On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was killed in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He went down with five of the 7th Cavalry’s 12 companies as Native American warriors surrounded him. Men in his unit killed their horses and mounted a defense from behind their dead companions. Two weeks later, on July 4, America was celebrating its centennial. The conflagration at the Bighorn was a great victory for Native Americans—and a significant loss for the U.S. cavalry. The defeat cast a pall over nationwide celebrations, although a cavalry horse named Comanche, which survived Custer’s rout despite being shot numerous times, became a symbol of hope and rallied the 100-year-old nation. But it would take the assassination of the Lakota Chief Sitting Bull—wrongly blamed for killing Custer—in 1890 and then the subsequent massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee (which I wrote about last year for the Washington Monthly) in 1891 to avenge the American loss.
In September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth canceled a plan, first advanced under President Joe Biden, to rescind medals given to cavalry soldiers involved in the massacre. The revocation was something Native Americans had long sought, among them Wendell Yellow Bull, Marine veteran, Oglala Lakota County commissioner in South Dakota, and great-grandson of Joseph Horn Cloud, who survived Wounded Knee. Testimony about the Wounded Knee massacre has been passed down to Yellow Bull, along with accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn from Dewey Beard, Horn Cloud’s brother, the last known Lakota survivor of that battle, who died in 1955. Amazingly, Dewey Beard was also among those at Wounded Knee—and survived that, too. Yellow Bull carries the testimonies of these individuals, often overlooked in popular histories. Consider this from Dewey Beard: decades ago, he recalled overhearing U.S. Cavalry soldiers asking an Indian at Wounded Knee if he was at the Bighorn shortly before the government troops opened fire. In other words, “Did you kill Custer?” The question was really meant for any of the Native Americans who had fled into the ravine at Wounded Knee at that moment; the blame was general, and Sitting Bull had already been assassinated for it, hounded for years as Public Enemy #1 for allegedly doing so.
When the revocation of medals was under consideration, Biden administration officials consulted Yellow Bull during their visit to Wounded Knee and the site of the massacre. Earlier this year, following Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order regarding signage at national parks and monuments, signs at the Little Bighorn National Monument battlefield site that referenced “broken promises to Native American tribes” were removed. This edict was recently reversed by an “activist judge,” in the words of a Trump official. Whether the signage will be reinstated in time for the Bighorn commemorations is unclear.
As America prepares to celebrate our 250th birthday, the Battle of the Little Bighorn will mark its 150th anniversary. The battle is, arguably, a seismic event from which the nation has yet to recover. A significant victory for Native Americans, the conflagration was humiliating for the U.S. Cavalry. It remains its only defeat on the home front (short of the smaller Battle of Rosebud, 10 days earlier, which the army described as a victory but was in fact a retreat, with soldiers driven off by Cheyenne and Shoshone forces led by Crazy Horse). Although Native Americans won the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the greasy grass (a term used by the local indigenous population to describe the lush grasses along the Bighorn River), the battle marked the beginning of their final days of living free on the frontier. It was only a matter of time before the holdouts were rounded up and sent to reservations.
Curiously, despite the cavalry’s loss, the battle became a place where America lives. Forever branded as “Custer’s Last Stand,” it endures as the ultimate “hill to die on,” a home address of the American Dreamtime where the nation went down swinging—but not for long. Although defiance has been a coin of the realm since the country’s inception, it would take the Battle of the Little Bighorn to enshrine it as a creed followed by outlaws, killers, devotees of David Koresh at the 1993 siege in Waco (aka, “We ain’t comin’ out,” they said), Cliven Bundy and his mounted pals at Malheur, the current President, and his January 6 crowd, every Travis Bickle wannabe who has said “You talkin’ to me?,” and every driver who has ever been pulled over and said “But officer, how come the other guy didn’t get a ticket?”
Let’s face it: charging up hills with guns is a thing that we do, even if the hill is in your head, and you have no weapon.
