History is what we think about the past, or what someone else thinks. The real existence of the past slides away. When we reach for that story, it slips past our fingers. We’re pulled onward, like all past and future swimmers—maybe a bit surprised at how strong the current is. If history is a river, there’s no bridge to the other side.
The Central Montana landscape can be a little hypnotic, rising and falling knolls and ridges in various shades of khaki, waving with grass. In human terms, it’s a sea of names: Native American names, settler names, geographical, geological and administrative names, nicknames and local usages—a blanket of names on the landscape, visible and invisible, sometimes secretive.
Deep in this grassland, out on the lone prairie, is the most famous historical name in Montana: Little Big Horn. Over the years, the Battle of the Little Big Horn has bred a torrent of history, fiction, fictional history, film, lecture, essay, legend and myth. It’s not just an American fascination. Most people in the literate world, it’s fair to say, have some awareness of this battle and probably an opinion on it. As a coin of culture or plug-in of connectivity, the Battle of the Little Big Horn is world currency.
Why? It’s small for a battle. U.S. casualties were 268 killed and 55 wounded. Sioux casualties are unknown, but the National Park Service considers 36 to 130 to be a plausible range. Custer lost a battle. The Sioux lost the campaign. The campaign was meaningless, because the Sioux were barely surviving, along with the American bison on which Sioux life depended, a singular horror mainly caused by disease, ecological disaster and hunger. No territory was lost or won in the 1876 campaign; the Little Big Horn is on Crow land, and the Crow were on the U.S. side before and after the battle. But this battle was not relegated to obscurity like other battles in the long cycle of Sioux wars. Little Big Horn became a legend translated into every language, a meme, an elevator button to the Sitting Bull and Custer floor. Entry in the Great Events pantheon began almost as soon as the battle ended. Native American witnesses suggest it was an instant legend for the Sioux as well. But that doesn’t answer “why.” Widespread cultural awareness that “a thing happened” is an effect, not a cause.
In the end I think we have to answer “why” ourselves, and not agree to be merely told why the Little Big Horn fight mattered—though we can easily see that it did matter. The first people on the battlefield after the Sioux did not find a mystery, but mystery soon found them.
The Central Montana landscape can be a little hypnotic, rising and falling knolls and ridges in various shades of khaki, waving with grass. In human terms, it’s a sea of names: Native American names, settler names, geographical, geological and administrative names, nicknames and local usages—a blanket of names on the landscape, visible and invisible, sometimes secretive.
Deep in this grassland, out on the lone prairie, is the most famous historical name in Montana: Little Big Horn. Over the years, the Battle of the Little Big Horn has bred a torrent of history, fiction, fictional history, film, lecture, essay, legend and myth. It’s not just an American fascination. Most people in the literate world, it’s fair to say, have some awareness of this battle and probably an opinion on it. As a coin of culture or plug-in of connectivity, the Battle of the Little Big Horn is world currency.
Why? It’s small for a battle. U.S. casualties were 268 killed and 55 wounded. Sioux casualties are unknown, but the National Park Service considers 36 to 130 to be a plausible range. Custer lost a battle. The Sioux lost the campaign. The campaign was meaningless, because the Sioux were barely surviving, along with the American bison on which Sioux life depended, a singular horror mainly caused by disease, ecological disaster and hunger. No territory was lost or won in the 1876 campaign; the Little Big Horn is on Crow land, and the Crow were on the U.S. side before and after the battle. But this battle was not relegated to obscurity like other battles in the long cycle of Sioux wars. Little Big Horn became a legend translated into every language, a meme, an elevator button to the Sitting Bull and Custer floor. Entry in the Great Events pantheon began almost as soon as the battle ended. Native American witnesses suggest it was an instant legend for the Sioux as well. But that doesn’t answer “why.” Widespread cultural awareness that “a thing happened” is an effect, not a cause.
In the end I think we have to answer “why” ourselves, and not agree to be merely told why the Little Big Horn fight mattered—though we can easily see that it did matter. The first people on the battlefield after the Sioux did not find a mystery, but mystery soon found them.
Native American Monument, Custer Hill MT.
There is no definitive account of Custer’s last fight, and there may never be one. We don’t lack context, however. In retrospect, no power on earth could prevent or even slow the wave of easterners and immigrants pouring over what are now the western states of the United States. When President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore and claim the upper regions of the American west, he may have imagined the Mississippi River as the reasonable boundary of eastern settlement, leaving the whole of the trans-Mississippi as a vast indigenous territory to evolve in tandem with the rest of the country as time went by. This was soon an obscure notion. Successive presidents devised other land-and-settlement policies, but many hundreds of thousands of individual settler choices created the reality.
