunition.

Reno and Custer led their companies into the valley toward the Indian encampment. Benteen’s force scouted the bluffs to the south.

When Custer reached the Little Bighorn, he turned his forces north into the lower end of the Sioux-Cheyenne encampment. Reno was ordered to cross the river, then head down the valley to attack from the upper end of the camp.

As the soldiers descended, Indian warriors mounted their ponies and stirred a huge cloud of dust into the sky. Arming themselves with Winchester rifles, war clubs and bows, the warriors met Reno’s forces in the timbered breaks south of their camp. Gunfire and battle cries erupted along the river.

Crazy Horse, the Oglala war chief, was bathing in the Little Bighorn when the first shots were fired. Rather than rush into battle, he returned to his lodge to apply his war paint and prepare for the fight. When he mounted his pony, Crazy Horse was joined by a huge number of warriors that descended on Reno’s already scattered forces.

Chaos reigned in the gray cloud of gun smoke hanging over the river. Soldiers dropped from their horses as both men and mounts were overcome by a hail of steel-tipped arrows and bullets. A round struck the Arikara Bloody Knife — one of Custer’s favorite scouts — in the back of the skull. The bullet sprayed blood, flesh and brains onto Reno’s face and chest.

Reno was forced to retreat, his fallen soldiers mutilated where they fell — Plains Indian warriors mutilated enemies on the battlefield so their bodies would suffer in the afterlife.

Meanwhile, Custer, aware of the pandemonium in the timber, sent word to Benteen to assist. “Come on; Big village, be quick, bring packs,” Custer ordered. As Benteen moved forward to assist Reno, Custer advanced with his troops toward the Indian camp.

Following Reno’s retreat, details of Custer’s precise movements become less clear. What is known is that the Indians moved north and met Custer’s men along the Little Bighorn. At least a portion of Custer’s force descended to Medicine Tail Ford to attack the camp. Those soldiers, whether ordered or in retreat, rejoined the command at Calhoun Hill with warriors in pursuit.

On the slopes of Greasy Grass Ridge, Custer’s men were annihilated. The 7th Cavalry lost five companies, more than 200 men, all under Custer’s command. There were no survivors.

Following the battle, Custer was found near the top of the ridge. His body had been stripped and he was shot in the left breast and the left temple. He was surrounded by brass casing fired from his Remington rifle. An arrow was driven into his penis.

Shocking news

Not since the Fetterman Massacre at the height of Red Cloud’s War in December 1866 had the U.S. Army suffered such a staggering defeat at the hands of an Indian force. And not since the assassination of President Lincoln on April 15, 1865, had the country been so gripped by the news.

Terry’s ragged column marched to the mouth of the Little Bighorn, arriving at the Yellowstone River on July 2. Word of the disaster had already reached the steamship Far West, anchored there to meet them, though many aboard either doubted the news or were too shocked to believe it. Muggins Taylor, an army scout, rode 175 miles west to Fort Ellis to report news of the battle.

The first official account came from Gen. Terry. The dispatch, written on June 27, was delivered by the scout Taylor to a Bozeman telegraph office on July 3, where it inexplicably sat for days before being mailed to Chicago. The report, made public on July 9, laid no blame for the Army’s defeat.

Terry’s second report, written when he reached the Far West on July 2, took a different tone.

“I do not tell you this to cast any reflection upon Custer,” Terry wrote to Commanding General of the Army William T. Sherman. “For whatever errors he may have committed he has paid the penalty and you cannot regret his loss more than I do, but I feel our plan must have been successful had it been carried out, and I desire you to know the facts.”

Sherman received the report July 6, but by then, news of Custer’s defeat had already begun to spread.

After taking on the wounded, the Far West steamed to Bismarck, North Dakota, arriving July 5. Bismarck Tribune editor Clement Youngberry used Terry’s official report, field communications and dispatches published in special editions of the newspapers in Bozeman and Helena on July 3 to write a 15,000-word account of the battle. The story was wired the next morning to the New York Herald.

“It seems almost too terrible to be entirely true,” Gen. Sherman said. “It must be exaggerated. I cannot believe that Custer and his command would be swept away in the territories. I don’t think there were enough Indians there to do it like that.”

The massacre of the 7th Cavalry and of Custer, the nation’s best-known Indian fighter, shocked the country just as it was celebrating its centennial. The disaster ushered in a sordid period of blame-laying that would cloud the truth and create myths and legends that persist to this day.

Path to peace

The U.S. government designated the ground where Custer fell a national cemetery in 1879 to protect the bodies of the many 7th Cavalry soldiers buried along the Little Bighorn River. In 1890, the U.S. Army erected 249 headstones across the battlefield to mark the locations where soldiers had fallen.

In 1946, the battleground was designated Custer Battlefield National Monument. After decades of protest and debate, the site was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument by a law signed by President George H. W. Bush in 1991.

During the 1970s, Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means brought attention to the lack of Indian recognition at the Little Bighorn Battlefield. “AIM (American Indian Movement) came here in the 70s and forcibly put an Indian memorial over the soldiers’ plaques,” Woody said. “They demanded something equal for the Indians.”

In 1999, the National Park Service began placing red granite markers at Cheyenne and Lakota casualty sites on the battlefield. The first markers commemorated Cheyenne warriors Lame White Man and Noisy Walking.

The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument Advisory Committee conducted a national design competition to honor the Indian combatants of the Little Bighorn Battlefield. In 2003, an Indian Memorial was completed with the names of the warriors who fought in the battle.

The monument stands alongside Custer’s headstone above the waters of the Little Bighorn."