ABSTRACT
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. 7th Cavalry, with the help of Crow and Arikara scouts, found and attacked a Lakota (Sioux) and Cheyenne village on the west bank of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. With its tribal circles swelled by Lakota and Cheyenne Indians who had left their reservations that spring to socialize and hunt with friends and relatives still roaming the northern Plains, the village was much larger than anyone expected. Historians estimate it contained seven thousand people, including as many as two thousand men of fighting age. At the first sign of attack, warriors from the village scrambled to defend their families and homes. By the end of the day Custer and everyone under his immediate command lay dead on the bluffs above the north end of the sprawling village. Meanwhile, the remnants of the 7th Cavalry—troops commanded by Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen and those escorting the slow-moving pack train—reunited on a hilltop just over four miles upstream. Warriors held them under siege there for the rest of that day and most of the next. In all, 263 soldiers and attached civilians died in the battle, 210 of them under Custer’s immediate command. Another sixty were wounded but more than four hundred survived. Estimates of Lakota and Cheyenne fatalities run from thirty to three hundred with most credible sources putting their death toll at the lower end of the range.