Depopulation by pandemic was once again the forerunner of migration and resettlement, as it had been in 17th-century Virginia and Massachusetts. European diseases reached the Great Plains before the first white settlers arrived, as Lewis and Clark saw and recorded. Rarely was the spread of epidemics deliberate, though there is the example of Lord Amherst in King Philip’s War of 1675-78.
For those of us who might not have access to oral traditions or other forms of heritage subtly linking the present to the past's deep time, no written record exists of the original state of the Plains Indians before the first smallpox waves. We have only flat two-dimensional ideas of that society. Even less likely are we to reimagine the Plains Indians before the adoption of the horse, re-introduced to North America by Spanish colonization. Reconstruction of those lost societies is a job for archeologists and historical ethnographers. By 1876, the year of the Little Big Horn battle, the Native American population had been reduced to remnant bands, survivors of a world-ending plague. The settlers did not worry about this. They died of the same diseases themselves, though not as readily. To them, Indians were part of nature and not the most convenient part. A European-American cultural script for Native Americans was already in place, sculpted by writers like James Fenimore Cooper for the literate general audience.
Depopulation by pandemic was once again the forerunner of migration and resettlement, as it had been in 17th-century Virginia and Massachusetts. European diseases reached the Great Plains before the first white settlers arrived, as Lewis and Clark saw and recorded. Rarely was the spread of epidemics deliberate, though there is the example of Lord Amherst in King Philip’s War of 1675-78.
For those of us who might not have access to oral traditions or other forms of heritage subtly linking the present to the past's deep time, no written record exists of the original state of the Plains Indians before the first smallpox waves. We have only flat two-dimensional ideas of that society. Even less likely are we to reimagine the Plains Indians before the adoption of the horse, re-introduced to North America by Spanish colonization. Reconstruction of those lost societies is a job for archeologists and historical ethnographers. By 1876, the year of the Little Big Horn battle, the Native American population had been reduced to remnant bands, survivors of a world-ending plague. The settlers did not worry about this. They died of the same diseases themselves, though not as readily. To them, Indians were part of nature and not the most convenient part. A European-American cultural script for Native Americans was already in place, sculpted by writers like James Fenimore Cooper for the literate general audience.
Custer Hill, Little Big Horn, MT.
Many defenders gave up their lives.
The Sioux, a dominant tribal confederacy, occupied much of the Great Plains. In the north, they were squarely in the path of the already-established Oregon Trail, and in the south they were in the path of settlers aiming to seize the Central Plains themselves. Miners and mining profiteers moved in from the west. St. Louis, easily reached from the entire Mississippi and Ohio watersheds, was an open gate to the Missouri River. The Sioux were already surrounded when the cycle of Sioux Wars began. Hostilities sputtered with regular outbreaks of bloodshed from the mid-1850s until after Wounded Knee in 1890.
Why an 1876 campaign, and why Custer? In 1874, the Black Hills belonged to the Sioux, affirmed and reaffirmed in the Laramie treaties. However, persistent rumors of gold led Colonel George Armstrong Custer to invade the Black Hills with a 1,000-strong cavalry column, reaching modern Custer, Wyoming and finding modest quantities of gold. Like Bannack and Virginia City the decade before, thousands of miners and profiteers headed for the Black Hills. The rush led to massive finds of raw gold in the northern Black Hills around Deadwood. There was no U.S. theory that the Sioux could own their own gold. The events started by Custer’s treaty violation soon dispossessed the Sioux. Treaty violations called Federal authority into question, not least the reservation system. It’s hard to be more succinct than Wikipedia about this. “Among the Plains Tribes, the long-standing ceremonial tradition known as the Sun Dance was the most important religious event… Towards the end of spring in 1876, the Lakota and the Cheyenne held a Sun Dance that was also attended by a number of "Agency Indians" who had slipped away from their reservations. During a Sun Dance around June 5, 1876, on Rosebud Creek in Montana, Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota, reportedly had a vision of "soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky." At the same time US military officials were conducting a summer campaign to force the Lakota and the Cheyenne back to their reservations, using infantry and cavalry in a so-called "three-pronged approach".”
Why an 1876 campaign, and why Custer? In 1874, the Black Hills belonged to the Sioux, affirmed and reaffirmed in the Laramie treaties. However, persistent rumors of gold led Colonel George Armstrong Custer to invade the Black Hills with a 1,000-strong cavalry column, reaching modern Custer, Wyoming and finding modest quantities of gold. Like Bannack and Virginia City the decade before, thousands of miners and profiteers headed for the Black Hills. The rush led to massive finds of raw gold in the northern Black Hills around Deadwood. There was no U.S. theory that the Sioux could own their own gold. The events started by Custer’s treaty violation soon dispossessed the Sioux. Treaty violations called Federal authority into question, not least the reservation system. It’s hard to be more succinct than Wikipedia about this. “Among the Plains Tribes, the long-standing ceremonial tradition known as the Sun Dance was the most important religious event… Towards the end of spring in 1876, the Lakota and the Cheyenne held a Sun Dance that was also attended by a number of "Agency Indians" who had slipped away from their reservations. During a Sun Dance around June 5, 1876, on Rosebud Creek in Montana, Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota, reportedly had a vision of "soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky." At the same time US military officials were conducting a summer campaign to force the Lakota and the Cheyenne back to their reservations, using infantry and cavalry in a so-called "three-pronged approach".”
