Custer Lost but No One Really Won at the Little Big Horn
On June 25, 1876, a village of some five thousand Lakotas and Cheyennes camped on the Greasy Grass River (today s Little Big Horn) was famously attacked by George Armstrong Custer and his vaunted Seventh Cavalry. The Indians were followers of the powerful Húnkpapa holy man Sitting Bull, and, like their leader, most of them wanted nothing to do with white men. They simply wanted to be left alone, to live separate from the Euro-Americans who d been steadily encroaching and trespassing upon Lakota lands for decades.
With shouts of Hóka hé! (Come on!) and The Earth is all that lasts! the Oglala war chief Crazy Horse and other Indian leaders rapidly gathered their warriors and galloped off to defend their families. And because Custer had unwisely divided his regiment into three battalions, more than a thousand Lakota and Cheyenne fighting men were able to strike these separated detachments individually. On a grassy ridge overlooking the Greasy Grass, the warriors completely overwhelmed Custer and some two hundred troopers of the Seventh. The Indians stunning victory was soon dubbed Custer s Last Stand.
Family legend has it that my great grandfather, on my maternal grandmother’s side, was a sergeant in the US Cavalry. But he operated out of Oregon, and was no where near Custer’s Last Stand, which was in Montana.