Beyond Custer’s Last Stand: The forces that led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Top painting: "The Custer Fight" by Charles Marion Russell, 1903
91ý historians Thomas Andrews and Noah Ramage argue that the seeds of Little Bighorn, which happened 150 years ago, were planted years before Custer’s defeat
The Battle of the Little Bighorn has long occupied a unique place in American memory. Often remembered through images of Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer making a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds, the battle has been mythologized in movies, books and popular culture for nearly 150 years.
But according to University of Colorado Boulder historians Thomas G. Andrews and Noah Ramage, that familiar story obscures a much larger and more complex reality.
Andrews, faculty director of the Center of the American West, says that rather than a simple clash between the U.S. Army and Native Americans, the battle (which many Indigenous people refer to as the Battle of Greasy Grass) emerged from shifting alliances with Native nations amid a backdrop of competition for territory, economic transformation and mounting pressure on Northern Plains tribes. To understand what happened at the Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876, Andrews argues that it is necessary to understand the forces that led up to it.
91ý historians Thomas G. Andrews (left) and Noah Ramage (right) argue that the seeds of Little Bighorn were planted years before Custer’s defeat.
At the center of the conflict were several Native nations with different histories and interests, some of which allied themselves with the U.S. government while pursuing their own agendas and some of which violently resisted any efforts by the government to dispossess them of their territories. Among that latter group was a coalition led by Lakotas, joined by Northern Cheyennes and smaller numbers of Arapahos.
“Over the course of the 18th and the first part of the 19th century, the Lakotas really become a kind of great power in the Northern Plains,” Andrews explains.
Their rise was fueled largely by horses, which transformed mobility, trade, hunting and warfare. As Lakota influence expanded westward, Andrews says they moved into territories claimed by other tribes, including the Crow and Arikara. Those longstanding rivalries later helped explain why some Native groups chose to align themselves with U.S. forces, he says.
The United States and the Lakotas had already fought before Little Bighorn, Andrews notes. During Red Cloud’s War in the 1860s, the Lakotas and their allies successfully resisted U.S. efforts to establish the Bozeman Trail through their territory.
“They would actually win,” Andrews says. “They ended up winning a favorable treaty from the United States in 1868.”
That treaty guaranteed hunting rights in the Powder River Country and recognized Sioux sovereignty over vast territories. Yet even as the ink dried on the agreement, a confluence of factors was building that would ultimately lead to renewed hostilities, says Ramage, an assistant professor whose research focus is Native American and Indigenous history.
Expansion, gold and a new federal policy
By the mid-1870s, Native nations on the Plains faced enormous pressures. The completion of railroads accelerated western settlement, while Custer’s 1874 expedition into the Black Hills triggered a gold rush into lands protected by treaty, Andrews says.
“You basically had this huge influx of American squatters essentially moving illegally into territories that the government had recognized as sovereign Sioux territory,” he adds.
For many Americans, the Battle of the Little Bighorn is remembered as “Custer’s Last Stand”—a dramatic clash of armies on a Montana hillside where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 soldiers of the 7th Calvary were killed on June 25, 1876.
For Rick Williams, an Oglala Lakota/Northern Cheyenne Native, historian, Indigenous rights advocate and University of Colorado BoulderCenter of the American West former board member, the battle was never just a chapter in a history book.
It was a story passed down through his family in hushed tones, told by his great-grandmother in her native Lakota and Cheyenne and translated into English for him by his grandmother.
“I’m probably one of the few people living today who has a direct connection with someone who was there,” says Williams. “My great-grandmother was born in 1869 … and she was a little girl in the Cheyenne camp during the Battle of the Little Bighorn; she witnessed what happened.
“Growing up, my grandmother and great-grandmother would tell these stories, but they always warned me not to repeat them. They believed they could still get into trouble, possibly from the public or maybe with the government,” he adds. “Even in the 1950s and 1960s, there was still a fear surrounding (Native American) discussions of what happened at Little Bighorn, because Custer was still revered.”