The War Department in far-off Washington sought only a punitive expedition. The number of Sioux involved was not large. For the Sioux, this was already a post-apocalyptic summer. Even the buffalo were rapidly being wiped out, an indescribable ecological catastrophe. The Sioux, like all the tribes, were grasping for survival as their world fell apart around them.
Not all Plains tribes and leaders responded the same way to the complicated situations they were faced with. These societies, whose social and cultural orders were fully disrupted within living memory, were trying to survive as best they knew. They were warrior societies in permanent mutual conflict. We might think of the Plains Chieftains as somewhat like the heroes of the tribal Greeks in the Iliad, autarchs whose authority rested on heroic charisma. The Plains Indians knew the relationship between power and violence. Some of the lands declared to be Sioux by U.S. treaty belonged to other tribes. The Lakota, for instance, had a history of ignoring Crow boundaries and the Crow had asked for U.S. cavalry help. It was no coincidence that the climax of the campaign occurred on Crow territory. The Crow, Arikawa and others sided with the U.S. and fought in the 1876 campaign as guides and as auxiliary cavalry—a power-based decision.
The army deployed three small columns under Brigadier-Generals Crook and Terry and Colonel Gibbon, including hundreds of Crow and other Indians as scouts and allied cavalry. Colonel Custer commanded Terry’s striking force. The combined number of troops in the three columns was comparable to a Civil War-era brigade, minus the artillery. Many were tied up in supply lines and forts. The roadless area over which these three columns campaigned was quite a bit larger—very much larger—than General Grant’s entire theater of war back in Virginia. The map below visualizes the territorial scope and time frame of the Sioux Wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn#/media/File:The_Lakota_Wars_(1854-1890)._The_battlefields_and_the_Lakota_treaty_territory_of_1851_(circa.).png
Communication between the Federal columns was incredibly difficult. The Sioux proved hard to locate, but on June 17, 1876, in fulfillment of Sitting Bull’s prophesy, Crook’s column found Crazy Horse and his Lakota and Cheyenne fighters on the Rosebud River. Several hours of hard fighting later, Crook’s Crow allies probably saved Crook’s column from disaster by enabling surrounded troopers to get out. Crazy Horse’s forces then withdrew, and General Crook also retreated. The Battle of the Rosebud knocked Crook out of the fight.
Crazy Horse then joined Sitting Bull’s great gathering of the tribes on the Little Big Horn, an encampment celebrating a major religious revival, ceremonially trying to summon the aid and guidance of powers they understood from the universe around them, powers they were familiar with as manifestations of the divine. Calling fervently on the spiritual beliefs of the past in a last-ditch Appeal to Heaven is a natural social response to existential threat.
Not all Plains tribes and leaders responded the same way to the complicated situations they were faced with. These societies, whose social and cultural orders were fully disrupted within living memory, were trying to survive as best they knew. They were warrior societies in permanent mutual conflict. We might think of the Plains Chieftains as somewhat like the heroes of the tribal Greeks in the Iliad, autarchs whose authority rested on heroic charisma. The Plains Indians knew the relationship between power and violence. Some of the lands declared to be Sioux by U.S. treaty belonged to other tribes. The Lakota, for instance, had a history of ignoring Crow boundaries and the Crow had asked for U.S. cavalry help. It was no coincidence that the climax of the campaign occurred on Crow territory. The Crow, Arikawa and others sided with the U.S. and fought in the 1876 campaign as guides and as auxiliary cavalry—a power-based decision.
The army deployed three small columns under Brigadier-Generals Crook and Terry and Colonel Gibbon, including hundreds of Crow and other Indians as scouts and allied cavalry. Colonel Custer commanded Terry’s striking force. The combined number of troops in the three columns was comparable to a Civil War-era brigade, minus the artillery. Many were tied up in supply lines and forts. The roadless area over which these three columns campaigned was quite a bit larger—very much larger—than General Grant’s entire theater of war back in Virginia. The map below visualizes the territorial scope and time frame of the Sioux Wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn#/media/File:The_Lakota_Wars_(1854-1890)._The_battlefields_and_the_Lakota_treaty_territory_of_1851_(circa.).png
Communication between the Federal columns was incredibly difficult. The Sioux proved hard to locate, but on June 17, 1876, in fulfillment of Sitting Bull’s prophesy, Crook’s column found Crazy Horse and his Lakota and Cheyenne fighters on the Rosebud River. Several hours of hard fighting later, Crook’s Crow allies probably saved Crook’s column from disaster by enabling surrounded troopers to get out. Crazy Horse’s forces then withdrew, and General Crook also retreated. The Battle of the Rosebud knocked Crook out of the fight.