Nearly every dive bar in America features the famous painting of Custer’s Last Stand, in which the 36-year-old Custer is brandishing a gun and firing away, along with his soldiers, clutching the reins of their frightened steeds, encircled by rampaging Indians on bedecked war ponies, wielding tomahawks and rifles, moving in for the kill. Amid the frothing siege, Custer takes on all comers, holding his ground defiantly, and when it was all over, the bloody location became known as Last Stand Hill. It’s a national shrine. What happened there is the subject of hundreds of books (and I count two of mine among them—Mustang, which has a chapter on the Bighorn and the horses that served there, and Blood Brothers, which has a chapter on the Bighorn), thousands of articles, dozens of movies, a zillion conferences, and endless theories about what really happened and how exactly Custer was killed.
Like many pivotal battles, the Battle of the Bighorn is reenacted annually. Every year, thousands converge in Montana at the Little Bighorn Battlefield for an elaborate staging of the firestorm with which we are still trying to reconcile. They arrive by car, plane, caravan, RV, bus, and train, having made their reservations at local hotels months in advance.
Other participants in Bighorn events arrive on horseback, including cavalry re-enactors who trailer in with their horses and park at encampments near the site, and Native Americans who are part of the Little Bighorn Victory Ride, which has been coordinated for years by the above-mentioned Yellow Bull and members of his family. This is a 77-mile journey across Montana from Ashland to the Crow Agency, headquarters for the Crow Nation. The Little Bighorn National Monument is within the Crow Reservation, and at the time of the battle, members of the Crow served as scouts for Custer. The situation created rivalries that persist to this day, with the Crow staging their own re-enactments and casting their own tribal members not only as cavalry scouts but as Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors who fought against Custer.
When I first visited the site, I experienced something so mysterious and shattering that I don’t think I’ll ever recover. I’ve had the same feeling on subsequent visits. The battlefield should be a required visit for all of us, a hallowed site. “On the way into the battlefield,” I recounted in Mustang, “there was a long line of Indians on war ponies. They were in breechcloths, and some wore feathered war bonnets and were barefoot. They rode horseback, and their beautiful compact ponies were painted with symbols—one had red circles around the eyes and nostrils for vision and sense of smell; another had a pair of red thunder stripes on the forelegs to please the god of war.” This was a prelude to the re-enactment, which began at dawn. Elsewhere on the field, at a cavalry encampment reconfigured with historical accuracy, re-enactors were saddling up their steeds. Many re-enactors actually live a kind of frontier life; they are cowboys and rebels stranded in another era. They don’t drive 55 (to invoke the Van Halen hit)—and in Montana, they don’t have to. The speed limit on “Big Sky Country” highways is 80.
Later that day, after elaborate re-enactments, I walked the battlefield and encountered various scholars and devotees of the battle. One was sitting among the stones, drawing pictures.
“I’ve been coming here for 20 years,” he said.
“For the memorial?” I asked.
“No, all the time. I can’t stay away.”
He explained that his wife doesn’t understand why he spends so much time here, but one of these days, he’s going to exhibit his drawings.
“See that place over there?” he said, pointing to a depression in the grass. “That’s Horseholder’s Ravine. It’s where the soldiers would hold the horses while three or four of the men would dismount and fight on foot.”
He was referring to the standard cavalry practice carried out that day on the field, which is how the Indians were able to run off large numbers of army horses. I walked into the ravine and imagined the scene when the grass was three feet high and touched the underside of a horse’s belly.
I asked him if he could point me to Myles Keogh’s marker. “Oh, yes,” he said, “Captain Myles Keogh [rider of the legendary horse, Comanche]. Did you know it was really his last stand? All that stuff about Custer is bullshit.”
That’s what everybody said, except for the Custerphiles, and even they have many different versions of what happened. I thanked him for his time and moved on. “Watch for snakes,” he said.