Ramage argues those developments reflected a broader shift in federal policy and attitudes toward Native nations. By this time, Ramage says the federal government was becoming increasingly willing to ignore existing agreements. In 1871, Congress stopped making treaties with Native nations, signaling that Washington increasingly viewed itself as possessing unilateral authority over Indigenous peoples and their lands.
“Instead of negotiating with Indian nations as they had in the past, a very aggressive United States starts to dictate policy to Indian nations,” Ramage says, “partially because it views them as inferior.”
He places the conflict within a broader era of American territorial expansion.
“The United States was incredibly ‘grabby’ at this moment,” he says, comparing events on the Northern Plains to a broader period of aggressive imperial expansion in which the United States seized more than half of Mexico’s territory in 1848 (through a treaty) and the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 (without a treaty).
“The U.S. wants to finally monopolize power in the Northern Plains—and to do that it had to finally overcome Lakota power,” Ramage says. He adds, “This is not a war that starts because of some sort of misunderstanding. The U.S. started this war, and it started it with the explicit aim of subjugating the Lakotas.”
Destruction of the buffalo
At the same time settlers poured westward, Andrews and Ramage say another force threatened the foundations of Plains Indian life: the destruction of the bison.
Buffalo were essential to Native economies and cultures. They provided food, clothing, shelter materials, trade goods and spiritual meaning. But industrialization suddenly transformed buffalo hides into valuable commodities, Andrews says.
In 1871, a tanning process was developed that allowed buffalo hides to be converted into belts for industrial machinery.
“It was really kind of this remarkable, literal harnessing of these massive herds of wild creatures on the Great Plains that suddenly could become industrial inputs driving American economic growth,” Andrews says.
The consequences were devastating, Andrews and Ramage agree. Commercial hunters armed with long-range rifles slaughtered buffalo in enormous numbers.
“They were really just hide hunting at that point,” Andrews explains. “Usually, they were not even taking the tongues off of the buffalo that they killed but just stripping the hides off and leaving the carcasses to rot.”
Ramage and Andrews agree that federal officials understood the significance of what was happening.
“U.S. military leaders recognized how profoundly Plains Natives depended on bison,” Andrews says. “They understood that attacking bison would serve U.S. national interests.”
Reservations and resistance
At the same time buffalo populations were collapsing, the federal government was attempting to force Native peoples onto reservations, which were intended not merely as places to live but as mechanisms of control, Andrews says.
“Their main way of trying to do this was by establishing reservations and by trying to use food, the provision of rations, to control Native peoples,” he says.
Native leaders disagreed over how best to respond. Some believed accommodation offered the best chance for survival. Others argued for continued independence.
Sioux veterans of the Battle of Little Bighorn (Photo: Library of Congress)
Initially, many Native people were willing to try reservation life, Andrews says. However, federal corruption, underfunding and bureaucratic failures made reservation existence increasingly untenable, he adds.
“Native people who tried to comply with what the United States wanted usually ended up starving,” he says.
By the summer of 1876, many Lakotas and Cheyennes had left the reservations and gathered in the Powder River Country, where treaty rights still guaranteed hunting access. What emerged was one of the largest Native encampments ever assembled on the Northern Plains, Ramage says.
The Army marches into disaster
As the U.S. Army moved to force these groups back onto reservations, Custer and the 7th Cavalry advanced toward the encampment, relying heavily on Native scouts for tracking.
While those scouts reported that it was the largest gathering of Native peoples that anyone had ever witnessed, Andrews says U.S. commanders failed to grasp the true size of the force they faced. On the fateful day of battle, Custer’s detachment of 7th Cavalry members encountered thousands of Native combatants rather than the few hundred they anticipated, he notes.
“The Americans had so badly underestimated what they were up against,” he says.
Ramage argues that this failure extended beyond Custer himself.
