The Battle of the Little Big Horn
16:41 Share

One of the most famous battles in the history of the American West took place in June of 1876. An alliance of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes faced off against the United States Cavalry. The battle was a rout and one of the most devastating losses for the American military, as well as one of the greatest victories for the Plains Indians.

The victory, however, was only temporary, as it led to an even bigger response, and the loss was actually glorified in the United States for decades. Learn more about the Battle of the Little Bighorn and its legacy on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by ButcherBox.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and that means Thanksgiving dinner for friends and family. A Thanksgiving dinner can be a massive ordeal and a nerve-wracking affair. You have to buy all the food and spend the better part of the day preparing everything before serving it. So why not take one thing off your plate by letting ButcherBox take care of the centerpiece of your Thanksgiving meal, the turkey. Not only will ButcherBox deliver the turkey directly to your door, but they will also offer some of the highest quality turkeys that you can find.

Their turkeys are never given antibiotics or hormones, and they're all certified to be raised humanely. And in addition to turkey, they also have ham, beef, and seafood, if that's what you prefer.

New ButcherBox members that sign up using my link will receive their choice between a whole turkey, turkey breast, or a spiral ham. Plus $20 off when they visit ButcherBox.com slash daily and enter code daily at checkout. Once again, that's ButcherBox.com slash daily code daily at checkout.

Shopify doesn't just meet you where you are. We meet you where you're going. Shopify is the only commerce platform relentlessly focused on one thing and one thing only, commerce. We challenge the status quo so that your business can do bigger, better, and focus on building what's next so that you're always moving further, faster. For enterprise brands that believe there's a better way, there's Shopify.

Learn more at shopify.com slash enterprise. The topic of this episode goes by several different names. The most commonly used one is the Battle of the Little Bighorn. However, if you're a member of the Lakota Nation, you may refer to it as the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Many people have heard of it referred to as Custer's Last Stand. However, as you'll soon see, Custer was really not the hero of the story.

The battle was a major point in the larger conflict known as the Great Sioux War of 1876. The events of 1876 can actually be traced back to the 1850s. The land in question is the Black Hills of what is today western South Dakota. When the events of this episode transpired, they were the home of the Sioux Nation. However, this was not the traditional Sioux land.

It was the traditional land of the Crow people in the first half of the 19th century and before. The Black Hills were sacred to the Crow who considered them an essential part of their spiritual and cultural identity. The Lakota Sioux originally lived in the woodlands of the upper Mississippi River region. However, during the 17th and 18th centuries, pressures from other Native American tribes, especially the Ojibwe, who were armed with European guns, forced the Sioux to move westward into the Great Plains.

This was like a domino effect with European settlers in the east arming and pushing the tribes there westward. And at the end of this chain reaction were the Crow people. The Sioux were not acting alone in their struggle against the Crow. They formed alliances with other tribes, particularly the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, who also had territorial disputes with the Crow. These alliances allowed the Sioux to coordinate large-scale military campaigns that overwhelmed their enemies.

In contrast, the Crow, although fierce warriors, were often outnumbered and lacked the same level of alliances that the Sioux had cultivated. By the early to mid-19th century, after decades of raids and battles, the Crow were forced to abandon the Black Hills region. They retreated westward into what is now modern-day Montana and Wyoming. I bring this up because the events of this episode involve the Sioux and not the Crow, who were the people who lived there just decades before.

Fast forward to 1868. After years of conflict, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was signed, following the Red Clouds War, which was a period in which the Lakota and their allies successfully fought to halt the construction of the Bozeman Trail and U.S. military forts in their territory.

This treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation, which included the Black Hills, and it promised that the area would remain under Native American control and that white settlers would be prohibited from entering the region. In return, the Lakota agreed to cease hostilities. However, everything changed in 1874 with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills.

A United States Army expedition sent to the Black Hills, led by 34-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, discovered gold in them thar hills. Officially, the expedition was supposed to assess the region's geography, resources, and potential for establishing military outposts. It included scientists, geologists, journalists, and miners.

When members of the expedition discovered gold in the Black Hills, news spread quickly, triggering a gold rush and a massive influx of settlers and miners into the area. This violated the treaty and sparked tensions with the Sioux. The leader of the expedition, George Armstrong Custer, is one of the reasons these events are still remembered and why they happened in the first place.

Custer was a flamboyant and ambitious U.S. Army officer and cavalry commander. He was born in Ohio and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1861, finishing dead last in his class.

Despite his academic standing, Custer quickly rose to prominence during the Civil War due to his aggressive leadership style, notably in cavalry battles at Gettysburg and the Shenandoah Valley, where he earned the rank of Brevet Major General at the age of just 23. He was known for his distinctive appearance and bold style. With long, curly blonde hair, he often courted media attention, which made him a polarizing figure.

He was probably planning a run for the President of the United States at some point. His plan was to go out west, win military glory against the Indians, and then parlay that into a nomination by one of the two major parties. And this was pretty much the same playbook used by previous U.S. presidents, including Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and of course, Ulysses S. Grant.

With miners and settlers encroaching on Sioux land in the Black Hills, the Sioux began moving west, once again into Crow territory. In addition to attacks on the miners and settlers who were taking their land, they were also fighting with the Crow who appealed to the U.S. government for help.

In late 1875, the United States government issued an ultimatum to the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho demanding that they return to their reservations by January 31, 1876 or be considered hostile. The leaders of this Native American alliance refused, resulting in the U.S. military launching a campaign to remove them from the unceded territories by force. There were several leaders of the Sioux who led the fight against the United States Army.

Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man, and he was a key figure in uniting the Native American tribes through his spiritual leadership and resistance to U.S. encroachment. Crazy Horse was a brilliant Aglala Lakota war leader. He played a central role in the tribe's military efforts during the war. Finally, Chief Gall was another important Hunkpapa leader who was a strong military strategist.

The Sioux, along with their allies, the Northern Cheyenne and the Arapaho, ignored the U.S. government's ultimatum and prepared for the wrath of the American army. The U.S. sent multiple cavalry and infantry units to the region, including the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by Custer, which is the unit relevant to this story. The total number of U.S. soldiers was somewhere around 2,500, and the number of native warriors has been debated, but the average is usually given somewhere between 1,000 to 4,000.

There were a few skirmishes that took place in the first half of 1876. The Battle of Powder Ridge took place on March 17th. This early engagement in the war occurred when Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds led a surprise attack on a northern Cheyenne village along the Powder River. While the attack did destroy the village, it did little to weaken Native American resolve, and Reynolds' force was criticized for poor execution and ultimately retreating. Four Americans were killed and three Cheyenne.

On June 17th, the Battle of the Rosebud was fought. This battle was a key battle in which General George Crook's forces engaged a large group of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse. While the battle was technically a stalemate, it prevented Crook from reinforcing Custer's Column, which would have played a crucial role in the subsequent Battle of the Little Bighorn. The Great Sioux War's most famous event, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, took place a week after the Battle of the Rosebud on June 25th.

Custer divided his force of around 600 men into three different battalions, hoping to surround a large Native American encampment near the Little Bighorn River in what is today Montana. His plan was to capture the non-combatants in the camp, primarily women, children, and the elderly, and then use them as leverage to negotiate an end to the conflict.

According to John Martin, one of the only survivors from that unit, Custer wasn't even concerned with fighting so much as preventing the people in the camp from fleeing. The battalion of approximately 200 men led by Custer went straight into the camp around midday. However, he underestimated the number of native warriors, believing that he would only face a few hundred. In reality, there were probably around 1,800 to 2,500 warriors in the camp.

His men were very quickly surrounded and overwhelmed by the warriors, who cut them off from the other two battalions. Two of Custer's subordinate commanders, Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, who led the other two battalions, had been tasked with separate assaults but became bogged down in the fighting. They eventually managed to regroup and form a defensive perimeter, surviving until reinforcements arrived about 36 hours later. As for Custer's men, they were slaughtered.

Within an hour, the battalion that Custer led was utterly defeated. Total losses of the 7th Cavalry from all three battalions were 268 killed, 55 wounded, six of whom later died from their wounds. If it sounds like I'm glossing over the actual battle, it's because we know next to nothing about it. There were no witnesses from Custer's battalion who survived.

The aforementioned John Martin was a member of the unit, but he was sent to one of the other battalions with a message and missed the entire affair. The Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors had no clue who Custer was, and it wasn't until years later that they recounted tales of the battle, often with conflicting testimony. One story holds that he fell in a stream, but his body wasn't found in a stream. Another holds that a Cheyenne woman named Buffalo Calf Road Woman knocked Custer off his horse with a club.

Multiple warriors later claimed to have been the ones to have killed Custer, but to be honest, they wouldn't have known at the time. When reinforcements arrived two days later, Custer's body was found shot in the chest once and once in the head. According to some Sioux accounts, he and other soldiers killed themselves when it was clear the end was near. Yet another story holds that Custer was one of the first to be killed, as his death would have caused his unit to fall apart without leadership.

Native casualties are harder to estimate, but they were likely much lower, with reports between 36 and 100 dead. The defeat at Little Bighorn shocked the United States and led to a massive military response. The U.S. government sent more troops into the region and ramped up its campaign against the Lakota Sioux and their allies. In the years following the battle, many Native Americans were forced onto reservations.

Crazy Horse surrendered to U.S. forces in 1877 and was killed later that year under controversial circumstances. Sitting Bull fled to Canada, but eventually returned and surrendered in 1881. The U.S. government formally confiscated the Black Hills in 1877 in violation of the 1868 treaty. Despite multiple legal challenges over the years, the United States has retained control of the Black Hills, though the Lakota and their descendants continue to demand its return.

What is most interesting is the legacy that surrounds Custer after his death. The story of Custer's last stand was told in newspapers, books, and later movies. In American media, it was portrayed as a heroic tragedy. The leader of one of the other battalions that survived, Frederick Benteen, later went public and said that Custer was actually a poor tactician, was reckless, and endangered the troops under his command.

The reason for the legend of George Armstrong Custer was largely due to one person, his widow, Libby Bacon Custer. For years, she kept the Custer myth alive. She wrote the 1876 bestseller, A Popular Life of General Custer, with Frederick Whitaker soon after his death, and later a memoir titled Boots and Saddles in 1885. For years, she contacted journalists to encourage stories about her late husband and was available herself for interviews.

She was supported by various veterans groups from the Indian Wars who used the story of Custer's last stand to advocate for increased pensions. The story of Custer became so prevalent that in the 1920s, one history textbook omitted the story of Custer because the authors didn't find it to be of consequential to the settlement of the West. But after a backlash, they included the story. Libby Bacon Custer served as an advocate for her husband all her life, which was quite long.

She died at the age of 90 in 1933. That same year after her death, the book Glory Hunter, The Life of General Custer by Frederick F. Vanderwater was published, which was the first book to provide a more honest portrayal of the soldier. The narrative surrounding Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn has taken almost a century to change in popular American culture.

The truth surrounding the Battle of the Little Bighorn is that Custer was seeking military glory for personal advancement and made a gross tactical error regarding the size of his enemy, which resulted in the deaths of himself and all of the men under his command. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiefer.

I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.