While many believe Crazy Horse himself finished off Custer, Sitting Bull was the one who was accused. Following the battle, he and other Lakota members fled to Canada, where they lived in exile for seven years, until the Canadian government, under pressure from American officials, forced Sitting Bull to return to America. It was 1881, and in 1885, for four months, he joined up with Buffalo Bill and toured the country with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, more popular in many venues on the circuit than Buffalo Bill, and more notorious—still “blamed” for killing Custer. This belief persists to this day.
A few years ago, I was giving a talk about Blood Brothers at the library in Cody, Wyoming. A woman approached me after everyone else had left and leaned in, almost whispering. “I didn’t know Sitting Bull didn’t kill Custer,” she said. “That’s what they told us in school.” People often confess things to me at my talks about their own interactions with American history, how they’ve engaged with our myths. If you think these fables are abstract, think again. She thanked me for the talk and headed out into a blizzard.
I started thinking about how deeply that era in our story resonates. Like many before her, the woman at the library believed that Sitting Bull was a villain in the national story—and suddenly, he wasn’t. I flashed back to my first visit to the Bighorn battlefield. Some re-enactors had set up a period camp, as the 7th Cavalry did, dressed in the garb of the time, covered in dust to simulate days of marching, and feeding their horses from a bag strapped to their noses. Some had trucked in their own horses. Others borrow one from the Crow.
“Where’s the guy who plays Captain Myles Keogh?” This was a reference to the man who rode the once-wild Comanche, the celebrated horse. I was asking some men who were bivouacked with their horses along the banks of the Little Bighorn.
“Is he here this year?” one said.
“I haven’t seen him.”
“I just saw him,” said another. “I think he’s over there with a film crew from Germany.”
I head deeper into the encampment and keep asking. A guy dressed as an orderly directed me toward a tent.
“Hello?” I called out. “Captain Keogh?”
Out comes junior high school history teacher Bill Rini, who dressed the part. He didn’t really look anything like Keogh, though. He was short and Italian. He’s been coming all the way from Queens every year since 1995. Like many re-enactors, he was certain about what happened.
“Actually, there were four last stands,” he said. “Custer’s, Keogh’s, Weir’s, and Calhoun’s. Once Reno ran, Custer was in trouble. Did you know Custer’s bugler is buried in Queens?”
I then asked about Comanche.
“Comanche was identified by Keogh’s best friend, Lieutenant. Nowlan. He was shot ten times, not seven. Probably by Crazy Horse. By the way, do you know how horses gave the Indians an advantage? When they surprised Custer in the morning, they ran their horses up and down the perimeter to make a dust cloud. The cavalry couldn’t see where to shoot. And one more thing.
Captain Keogh did not die while crouching under Comanche between his forelegs and getting off a few final shots. He was definitely shot out of the saddle. You can tell from the wound in his knee.”
Maybe he was shot from the saddle and then continued to fight under the horse, Comanche? I asked.
Absolutely not, he said.
The bugler sounded dinner, but before Captain Keogh disappeared, I took his picture. The horse-playing Comanche had been taken back to the rez by the Crow, so it was a solo shot of Bill standing near the river. It was dusk, and as the sun set, he straightened out his buckskin shirt, stood erect in his cavalry boots, his chest swelled, his body stretched to the sky, and his eyes looked off to the future as the Crow ran ponies through the Little Bighorn River behind him.
The next day, I attended a press conference at the Custer Battlefield Museum in Garryowen, where the first skirmish of the battle happened. Outside the museum, a recording of “Garryowen” played, the 7th Cavalry siren that lured many across the prairie to their doom. Inside, Joe Medicine Crow (since deceased), 97, the grandson of Custer scout White Man Runs Him, consultant to the 1941 Errol Flynn movie about Custer, They Died With Their Boots On, was talking story. Alas, not many were there—some European press, a few academic types, a couple of local reporters. The Crow elder was wearing a full war bonnet, jeans, a denim shirt, and cowboy boots. He spoke of how the Crow got horses—it was before the white man found the tribe. “Inter-tribal warfare started over horses,” he said. “The horses reached the Crow in 1730.”
