Battle of the Greasy Grass - Or - Custer's Last Stand

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer is best known for leading more than 200 of his men to their deaths in the notorious Battle of the Little Bighorn on 25 June 1876.  The battle, also known as "Custer's Last Stand," was part of the Black Hills War against a confederation of Plains Indians, including the Arapaho, Northern Cheyenne, and both halves of the Sioux nation - the Dakota and Lakota.  It remains one of the most controversial battles in United States history.
   To force the large groups of Native Americans back to the reservations, the US Army dispatched three columns, under the command of General Alfred Terry, to attack the gathering in a coordinated fashion.  One of those three columns was led by Lt Col Custer, and it consisted of his prized possession, the 7th US Cavalry.  On the morning of 25 June, Custer's scouts reported smoke from campfires and signs of many Indians about 15 miles from their position.  Custer decided to ignore his standing orders from General Terry, and attack the encampment before sending information back to the other two columns, which meant facing the enemy alone and without infantry, artillery, or any of the other cavalry troops on the move. His scouts told him that there were a great many enemy scattered along the banks of the Little Bighorn, and warned him he might be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.  Custer, however, had decided and he was set upon his course.
   Custer divided his forces into three sections, but his supply train was to hold back, other than with ammunition.  He ordered Captain Frederick Benteen's battalion to scout along a ridge to the left, to prevent the Indians from escaping through the upper valley of the river.  Major Marcus Reno was to travel up the valley, cross the river and attack the encampment in a surprise charge at the southern end.  Custer was going to lead his battalion quietly to the north, and attack, supposedly, at the same time as Reno from the north end of the encampment. Custer made this decision without checking the terrain.  He had to wander through a maze of bluffs and ravines to reach the other end of the camp.  He arrived where he thought he wanted to be too late for a simultaneous attack.
   Reno attacked when he had been told to - his squadron of 175 soldiers advanced to the river and found a band of young braves bathing.  They were taken completely by surprise, and some began running towards the soldiers while unarmed and naked.  Chief Gall, was bathing also.  His wives and children were in the camp immediately on the other side of the river.  The soldiers crossed into the camp and began shooting anything that moved, including women and children.  Gall jumped onto his black horse, completely naked and without arms, and rallied his frightened young contingent.  Hearing the cries and gunfire, other mounted and armed warriors were appearing.  Quickly finding themselves in a desperate battle with little to no hope of relief or reinforcements, Reno halted his men and recrossed the river.  The US troops fought in a dismounted formation for ten minutes, and then withdrew into the timber and brush along the river.  They still heard no sounds of combat from the north end of the camp, where Custer should have been attacking.  When the position along the river bank proved indefensible, Reno withdrew his men uphill to the bluffs east of the river, while being hotly pursued by the Cheyenne and Sioux.  Especially so when it was found that two of Gall's wives and four of his children had been killed in the attack upon the camp.
   Just as the braves finished driving the soldiers away from the river bank to the south, roughly 210 men led by Custer, himself, were spotted approaching the camp from the north.  Cheyenne and Hunkpapa Sioux crossed the river together and slammed into the advancing cavalry.  The force of the assault drove Custer's men back to a long high ridge to the north.  In the meantime, another group of braves, largely Oglala Sioux following Crazy Horse, swiftly moved downstream and then doubled back in a sweeping arc.  This enveloped Custer and his men in a classic pincer move.  The warriors began pouring gunfire and arrows into the constricted area.
   As the Indians closed in, Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses to form a protective wall - but it was too little and much too late.  In less than an hour, Custer and all his men were killed in the worst American military disaster ever.  After another 24 hours of skirmishing, Reno and Benteen's now combined forces escaped the area when the Native Americans vanished.  Their scouts had reported the approaches of two more large columns of soldiers - the ones that Custer had orders to wait for.  Both Reno and Benteen's troops had suffered heavy casualties, but few deaths.
(Because the fighting at the encampment began on the afternoon of 25 June, and the skirmishes involving Reno and Benteen did not end until the afternoon of 26 June, this battle is usually said to have lasted approximately 24 hours.)
    After the battle with Custer's men, the Indians came through and stripped the bodies.  They mutilated all of the men who had been wearing a uniform, as they believed that the soul of a mutilated body was forced to walk the earth for all eternity, seeking wholeness, and could not ascend to heaven.  They took rifles and knives and all of the horses that were not badly wounded.  When the other US Army columns arrived at the battlefield, they did find something odd. George A Custer's body had been stripped and cleaned, but not mutilated or scalped, unlike his brother Thomas, brother Boston, brother-in-law James Calhoun, and nephew Autie Reed.  It has been reported that George A Custer was wearing his favorite buckskins, and not his cavalry uniform.  Some have opined that he was not touched due to the fact the warriors thought he was a civilian, as his hair had been cut short, also. The US Army, and Custer's wife Libbie, however, pushed the myth that the Indians had respected his fighting ability, and therefore left him unmarked.  It is highly unlikely that Custer, who, in a way, started the whole ball of wax rolling by breaking the 1868 Treaty, was "respected" by his enemies, whom he had slaughtered by the hundreds.  In all fairness, to this day, no one knows why Custer was not traditionally mutilated and scalped.
    The pinnacle of the Plains Native American peoples' power was reached on that day, 142 years ago.  They had achieved their greatest victory ever, but soon their tenuous union fell apart in the face of the onslaught of the United States government, Army, and people.  Outraged over the death of a popular Union Civil War hero on the eve of the American Centennial, the people of the nation demanded and received harsh retribution against the people who were the Natives here.  The Black Hills dispute was quickly settled by redrawing boundary lines, placing the sacred land of the Black Hills outside the reservation, and open to white settlement.  Within a year, the Sioux nation was defeated and broken.  Sitting Bull and Chief Gall fled to Canada.  Crazy Horse was forced to surrender a year later.  "Custer's Last Stand" was the last stand for the plains Indians, as well.

