THIS DAY IN HISTORY: June 25, 1876, Battle of Greasy Grass 

150 years ago today, a group of Great Plains tribes achieved a monumental victory over the U.S. military in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. For generations, American history books told the tale of the battle — referred to in Indian Country as the Battle of Greasy Grass — as “Custer’s Last Stand,” enshrining a false legacy around a beloved general, when in actuality it was a stand for Native sovereignty, culture and lifeways.

The Lead Up

In the years leading up to the Battle of Greasy Grass, the federal government had turned its strategy of forcefully removing Native people from their lands to one of restricting their movements to designated areas, giving birth to the reservation system.

Reservations were designed to allow for safe passage for settlers heading westward, regardless of the needs and lifeways of the tribes subject to them.

The effect was immediate and debilitating. Tribes lost their ancestral lands, and food sovereignty was compromised, pushing them into reliance on government commodities.

Being confined to a designated square-mileage was in direct conflict with the lifeways of nomadic tribes in the Plains region, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Many reservations quickly shrank as the government broke treaties to take more land, exacerbating the already inadequate conditions for Native life.

In 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed between the U.S. government and Sioux chiefs, including Oglala Lakota Chief Red Cloud, Brule Lakota Chief Iron Shell and Northern Cheyenne Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf. The agreement designated a 60 million-acre swath of land in western South Dakota as the Great Sioux Reservation and established Sioux ownership of the Black Hills.

Prominent Sioux Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse refused to sign the treaty, rejecting the reservation system forced upon them. Followers of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse continued to live as they had since time immemorial, disregarding the geographic constraints forced upon them.

Just a few years after the signing, the government broke the treaty and began encroaching on the lands promised to the Sioux.

In 1874, General George Armstrong Custer was ordered to map an area of the Black Hills within the Great Sioux Reservation to designate an area for a military post and document the natural resources. During the expedition, gold was discovered. Settlers and miners poured into the reservation, violating the treaty. Enticed by the prospect of unmined gold, the government attempted to buy the Black Hills from the Sioux, who rejected the offer. In an attempt to undermine the treaty and create an opening to mine the hills, in 1875, the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered all of the Sioux living beyond the reservation borders to report to the government by Jan. 31, 1875, or be labeled hostile. The tribe largely ignored the ultimatum.

Three months later, in March 1876, three military forces set out into the region — most of which was commanded by Custer — to round up the Sioux labeled as hostile.

Sitting Bull’s Vision

Sitting Bull’s leadership and refusal to comply with anti-Indian U.S. policies drew thousands of Native people to his camp. By the summer of 1876, upward of 10,000 Sioux and Cheyenne joined him in a village in a valley on the western edge of the Little Bighorn River in what is present-day Lame Deer, Mont.

In June of that year, Sitting Bull, a renowned spiritual leader, performed the Sun Dance ceremony. During the ritual, the leader was visited by a vision of soldiers falling upside down onto his village, foreshadowing a great victory on behalf of his people.

The Battle

On June 22, Custer and his men were ordered to split off from the rest of the troops to approach the Lakota from the east and south, while the others approached from the north, effectively surrounding the Lakota and leaving no means of escape. By June 24, 1876, just a couple of weeks after Sitting Bull’s vision, Custer and his band of 700 men were 25 miles east of Sitting Bull’s camp.

The general sent out Crow and Arikara scouts to locate the village and gather intelligence, which he intended to use to launch an attack in the night.

The scouts reported that the Lakota and Cheyenne were already alerted to the troops’ presence. No longer having the advantage of surprise, Custer ordered an immediate attack. He divided his men into 12 troops commanded by himself, Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen.

According to “Archeology, History and Custer’s Last Battle,” Custer’s strategy was to capture noncombatants — such as children, women, the elderly and the disabled — and use them as leverage to force the Sioux to surrender, a technique the general wrote about in his autobiography, published two years before the battle.

When Reno and Benteen approached the battle from their respective positions, they quickly realized they had grossly underestimated the Sioux numbers. They retreated to higher ground, while Custer’s troops were quickly overtaken. Sitting Bull, who was 60 years old at the time, directed the Sioux forces from the village, while Crazy Horse led a group of warriors that ultimately trapped Custer’s troops.

Lakota leader Standing Bear, who was 17 at the time, describes seeing the soldiers’ descent into the valley upon the village:

“Then I heard a man shouting that the soldiers were coming. They had shot a boy that was on his way to get our horses. I ran back and saw that another man was bringing our horses. I sprang onto a horse but I didn’t have time to dress. I had only my shirt but no shoes. I rode with my uncle in the direction toward Reno when on the hill we saw Custer advancing. Before we got closer we saw hundreds upon hundreds of our people around us. A few of them had guns and most of them had bows and arrows.”

The battle that ensued lasted two days and left all of Custer’s men dead. It is estimated that between 30 and 40 Sioux died during the conflict. Custer’s body was found in the aftermath with two gunshot wounds, one in the chest and another in the head. His exact cause of death has never been determined. Some accounts assert that he died by suicide after sustaining the shot to his chest; others say the shot to his head was made post-mortem; and according to others, he was killed by a Lakota warrior named Big Nose.

The Aftermath

The military used the defeat and Custer’s death at Little Bighorn to galvanize the campaign to force Native peoples off their lands into the reservation system. Sitting Bull and his people refused to comply, and he took his people into Canada to flee persecution.

The U.S. still wanted the gold discovered by the 1874 expedition. In the Indian Appropriations Act of 1876, lawmakers attached a rider stipulating that unless the Sioux ceded the Black Hills, the government would cut off the food rations on which tribes had become dependent. At the time, the Sioux were not compensated for the resulting seizure of the Hills. In 1980, the Supreme Court ordered the U.S. to compensate the Lakota $105 million. The tribe refused to accept the funds and issued the following statement:

“The Black Hills are not for sale. One does not sell their holy land.”

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