As with all of the Horse Nations, the Crow quickly became mounted on the horse as soon as it arrived in their territory, and today they have one of the country’s premier annual rodeos. The Crow re-enactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn stands as one of the finest, most charming horse spectacles I have ever seen, with tribal history presented as gorgeous, primal scenes involving the “great rivers of horse,” in the words of Native Americans who once referred to the infinite number of steeds on the Great Plains in this manner. The show began with the national anthem, then the Crow anthem, and a prayer in Crow. A horse whinnied as the prayer finished—perhaps on cue, perhaps not—and then the Crow narrator told a joke:
Custer and his brother Tom are on the battlefield. Tom says, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”
George says, “What’s the bad news?”
Tom says, “We’re gonna die here.”
George says, “What’s the good news?”
Tom replies: “We don’t have to go back to North Dakota.”
It’s funny, but there’s also this to consider. During the 2024 elections, Republican Tim Sheehy defeated Democratic incumbent Jon Tester for the U.S. Senate seat in Montana. Shortly before the election, Sheehy rolled out an old attack, invoking the phrase “drunk Indians.” Such remarks aren’t out of the ordinary in certain quarters; I’ve heard a variety of them across my travels, and there’s one that appears from time to time at Little Bighorn re-enactments and celebrations. There’s a participant in a local parade whose pickup truck has a display that features Sacajawea, referring to her as “Sac-a-Beer-A.” While of course the joke is offensive, it’s about way more than that. It’s a covert reference to the rate of alcoholism among Native Americans. In fact, it was the guy in the truck who was visibly drunk, leaning out of his vehicle, honking his horn, and waving at spectators, who were drinking and waving back. This and similar jokes go to the schism in America, the one that is calling to be resolved, that of the white man and the Native American, which in this example is playing out in the heart of its clash—at the Little Bighorn battlefield, amid re-enactments of this ongoing conflict.
During a visit to a Bighorn re-enactment, I paused at the Native American Memorial—a “Circle of Unity,” as the installation is called. It was a large sunken circle with a weeping wall of stone ringing two-thirds of its circumference, lined with plaques honoring the Indians who fought Custer. On the outer perimeter, there was an iron-cable sculpture of Indian warriors on galloping horses; you can look through it, across the battlefield, and all the way to the horizon. A visitor had tied ceremonial feathers to the sculpture, adding to the scarves, strings of beads, and small American flags that rippled in the stiff prairie breeze. A cloud of dust rose from the south, and the Indians on their ponies raced across the field, shouting war cries. They had been traveling for 10 days, leaving from reservations in South Dakota, making their way to the canyon where Crazy Horse had carved a petroglyph on his way to the battlefield, and then resuming their ceremonial ride.
Just outside the circle, they stopped, forming a line of horses that separated now from then. As they stood in for their ancestors, a powwow circle came together inside the shrine. Sioux and Cheyenne tribesmen beat their drums and sang songs of war. Native warriors across several generations stepped into the circle and surrounded the men, pounding their drums. There were veterans of World War II, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, the Gulf War, in their army fatigues or Marine finest, and wearing war bonnets or feathers in their military caps—fighters all, men and women whose ancestors fought for the Horse Nations and who themselves fought in twentieth and twenty-first-century wars for the nation that had conquered them.
With war ponies flanking the memorial circle, the sun rising higher in the east, and the powwow drummers and singers chanting for the ages, two Indians joined the circle. The drums and singing stopped. One of them was Donnie Red Thunder, a former Navy SEAL and great-great-grandson of Crazy Horse. He had traveled the 365 miles from the Cheyenne River camp in South Dakota on horseback. ‘We’re the only country that can say they defeated the United States,’ he said, a record that stood for decades until joined by the Vietnamese, Afghans, and now Iranians. But as we approach America’s 250th birthday, that victory against the U.S. on the home front by the nations that were here first still stands.