Crazy Horse then joined Sitting Bull’s great gathering of the tribes on the Little Big Horn, an encampment celebrating a major religious revival, ceremonially trying to summon the aid and guidance of powers they understood from the universe around them, powers they were familiar with as manifestations of the divine. Calling fervently on the spiritual beliefs of the past in a last-ditch Appeal to Heaven is a natural social response to existential threat.
A living witness: Sitting Bull in later life. Source: Wikipedia.
As Custer’s column reached the Rosebud battlefield, his scouts discovered the Little Big Horn encampment. This was the goal of the campaign and the climax of the war. Unusual among Federal commanders, Custer had personal experience attacking encampments—in 1868 Custer and the 7th Cavalry had razed Chief Black Kettle’s village while it was flying a white flag under cavalry protection from Fort Cobb. Even the Bureau of Indian Affairs called this a massacre of the innocent. Custer knew how the thing was done and he set out immediately to do it again. We can hardly imagine him acting differently. The column included several Custer family members; the Colonel was accompanied by two brothers, a brother-in-law, and a nephew on vacation. There was also a newspaper correspondent because Custer was already a celebrity with headlines, controversies, fans and haters. The pressure was on Custer to be decisive.
Battlefields are the forensic remains of old battles, and speak volumes about what really happened. Generations of scholars, historians and other enthusiasts have spilled ponds of ink about Custer, the Sioux and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Controversies, theories and reconstructions brew along enthusiastically to this day. There are dedicated specialists in Little Big Horn Studies. The battlefield itself contributes to this fascination. Even if we ignored the many-faceted iconographic status of the Battle of the Little Big Horn in American culture, all the roles the battle has played in the American imagination, and even if we ignored the real causes, purport and issue of the battle, the jewel-like mysteries of the battlefield itself would still remain.
There are no definitive versions of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Richard A. Fox’s Archaeology, History, and Custer's Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015) comes park-ranger-recommended as a physical survey of the battlefield and its artifacts. The forensic analysis of archeologically-recovered cartridge cases tells a non-theoretical tale. The shell casings discriminate between cavalry and Sioux shooters and can even trace the movements of some of the gunmen across the battlefield.
Custer had a large staff and 12 companies at his disposal, a bit over 40 men per company, with 35 Indian scouts, six Crow and the rest Arikawa, for a total of approximately 647 troopers and scouts. One company guarded the supply train. Of the remaining 11 companies, Custer assigned three to Captain Frederick Benteen and three to Major Marcus Reno. Benteen was sent to scout an open flank, and Reno was ordered to attack the southern end of the Sioux encampment. Custer retained Companies C, E, F, I and L.
Before he divided his companies, Custer had been told that this was the largest Indian encampment his scouts had ever seen. No doubt it was. With an immensely charismatic leader like Sitting Bull seeking supernatural intervention in a moment of utmost crisis, the Little Big Horn Encampment may have contained nearly all of the last free Sioux. We may as well ask who wasn’t there when Custer arrived.
Battlefields are the forensic remains of old battles, and speak volumes about what really happened. Generations of scholars, historians and other enthusiasts have spilled ponds of ink about Custer, the Sioux and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Controversies, theories and reconstructions brew along enthusiastically to this day. There are dedicated specialists in Little Big Horn Studies. The battlefield itself contributes to this fascination. Even if we ignored the many-faceted iconographic status of the Battle of the Little Big Horn in American culture, all the roles the battle has played in the American imagination, and even if we ignored the real causes, purport and issue of the battle, the jewel-like mysteries of the battlefield itself would still remain.
There are no definitive versions of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Richard A. Fox’s Archaeology, History, and Custer's Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015) comes park-ranger-recommended as a physical survey of the battlefield and its artifacts. The forensic analysis of archeologically-recovered cartridge cases tells a non-theoretical tale. The shell casings discriminate between cavalry and Sioux shooters and can even trace the movements of some of the gunmen across the battlefield.
Custer had a large staff and 12 companies at his disposal, a bit over 40 men per company, with 35 Indian scouts, six Crow and the rest Arikawa, for a total of approximately 647 troopers and scouts. One company guarded the supply train. Of the remaining 11 companies, Custer assigned three to Captain Frederick Benteen and three to Major Marcus Reno. Benteen was sent to scout an open flank, and Reno was ordered to attack the southern end of the Sioux encampment. Custer retained Companies C, E, F, I and L.
