On June 25, 1876, Colonel George Armstrong Custer led his troops to annihilation in the famous battle of the Little Big Horn. Undistinguished at West Point, Custer won recognition as a bold cavalryman during the Civil War, then went on to head the Seventh Cavalry in campaigns against the Plains Indians. Court-martialed in 1867, his command was suspended for nearly a year. In 1874, Custer led the expedition that confirmed the presence of gold in the sacred Black Hills territory of the Sioux, touching off a white invasion. When the Sioux refused to sell the Black Hills to the U.S. government, they were ordered off their unceded lands and onto reservations. Those who resisted were branded “hostiles,” the Army sent to retrieve them. It was such a mission that brought Custer and his 225 men to the valley of the Little Big Horn, or, as the Indians called it, Greasy Grass, River in southern Montana, supposedly to reconnoiter the area. There, unbeknownst to Custer, was the largest Indian army ever assembled, about 3,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by such chiefs as Crazy Horse, Gall and the revered Sitting Bull. Though his men and horses were exhausted and he had been ordered to await reinforcements, Custer nonetheless ordered the attack that resulted in his own death and that of his men. Critics censured his recklessness, but news of “Custer’s last stand” incited the nation’s wrath against the Sioux.

The years and decades after the Civil War witnessed tremendous westward expansion — expansion that was fundamentally incompatible with the traditional lifestyle of the Indians. A final showdown was inevitable and it came in a series of Indian Wars between the so-called “hostiles” — tribes or tribal factions who resisted expropriation of their lands and refused to live on reservations — and the U.S. Army. Between 1865 and 1890, the Army battled many tribes in many places. It fought Apaches in the Southwest, Bannocks, Modocs, Utes and Nez Perce in the Northwest; and on the Plains, Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and largest and most powerful of the Indian tribes, Sioux. With their superior horsemanship and knowledge of terrain, the Indians were not without victories. In 1868, Chief Red Cloud won his two-year campaign to oust the Army from forts along the Bozeman Trail, a route which passed through Sioux hunting grounds in the Powder River country of Wyoming. And, in 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated U.S. troops in battles at the Rosebud and the famous Little Big Horn. But in the end, the Army — superior in numbers and technology — prevailed, aided in part by the destruction of the buffalo, the Plains Indians’ primary source of food.