Native Leaders Defending Their Land and Way of Life

With the United States government breaking the Treaty of 1868, discovering gold in the sacred lands of the Sioux, and then deciding to send all the northern Plains Indians to a reservation, the Native American leaders had enough.  They felt they could be pushed no further, and in the Spring of 1876, tribes began gathering on what was then a Crow reservation.  There was a huge influx of people - entire families, not just warriors, fighting chiefs and medicine men.  The Lakota Sioux arrived with members of the Hunkpapa, Sihasapa, Minneconjou, San Arc, Brule, Two Kettles, and Oglala clans; the Dakota Sioux were represented by members of the Lower Yanktonai and the Wahpekute; the Northern Cheyenne and the unhappy members of the Arapaho also joined the encampment.  The names of the warriors who participated, including some women, are legends to their people.  The whites remember just a handful of names - Crazy Horse, Chief Gall, Chief Hump, Spotted Eagle and Sitting Bull.  Sitting Bull was at the Crow Reservation gathering, not as a warrior, but as a medicine man.  He had a dream, or vision, of  an up-coming epic battle in which many soldiers would die.

In about 1831, a Hunkpapa Sioux was born in the Grand River Valley of what is now South Dakota.  In his youth, he was known as Jumping Badger, and he received early recognition from his tribe as a warrior and a man of vision.  During his youth he participated in the usual tribal raids for horses against the traditional enemies, including the Crow and Assiniboin.  As a full warrior, he took the name of Tatanka Yotanka, or Sitting Bull, in American English.

   Sitting Bull had little contact with white people until the Santee Sioux uprising in 1862.  When the defeated Natives were driven west, into the Plains, he learned of life on a reservation.  In July 1864, he was at a Teton encampment at Killdeer Mountain when General Alfred Sully bombarded them with artillery fire. At that time, Sitting Bull decided he would keep his people away from the white man and that he would never sign a treaty for them to be imprisoned on a reservation.

   With other Sioux leaders, he soon took his followers to the pristine valleys of the Powder and Yellowstone Rivers, where buffalo and other game was abundant.  He continually warned his followers that they were dependent upon the buffalo for their way of life.  Sitting Bull's influence as a holy man of the people was steadily growing.  In the summer of 1865, columns of US soldiers repeatedly invaded the idyllic Powder River country.  Sitting Bull had occasional encounters with them, and learned their habits of fighting, their strengths and their weaknesses.

   After Chief Red Cloud signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and then agreed to live on a reservation, his influence waned. However, Sitting Bull's disdain for treaties and reservation life soon attracted a large following - not only from the Sioux, but also from the Cheyenne and Arapaho.  In 1873, he skirmished with Lt Col Custer while Custer was guarding surveyors for the Northern Pacific Railroad in the Montana territory.

   Three years later, Sitting Bull and Custer met again in the Greasy Grass on the Crow reservation.  Sitting Bull was not a war leader in that battle, but he had predicted that many soldiers would fall, and his followers believed that his magical powers had brought the Natives the huge victory.  Although Sitting Bull survived the fight, an aroused and vengeful US Army forced him to flee to Canada.

Chief Gall was born in 1840 to the Blackfoot band of Hunkpapa Sioux; in his youth, he was known as Matohinshda, or Bear-Shedding-His-Hair.  There are many stories about his youth, and his extraordinary prowess as a hunter and fighter. Gall Lakota Phizi was considered by both Native Americans and whites to be a most impressive type of physical manhood - one can make one's own judgement from the photo above.