Before he divided his companies, Custer had been told that this was the largest Indian encampment his scouts had ever seen. No doubt it was. With an immensely charismatic leader like Sitting Bull seeking supernatural intervention in a moment of utmost crisis, the Little Big Horn Encampment may have contained nearly all of the last free Sioux. We may as well ask who wasn’t there when Custer arrived.
The site of Reno’s attack is the flat middle ground beyond the Little Big Horn.
Reno’s attack failed at once. His three companies had to dismount and form a skirmish line. Promptly outflanked, they were next driven into the cottonwoods along the river and finally up the gulches to the top of the ridge, closely pursued. The ridge, however, was not a place of safety.
Site of Reno’s retreat.
Skyline visibility on the Custer battlefield.
The Sioux did not fight in military units under command, but in volunteer bands under charismatic heroes, their skills honed by buffalo hunting. Cheyenne cavalry soon outflanked Reno’s new position and loosely encircled him. Reno’s ridge position was now being steadily sniped at from all sides, and Reno relocated to the area known as Reno’s Hill, on the south end of the battlefield, seen in the photo below. Seemingly from the physical evidence, Reno’s company may not have been given many targets as they were enveloped. Fortunately for Reno and his troops, by then Custer had been spotted on the opposite side of the encampment and Crazy Horse temporarily withdrew from Reno’s positions to repel Custer in the north.
Reno’s Hill in the middle distance, in practical rifle range.
As Reno’s soldiers hovered on the ridge under fire, Custer’s hard-riding bugler bypassed this area and reached Benteen and his three companies with orders to join Custer. Not long after, Custer sent a second message asking Benteen to hurry up. Benteen, possibly moving toward the nearest shooting, found Reno’s already-mauled outfit instead, and joined Reno inside the envelope. Soon the supply train company arrived as well. Reno now had seven cavalry companies and a supply train inside his perimeter. Rifle pits were dug; there was no other cover except dead horses.
Rifle pit on Reno’s Hill.
As the Reno fight was developing, Custer led his five companies around to the north, behind the links of ridge that dominate the battlefield. His likeliest goal was to attack the encampment from the north side and capture the fleeing noncombatants pouring out from Reno’s attack. The actual size of the encampment is not exactly known. The National Park Service considers it to have held approximately 7,000 people, with a pony herd of 15,000 animals, and to have stretched for several miles. Estimates of the number of Sioux who took part in the fighting range from 900 to 2,000. The park brochure calls this “possibly the largest-ever encampment of Plains Indians” but we can wonder how large pre-contact Sun Dance encampments might have been, under particularly great charismatic leaders.
It’s interesting to learn what the Sioux were shooting with. The bow, the lance and the club remained the main weapons of many Sioux, but archeological shell casings and forensics determined the minimum number of different kinds of rifles fired at various points on the battlefield. Fox’s chart (p. 78) in Archeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle shows 27 Sharps 50-cal. rifles and 62 Henry 44-cal. rifles on Custer’s part of the battlefield, among a large miscellany of other popular Civil-War-era rifles and pistols. A lot of the rifles carried by the Sioux in 1876 were heavy calibers suitable for buffalo, and the balance of firepower may have been on their side at critical moments.
It’s interesting to learn what the Sioux were shooting with. The bow, the lance and the club remained the main weapons of many Sioux, but archeological shell casings and forensics determined the minimum number of different kinds of rifles fired at various points on the battlefield. Fox’s chart (p. 78) in Archeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle shows 27 Sharps 50-cal. rifles and 62 Henry 44-cal. rifles on Custer’s part of the battlefield, among a large miscellany of other popular Civil-War-era rifles and pistols. A lot of the rifles carried by the Sioux in 1876 were heavy calibers suitable for buffalo, and the balance of firepower may have been on their side at critical moments.
Sharpshooter’s Ridge: one reason Benteen couldn’t risk closing up with Custer.
An hour or so into the fight, Reno’s seven companies and all their horses were not yet trapped on Reno’s Hill. Direct attacks were sporadic, sometimes hand-to-hand and suicidal. Pot-shots continued to find targets. Tactics would have called for small local counterattacks to drive off groups of Sioux who came too close. Some of Reno’s casualties died like that. During this dangerous and brief lull, distant volleys were heard from Custer’s position a couple of miles away. Reno cannot possibly have known exactly where that was. Captain Weir, from Benteen’s command, took his company a mile north on the ridge to a spot called Weir Point, and from there he may have seen the conclusion of the Custer fight.
Weir Point. Custer Hill on the nearer skyline.
Another view: National Park Service Sign.
That was the high water mark of the Reno fight. Weir withdrew, and warriors from the Custer fight now descended on Reno’s Hill with new weapons and more ammunition, besieging the survivors until the next day. Reno’s position was appalling, but the Sioux broke camp and moved off when Gibbon’s column and the rest of Terry’s column approached the battlefield. The survivors of the Reno fight were free to ride over to Custer Hill and begin piecing together what happened there.
