The battle of Little Bighorn

"A GOOD DAY TO DIE"

In 1874, George Armstrong Custer, who six years before had slaughtered Black Kettle's Southern Cheyennes on the Washita River, brought all the western Sioux face-to-face with another crisis. Ignoring the Treaty of 1868, which guaranteed the Sioux the western half of present-day South Dakota as a reservation for their perpetual and exclusive use, General Sheridan sent Custer and a large reconnaissance expedition into the Black Hills, in the heart of the reservation, to locate a site for a new fort.

The intrusion was a violation of the treaty, which read, "No white person or persons, shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the territory, without the consent of the Indians.... and to pass through the same." To the Sioux, the sacred Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, were the spiritual center of their world, where their people withdrew from the hot plains to fast and pray, to cry for a vision, establish communion with the supernatural world, and, at the springs and among the cool, pine-covered hills, renew their strength and spiritual well-being. Compounding the affront to the Indians, Custer turned the illegal invasion into a gold-seeking expedition. When he found gold and trumpeted the news to the world, the results were predictable. Thousands of miners, entrepreneurs, and adventurers overran the Black Hills and the sacred sites of the Sioux, throwing up mining camps and towns, cutting down the woods, polluting the streams, and resisting successfully the army's halfhearted attemps to eject them. United in their outrage, the Sioux threatened war against the invaders, who, in turn, raised an outcry for the removal of the Sioux from what, in fact, was still the Indians' country.

The government's solution, overlooking the sacred nature of the Black Hills and regarding them as just another piece of real estate, was to try to buy them from the Indians. Red Cloud and a number of agency chiefs were summoned to Washington and, although bullied and threatened, insisted that all of the Sioux would have to be consulted. In September 1875, a special government commission finally met at the Red Cloud agency with some twenty thousand Sioux, most of them were from the agencies, but others representing the different "hostile" bands in the north. One after another, tribal spokesmen condemned the government. Typical were the remarks of a Lower Yanktonai chief, Wanigi Ska (White Ghost): You have driven away our game and our means of livelihood out of the country, until now we have nothing left that is valuable except the hills that you ask us to give up..... The earth is full of minerals of all kinds, and on the earth the ground is covered with forests of heavy pine, and when we give these up to the Great Father we know that we give up the last thing that is valuable either to us or the white people.
Tatanka Yotanka, or Sitting Bull, a great warrior and also a spritiual leader with strong powers, was not there, but Hunkpapas conveyed his warning: We want no white men here. The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I WILL fight..

Red Cloud, trying to reassert his authority to speak for all, demanded six hundred million dollars for the Black Hills. The commisioners offered six hundred million dollars, and the council broke up without accomplishing anything. In November, at the instigation of President Grant, the government ordered all "hostile" bands to come into the Sioux agencies by January 31 or be driven in by troops. The belief was that once the militant Indians had been brought under control at the agencies, they could be induced to sell the Black Hills on the government's terms. But January 31 came and went, and the "hostile" hunting bands in the north either would not or could not come in, on such short notice in the dead or the Great Plains winter. In February 1876, as Uniter States prepared to celebrate the contennial of it's own freedom, General Sheridan set plans in motion for a three-pronged spring campaign to force the free bands to come to the agencies. But the Sioux nations would not be bullied. As the weather warmed, hundreds of warriors left the agencies and swelled the ranks of the fighting bands in the north. On June 17, at Montana's Rosebud River, a thousand Sioux warriors, led by Crazy Horse, stopped the first prong of thirteen hundred troops, commanded by General George Cook and accomplished by Crow and Shoshoni scouts, and forced their withdrawal to a base camp in the south. From the Rosebud, Crazy Horse's force crossed to the valley of the Little Bighorn River, known to the Indians as the Greasy Grass, and joined an enormous village of seven to ten thousand Lakotasm Yanktonais, Santees, Northern Arapaho, and Northern Cheyennes, whose camp circles stretched for almost three miles along the river. Farther north, the other two prongs of the ary's campaign-one coming from the west in Montana, the other from the Missouri River in the east-met and turned south, hoping to trap the "hostile" bands. Advancing ahead of the main body, the 7th Calvary, led by Custer-the man who had massacred Black Kettle's Cheyennes and had thought nothing of starting a gold rush into the Sioux's sacred country, sighted and prepared to attack the huge camp on the Little BigHorn. Feeling secure in their own country, the Sioux and their allies had taken no precautions to guard against a surprise attack, and it was not until the dust of the approaching cavalrymen rose from the ridges east of the river that they were aware of danger. Wooden Leg, a young Northern Cheyenne warrior, recalled the scene among the Cheyenne tipis, the northenmost in the line of camps:

Women were screaming and men were letting out war cries. Through it all we could hear old men calling," Soldiers are here! Young men, go out and fight them."

On the hills above the river, Custer divided his command, Some of the soldiers crossed the Little Bighorn south of the camps, turned north and opened battle by charging toward the Hunkpapa village, the southernmost of the Indian camps. As the soldiers came toward them, Sitting Bull rallied his men to protect the women and children. Runs-the-Enemy, a Cut Head Yanktonai Sioux with the Hunkpapas, remembered hearing him:

Sitting Bull....said..."A bird, when it is on it's nest, spreads it's wings over the nest and eggs and protests them.... We are here to protect our wives and children, and we must not let the soldiers get them." He was on a buckskin horse, and he rode from one end of the line to the other, calling out: "Make a brave fight!"

In the camps, the Indian women, and children and old people could hear sounds of battle among the hills and coulees across the river, but in the smoke and dust they could not see which side was winning. Led by Gall, the Hunkpapas broke off the fight on top of the bluffs where they had chased the first troops that had attacked them and, turning north, fell on the soldiers with Custer. At the same time, other Indians plunged across the river to attack Custer's men from the west. Among them were the Cheyennes under Two Moons. "We circled all around them swirling like water round a stone," He said later... Meanwhile, in the Oglala camp, Crazy Horse mounted his horse and called for his Oglala warriors to follow him. "Come on, Lakotas! It's a good day to die," He yelled. Crossing the river, they flanked Custer's men on the north and east, tightening the Indian circle around the soliers. Black Elk, a thirteen year old girl Oglala, watched the fighting village, "A big dust was whirling on the hill, and then the horses began coming out of it with empty saddles." he said. The fight against the men with Custer was all over in less than half an hour. "The shots quit coming from the soliders," Wooden leg recalled.. Sitting Bull's nephew, White Bull, was one of the several who thought he had killed Custer:

On the hill top, I met my uncle....He had been around Fort Abraham Lincoln and knew Custer by sight. When he came to the tall soldier lying on his back... he pointed him out and said,"Long hair thought he was the greatest man in the world. Now he lies there."

Throughout the rest of the day and that night, the Indians besieged the first troops who had attacked the Hunkpapa camp and whom they had chased back across the river and the bluffs. On the following day, Sitting Bulls scouts sighted a second army coming up the valley of the Little Bighorn. Firing the grass as a smoke screen, the Indian forces broke camp and headed toward the Big Horn Mountains. News of the battle reached the outside world on July 4th, 1876, casting a pall over the nation's celebration of it's hundredth anniversary of Independence.