“Little Bighorn was arguably an intelligence failure for the United States as a whole—not just Custer,” he says. He blames federal officials for consistently underestimating Lakota power.
Grave markers at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana. (Photo: Victoria Stauffenberg/National Park Service)
“Many U.S. officials incorrectly assumed they were fighting racial inferiors,” he says. “They were consistently over-confident.”
Defeat at the Little Bighorn
The Battle of the Little Bighorn remains one of the most studied and debated engagements in American history. Andrews cautions that key details remain uncertain because most of Custer’s immediate command died in the fighting.
“We don’t have their perspective, and we never will,” he says.
Historians continue to debate Custer’s decisions and the roles played by subordinates Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen, both of whom had contentious relationships with their commander.
“Reno and Benteen both despised Custer,” Andrews says.
What is clear is that the Army encountered a vastly larger and more capable force than expected. Native warriors rapidly mobilized from the enormous village and overwhelmed Custer’s detachment of about 200 soldiers. Andrews says he believes the outcome can be attributed in large part to the Cavalry commander’s ego.
“I think really it’s Custer’s arrogance,” he says.
Ramage cautions that focusing solely on tactical mistakes can distract from the larger strategy being pursued by the Army.
“From my perspective,” he says, “there is a way in which focusing on (Custer’s) strategic blunders … seriously overlooks the fact that the ‘successful’ U.S. military strategy at this moment was often defined by horrific attacks on vulnerable non-combatants.”
For Natives, victory in battle, defeat in war
News of the defeat shocked Americans, Andrews and Ramage agree.
The battle occurred during the nation's centennial year, a period Andrews describes as marked by economic depression, political corruption and uncertainty. The death of a famous cavalry officer and the destruction of his command seemed almost unimaginable, he says.
At the same time, the battle quickly became part of a national mythology. Andrews says the story of “Custer’s Last Stand” helped transform a military disaster into a narrative of heroic sacrifice.
Meanwhile, for Native peoples, their victory proved short-lived.
“The government was dead set on retribution and on securing eventual victory,” Andrews says. He notes that federal authorities intensified military operations, tightened ration policies and increasingly used hunger as a method of coercion.
“The government essentially tries to starve Native peoples into submission,” he says.
By the spring of 1877, most Native groups had surrendered or fled to Canada.
Ramage says the Army’s defeat at Little Bighorn did not change the government’s end objectives.
This is not a war that starts because of some sort of misunderstanding. The U.S. started this war, and it started it with the explicit aim of subjugating the Lakotas."
“The U.S. was deeply committed to its military goals,” he says, “and even a humiliating defeat at Little Bighorn would not and did not change its course in terms of policy.”
Lasting consequences still felt today
With the subjugation of these Northern Plains tribes, the U.S. government reduced the size of the Great Sioux Reservation, seized the Black Hills despite treaty protections and intensified its campaign to assimilate Native peoples.
Even today, the legacy remains unresolved. Andrews notes that Lakotas never accepted the seizure of the Black Hills. While federal courts later approved financial compensation, the Lakotas rejected monetary settlements. “They actually want the land,” he notes.
For Ramage, the ongoing dispute illustrates that Little Bighorn’s significance extends well beyond a single military engagement. The battle occurred during a period when the federal government increasingly abandoned treaty-making and asserted unilateral authority over Native nations—a shift with consequences that are still being debated today.
“This is a war with one very clear aggressor: the United States,” he says.
Meanwhile, the battle’s memory continues to evolve. Once commonly remembered as “Custer’s Last Stand,” Andrews and Ramage say modern historians increasingly place the conflict within the broader context of Native resistance, U.S. expansion and the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty. The historians say tribal histories, oral traditions and Native perspectives have become a more prominent part of the story, challenging earlier interpretations that focused almost exclusively on Custer and the 7th Cavalry.
For Andrews, that continuing conversation is evidence that the battle remains relevant.
“The histories and its legacies are still absolutely active in Indian country,” he says. “There are still so many unresolved issues.”
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