View from Reno’s Hill toward the Sioux rifle positions.
Custer’s ideas have to be understood as controlling the battlefield by firepower. His five companies could only bodily control a few acres at a time, but if the riflemen were properly spaced apart, their rifles could freeze or prevent movement for many hundreds of yards. With this in mind, Custer first approached Medicine Tail Ford, across from the part of the encampment occupied by the Northern Cheyenne, Minneconju, Sans Arc, Oglala and Brule.
Medicine Tail Ford.
Low point on the ridge opposite Medicine Tail Ford.
Shooting broke out here. We can draw our own conclusions. Custer’s only imaginable tactical motive was to attack the far end of the encampment and support Reno. But Medicine Tail Ford wasn’t particularly near the north end of the camp. Custer was out in the open, the surprise was over, his foes were gathering under a number of celebrated war leaders, and Crazy Horse, having driven Reno’s command up onto the ridge, was now coming for Custer’s command too.
Archeological evidence suggests Custer pulled back to what is now called Calhoun’s Ridge, where he positioned Companies I and L behind a C Company skirmish line. Custer then rode with his large staff, pack of relatives, and Companies E and F around the east side of what would come to be known as Custer Hill, across the area where the Visitor Center, National Veterans Cemetery, and parking lot are now, and then down to the stream bed of the Little Big Horn. Traditionally the Visitor Center and National Cemetery were considered to be off the active part of the battlefield, but cartridge case finds and the dead body of Custer’s newspaper correspondent show that at least some of Custer’s staff got as far as the creek below the cemetery. There they may have finally found the hard-to-spot upper end of the Sioux encampment. However, the entire attack had already failed.
Archeological evidence suggests Custer pulled back to what is now called Calhoun’s Ridge, where he positioned Companies I and L behind a C Company skirmish line. Custer then rode with his large staff, pack of relatives, and Companies E and F around the east side of what would come to be known as Custer Hill, across the area where the Visitor Center, National Veterans Cemetery, and parking lot are now, and then down to the stream bed of the Little Big Horn. Traditionally the Visitor Center and National Cemetery were considered to be off the active part of the battlefield, but cartridge case finds and the dead body of Custer’s newspaper correspondent show that at least some of Custer’s staff got as far as the creek below the cemetery. There they may have finally found the hard-to-spot upper end of the Sioux encampment. However, the entire attack had already failed.
Visitor Center, Cemetery, and Little Big Horn seen from Custer’s Hill. I-90 is in the mid-distance. Axis of Custer’s attack is to the right, and axis of retreat is the center foreground.
A firing line was formed where the National Cemetery is now (below the Visitor Center in the photo above). Companies E and F stayed for a few minutes and fired a few shots, leaving a scant few cartridge cases as the only evidence. Then, we can reckon, Custer and the rest heard a considerable spate of gunfire in the near distance behind them.
During Custer’s excursion to the top of the Sioux camp, C and L Companies were driven from Calhoun’s Ridge to Calhoun’s Hill, rapidly surrounded, and overrun. Archeologically by shell casings and by the accounts of Reno and his officers, who counted the shell cases they saw in 1876, the collapse of this position involved a considerable expenditure of cartridges and the heaviest shooting of the Custer fight. Chief Walks White, or Lame White Man, was killed starting this attack, and here the Sioux suffered most of their casualties, based on oral histories. Warriors led by Gall, Two Moons, and Crow King finished off C, I and L Companies mostly with hand weapons, chasing them “like buffalo,” except for the half dozen or so on the fastest horses making off for the other side of Custer Hill.
During Custer’s excursion to the top of the Sioux camp, C and L Companies were driven from Calhoun’s Ridge to Calhoun’s Hill, rapidly surrounded, and overrun. Archeologically by shell casings and by the accounts of Reno and his officers, who counted the shell cases they saw in 1876, the collapse of this position involved a considerable expenditure of cartridges and the heaviest shooting of the Custer fight. Chief Walks White, or Lame White Man, was killed starting this attack, and here the Sioux suffered most of their casualties, based on oral histories. Warriors led by Gall, Two Moons, and Crow King finished off C, I and L Companies mostly with hand weapons, chasing them “like buffalo,” except for the half dozen or so on the fastest horses making off for the other side of Custer Hill.
Grave markers from the annihilation of C, L and I Companies.
Custer, on Cemetery Ridge, heard the sound of heavy rifle fire (which was also audible from Reno’s position, and inspired Captain Weir to ride to Weir Point). He would also have heard the firing die down and stop, because the C, I and L Company refugees were mostly being killed by lance and club. A messenger may have reached him—there were some C Company dead next to him on Custer Hill a few minutes later. We won’t know.
