The plains Indians killed an entire U.S. Cavalry command, achieving the last Native American victory in the fight to hold their disappearing land.
Before the little bighorn Mounting Tension
By the 1870s,the Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains of the United States were growing desperate. Their land was disappearing as more and more white settlers moved west. Worse,they were losing the buffalo that they needed for food,clothing,and shelter. To clear way for trains,railroad companies killed the buffalo by tens of thousands.
The final outrage came in 1874. An expedition found gold in the black hills of what is now South Dakota. Fortune-hunting whites rushed to the new strike. The Sioux nation bitterly resented this move. The Black Hills were the sacred home of their gods. A treaty had granted the area to the Sioux in recognition of their traditional. Now white prospectors were being allowed to enter it.
Custer
The leader of that 1874 expedition was a cavalry colonel named George Armstrong Custer. Within two years,Custer would play a famous role in the history of native Americans. Custer was a brave but reckless soldier. After graduating from West Point last in his class,he fought in the Union army in the Civil War and then served in the West.
Custer was flamboyant. When he left West Point,he had his own uniform made-of Black Velvet. In the West,he wore a buckskin jacket,not the regulation tunic. His long blond hair was a trademark and the source of the Native Americans' name for him-"Long Hair."
The 1896 Campaign
The Sioux had left their reservations in protest of the oncoming whites. They gathered,along with members of the tribes,in Montana. They were led by the chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The U.S. Army sent three cavalry columns to attack them and force them to return to the reservations. Custer led part of one of the columns.
On June 17,the Sioux met one of those columns and badly mauled it in a fight. The cavalry returned to its base. The Sioux set up a huge camp near a river called the Little Bighorn.
Custer's Last Stand
The U.S. Army command met again to plan its moves. Custer's mission was to search for the Sioux in the Rosebud and little Bighorn rivers and drive them south. The other forces,moving in from other directions,would trap the Sioux. Before leaving on the mission, Custer refused the offer of extra troops and two Gatling guns (early machine guns). It was a rash decision.
Custer rode his men hard for three days with little rest. Tired, they finally camped for the night early on June 25. The plan was to rest for a day and then seek out the Sioux.
As the troop breakfasted,Custer learned of the huge Sioux encampment.Concerned that he had been spotted and that the Indians would slip away before the other soldiers arrived,he decided to strike. He split his command into four detachments. One was the supply train. The three fighting units were led by Captain Frederick Benteen,Major Marcus Reno,and Custer himself. They went in different directions. Reno and Custer were to attack the Sioux camp from opposite directions while Benteen prevented any Sioux from escaping. Unfortunately,this plan was not based on a thorough scouting of the of the terrain or the size of the opposing force.
Crazy Horse led the Sioux,who numbered about 3,500. After splitting his command, Custer has 225 troopers with him. Reno's and Benteen's forces were even smaller. The cavalry especially Custer's unit was doomed.
Benteen was soon attacked by a group of Sioux fighters. Meanwhile, Reno had reached the camp,and his men had started firing on it. As Custer approached the camp,he ran into a force of about 1,500 warriors led by an able leader named Gall. Custer tried to move his command up to higher ground. But there he was met by Crazy Horse,who had directed another force of 1,500 Sioux around Custer's troops. Together, Gall and Crazy Horse encircled the cavalry. Hemmed in and outnumbered by a vastly superior force, Custer and his troops were all killed.
After the Little Bighorn
While Custer and his 225 officers and men all died,some of Reno's and Benteen's units survived. They had been able to reunite and hold back the attacks on them. When they heard that more soldiers were coming,camp and moved off.
Although the Sioux were able to smash Custer's command,their cause was hopeless. The Native Americans had to surrender. Within a year of the Little Bighorn,even so proud a warrior as Crazy Horse had given in and moved to a reservation. But before that year was out he was killed while being arrested-murdered,his people believed.
Sitting Bull took a few thousand followers to canada. A few years later, starving from decreased supplies of game,they finally gave in. In 1881 Sitting Bull led his last few hundred people to the reservation. In 1890 he was killed in a bungled arrest,as Crazy Horse had been.