  Gall had an amiable disposition bust was quick to resent insult or injustice.  This sometimes involved him in difficulties, but he seldom fought without good cause and was very popular with his associates.  One of his characteristics was his ability to organize, and it was a large factor in his leadership, when he achieved adulthood.  he was tried in many ways, and was never known to hesitate when it was a question of physical courage and endurance.  he entered public service to his tribe early in life, but not until he had proved himself competent and passed all required tests.

   It was Gall's habit to appear most opportunely in a crisis, and, in a striking and dramatic manner, take command of the situation.  The best known example of this is his entrance on the scene of confusion when Reno surprised the Sioux on the Little Big Horn.  Many of the excited youths, most unarmed, rushed madly and blindly to meet the intruders, and the scene might have upset an experienced warrior.  It was Gall, completely naked, who rode his black horse ahead of the boys and faced them.  He stopped them on the dry creek, while bullets from Reno's cavalry unit whistled past their ears. "Hold, men! Steady - we are not ready yet! Wait for more guns, more horses, and the day is yours!"  The young men obeyed, and in a few minutes the signal to charge forward was given.  Reno and his cavalry detachment retreated on the run before the onset of the Sioux.

   Sitting Bull had confidence in his men as long as Gall planned and directed the attack - whether it was against US soldiers, or the warriors of another tribe.  He was the strategist, and was able, in a twinkling, to note and seize upon any advantage.  he consistently upheld his people's right to their buffalo plains, and believed that they should hold the US government strictly to its agreements with the Native peoples. With the Treaty of 1868 disregarded, he agreed with Sitting Bull and the other chiefs in defending the last of their once vast domain.  He, too survived the Battle of Greasy Grass, and then escaped across the Canada border. He and his followers hoped to bring their lost cause before the English government, and were very disappointed when they were asked to return to the United States.

Originally known as Light Hair, when he was born around 1840, near what is now Rapid City, South Dakota, the Oglala Lakota Sioux later known as Crazy Horse, never allowed his photograph to be taken.  The above representation was painted after a meeting with the warrior.  His father was also known as Crazy Horse, of the Oglala band; his mother was Rattling Blanket Woman of the One Horn family in the Minneconjou band.  At the age of 10, he was known as His Horse On Sight; at 18, his father gave him use of his name.  Tashunca-uitco (Ta-sunko-witko, in phonetic English), actually means "His Horse Is Crazy" - white people shortened it to Crazy Horse.

   As a young warrior, Crazy Horse was a legend; he stole horses from the Crow tribes before he was 13, and he led his first war party before he was 20. He was also unique in that he did not follow Lakota customs: during battles he did not wear face paint, nor feathers nor a war bonnet, and he did not rub dust all over himself as the other Lakota warriors did.

   Celebrated for his ferocity in battle, Crazy Horse was recognized among his people as a visionary leader that was committed to preserving the traditions and values of the Lakota Sioux way of life.  He fought in the 1865 to 1868 war led by Oglala Chief Red Cloud against American settlers in Wyoming. In 1866, he led a war party of 1,000 warriors against the US troops, William J Fetterman's brigade, at Fort Phil Kearny; this would become known as the Fetterman Massacre, and was the worst defeat against US troops at that time.  He fought to prevent American encroachment on Lakota lands following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and was part of the attack on the Black Hills surveying party led by George A Custer in 1873.

   When the US War Department ordered all Lakota bands onto reservations in 1876, Crazy Horse became a leader of the resistance. Closely allied to the Cheyenne through his first marriage, he gathered a force of 1,200 Oglala and Cheyenne warriors at his village.  On 17 June 1876, General George Crook was trying to sneak up Rosebud Creek towards the Native encampment on the Little Bighorn.  Instead, he ran into Crazy Horse and had to retreat.  After this, the warrior joined his forces with those on the Little Bighorn, and the rest would be history.

   While Sitting Bull and Chief Gall retreated north into Canada, Crazy Horse remained to battle General Nelson Miles, who pursued the Lakota and their allies relentlessly through the winter of 1876-77.  This constant military harassment and the huge decline of the buffalo population forced Crazy Horse to surrender on 6 May 1877.  He was the last important leader to yield, except for Gall and Sitting Bull.

    Five months after his surrender, in September 1877, Crazy Horse's wife became ill.  He decided to take her to her parents, and left the reservation without permission.  General Crook ordered him arrested, thinking he was going to return to battle.  Crazy Horse did not resist his arrest, and was taken back to the nearby Fort.  When Crazy Horse realized he was being led to a guardhouse, and was to be locked inside, he began to struggle.  While his arms were being pinned at his sides by one soldier, another bayoneted him twice, in the back.  Crazy Horse died less than 24 hours later.