Horses can move pretty fast, but time was now gone. As Fox reconstructs events from the archeology, Custer, his staff and Company F broke for the high ground of Custer Hill. Most of Company E split off, possibly to block mounted warriors coming out of the encampment onto Custer Hill by way of Deep Ravine. E Company was destroyed at once. A handful of F Company, Custer and staff got as far as the markers where they fell. The entire Custer fight took roughly half an hour and the Custer Hill climax may have been over in minutes. By this reading, Custer died in mid-maneuver as his command disintegrated around him.
The next day, June 27, Reno's survivors reached the scene of the Custer fight. Captain Benteen later reported:
"I went over the battlefield carefully with a view to determine how the battle was fought. I arrived at the conclusion I [hold] now—that it was a rout, a panic, until the last man was killed ... There was no line formed on the battlefield. You can take a handful of corn and scatter [the kernels] over the floor, and make just such lines. There were none ... The only approach to a line was where 5 or 6 [dead] horses found at equal distances, like skirmishers [part of Lt. Calhoun's Company L]. That was the only approach to a line on the field. There were more than 20 [troopers] killed [in one group]; there were [more often] four or five at one place, all within a space of 20 to 30 yards [of each other] ... I counted 70 dead [cavalry] horses and 2 Indian ponies. I think, in all probability, that the men turned their horses loose without any orders to do so. Many orders might have been given, but few obeyed. I think that they were panic stricken; it was a rout, as I said before."
I hope that was a refreshing account of an old battle, but it occurs to me nothing in it says why it matters. But we know it did.
Little Big Horn is a tangibly spiritual space, not just the site of an incident in the Great Sioux War. The nature of places has never been something language captures well. The ancient Greek belief in daimons of place or landscape remains compelling to me.
Horses can move pretty fast, but time was now gone. As Fox reconstructs events from the archeology, Custer, his staff and Company F broke for the high ground of Custer Hill. Most of Company E split off, possibly to block mounted warriors coming out of the encampment onto Custer Hill by way of Deep Ravine. E Company was destroyed at once. A handful of F Company, Custer and staff got as far as the markers where they fell. The entire Custer fight took roughly half an hour and the Custer Hill climax may have been over in minutes. By this reading, Custer died in mid-maneuver as his command disintegrated around him.
The next day, June 27, Reno's survivors reached the scene of the Custer fight. Captain Benteen later reported:
"I went over the battlefield carefully with a view to determine how the battle was fought. I arrived at the conclusion I [hold] now—that it was a rout, a panic, until the last man was killed ... There was no line formed on the battlefield. You can take a handful of corn and scatter [the kernels] over the floor, and make just such lines. There were none ... The only approach to a line was where 5 or 6 [dead] horses found at equal distances, like skirmishers [part of Lt. Calhoun's Company L]. That was the only approach to a line on the field. There were more than 20 [troopers] killed [in one group]; there were [more often] four or five at one place, all within a space of 20 to 30 yards [of each other] ... I counted 70 dead [cavalry] horses and 2 Indian ponies. I think, in all probability, that the men turned their horses loose without any orders to do so. Many orders might have been given, but few obeyed. I think that they were panic stricken; it was a rout, as I said before."
I hope that was a refreshing account of an old battle, but it occurs to me nothing in it says why it matters. But we know it did.
Little Big Horn is a tangibly spiritual space, not just the site of an incident in the Great Sioux War. The nature of places has never been something language captures well. The ancient Greek belief in daimons of place or landscape remains compelling to me.
Donnie offering tobacco at the Spirit Tree on Custer Hill.
Whether a Spirit is its own power, or has power conferred, and whether the world is a conduit for Spirit, are questions I cannot answer. A Spirit is a Thing; what we are most looking for would come from beyond the world of Things and Spirits. Perhaps Sitting Bull’s powers were real. Maybe he summoned something that has not yet entirely departed. At least that would help explain the weird story of the Little Big Horn grave markers.
Reno’s command had already left a trail of graves across the battlefield before they reached Calhoun’s position and the first bodies. All the bodies on the battlefield had been mutilated, which the ancient Sioux did both for revenge and to release the angry spirits. Also everything of the least value or use had been stripped and carried off. One witness remarked that no horse equipment of any kind was left behind, “not even a strap.” The bodies had been in the sun long enough to swell up, and most were unrecognizable. The troopers buried them where they lay, in very shallow graves marked by stakes, sometimes scooping the dirt over the body from both sides in a low mound, and sometimes covering the barely-scraped graves with brush. They had a long string of burials to perform, all the way to Custer Hill and Deep Ravine, and they were exhausted and shot up and tending to over a company’s worth of wounded. It wasn’t the best job.
A year later, in 1877, the army mounted a reburial expedition. The graves were exhumed and re-interred, and the officers’ remains were taken back for their families to dispose of, including five members of the immediate Custer family. But this wasn’t enough. Another expedition to repeat the performance and further improve the Little Big Horn burials was sent in 1879. That wasn’t enough either. A more fully equipped expedition in 1881 moved all the relocatable remains to a mass grave at the top of the hill, and installed a granite obelisk. They also re-marked the original grave sites. Obviously that, too, wasn’t nearly enough, and in 1890 Captain Owen Sweet and company arrived with 246 individual marble markers for the original grave sites as best he could determine them. To quote Fox, “…Sweet incorrectly placed on Custer’s battlefield 44 markers intended to memorialize Reno’s dead.”
Reno’s command had already left a trail of graves across the battlefield before they reached Calhoun’s position and the first bodies. All the bodies on the battlefield had been mutilated, which the ancient Sioux did both for revenge and to release the angry spirits. Also everything of the least value or use had been stripped and carried off. One witness remarked that no horse equipment of any kind was left behind, “not even a strap.” The bodies had been in the sun long enough to swell up, and most were unrecognizable. The troopers buried them where they lay, in very shallow graves marked by stakes, sometimes scooping the dirt over the body from both sides in a low mound, and sometimes covering the barely-scraped graves with brush. They had a long string of burials to perform, all the way to Custer Hill and Deep Ravine, and they were exhausted and shot up and tending to over a company’s worth of wounded. It wasn’t the best job.
A year later, in 1877, the army mounted a reburial expedition. The graves were exhumed and re-interred, and the officers’ remains were taken back for their families to dispose of, including five members of the immediate Custer family. But this wasn’t enough. Another expedition to repeat the performance and further improve the Little Big Horn burials was sent in 1879. That wasn’t enough either. A more fully equipped expedition in 1881 moved all the relocatable remains to a mass grave at the top of the hill, and installed a granite obelisk. They also re-marked the original grave sites. Obviously that, too, wasn’t nearly enough, and in 1890 Captain Owen Sweet and company arrived with 246 individual marble markers for the original grave sites as best he could determine them. To quote Fox, “…Sweet incorrectly placed on Custer’s battlefield 44 markers intended to memorialize Reno’s dead.”
The 1881 obelisk.
Moving ceremonial rocks around has always been a pretty sure indication that something’s going on, as far back into the deeps of human history as we care to go. Compulsive ceremonial rock-moving suggests acute spiritual disturbance of some kind. Obviously these were not the restful dead. These were some hot dead. Bone juggling is another old-timer method of spiritual invitation—one sees it in places like Amiens and Rome—Verdun, come to think of it, is a modern example—but it’s really one of the older magics, like moving rocks around. There was much juggling of Little Big Horn bones. Make of that what you will.
Sweet’s placements, when you’re on the field, subtly tattoo the landscape. They’re artistically placed in an Aesthetic Era fashion and we are reminded that an 1890 cavalry captain is a civilized man. He stayed within the constraints of the original burials but counted depressions as former graves. Thus, where dirt had been dug out from both sides to mound the body in a shallow grave, Sweet counted that as two graves. Twin graves appear prominently here and there. In the Ruskin-inspired esthetic appropriate to the period, the overall pattern of placements would be unthinkable without these twinned stones. In a way they mark the original locations of the worst-buried people and in another way they save the whole pattern from mere naturalistic formalism. The Spirits love these dual meanings. The deeper meaning goes past spirit. The pattern of the grave markers on the Little Big Horn battlefield is not exactly an accident. Contrapuntally we can ask whether the markers do or do not amount to coincidence. If we go with coincidence as an explanation of the pattern, then it’s a large one.
Sweet’s placements, when you’re on the field, subtly tattoo the landscape. They’re artistically placed in an Aesthetic Era fashion and we are reminded that an 1890 cavalry captain is a civilized man. He stayed within the constraints of the original burials but counted depressions as former graves. Thus, where dirt had been dug out from both sides to mound the body in a shallow grave, Sweet counted that as two graves. Twin graves appear prominently here and there. In the Ruskin-inspired esthetic appropriate to the period, the overall pattern of placements would be unthinkable without these twinned stones. In a way they mark the original locations of the worst-buried people and in another way they save the whole pattern from mere naturalistic formalism. The Spirits love these dual meanings. The deeper meaning goes past spirit. The pattern of the grave markers on the Little Big Horn battlefield is not exactly an accident. Contrapuntally we can ask whether the markers do or do not amount to coincidence. If we go with coincidence as an explanation of the pattern, then it’s a large one.
A twinned grave from the C-I-L Company fight. Custer Hill is in the background.
In the 20th century the Park Service still heard unmarked graves calling to them, and placed six more markers. Eventually the tribes who helped create the original layout brought more good ceremonial stone, and the heart-rightness of these installations shows they actually were needed. I wouldn’t like to guarantee that we’ve seen the last of the rock-moving on the ridge, even now…
Where they fell. US 212 in the background.
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