The wind moved across the ridgeline in the late afternoon of June 25, 1876, and the fighting on the bluffs above the Little Bighorn River had fallen silent. George Armstrong Custer’s five companies of the 7th Cavalry no longer returned fire. The Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who had swarmed the hill had drifted away, back toward the immense village in the valley below, leaving behind a field that was no longer a battlefield but something far worse. Among those who walked that ground afterward was a warrior named White Wolf.

He saw the young men of his village moving among the fallen troopers, turning out pockets, pulling at clothing. What they found puzzled them: square pieces of green paper money, something entirely foreign. The bills meant nothing to the people, and so the children took them. They folded the green paper and used it as saddle blankets for the little mud horses they shaped with their hands.

Silver coins turned up too, and the Cheyenne hammered those into buckles. Wooden Leg, Little Hawk, and Bobtail Horse, all of whom had been in the fight, told of a different discovery among the dead: bottles of whiskey, pulled from the saddlebags and cartridge belts of the troopers, that the warriors opened and passed among themselves on the battlefield. It was not until two days later, on June 27, that the rest of the 7th Cavalry reached the field. They came under the command of Brigadier General Alfred Terry, marching overland from the steamer Far West on the Bighorn River.

The soldiers followed the trail of the village, and then they saw the hill. The aftermath was a scene that would not leave them. The cavalrymen moved through the carnage, and one of them, a soldier whose account survives, said the image of death and desolation was one he would never forget. The bodies lay scattered along the ridgeline where the last stand had been made, stripped, swollen, and disfigured in the June heat.

The burial parties began the grim work of identifying the dead, and among the first they reached was Captain Tom Custer, the general’s younger brother. He lay near the top of the hill, just north of where the general himself had fallen, face down. His face had been beaten and slashed beyond recognition. His body was marked by multiple arrow wounds, in his back and in his head.

In his skull an arrowhead was bent and deeply embedded. The skull itself was shattered, and nearly all his hair had been scalped, except for a small patch at the nape of his neck. Close by lay the body of General George Armstrong Custer. It had not been mutilated.

He was on his back, his hands folded across his abdomen, a position familiar to the men who had marched with him; they had often seen him nap that way during halts. He carried two fatal wounds, one in the front of his left temple and another near his heart. Farther down the slope, roughly two hundred yards from the hill that would bear his name, the soldiers found Boston Custer, the youngest of the three Custer brothers who had died that day. His body had been stripped bare, save for his white cotton socks, and the labels had been cut out of the socks.

Across the field, the burial parties encountered the same deliberate pattern. Several bodies still wore remnants of bloody undershirts, trousers, or socks, but in every case the names had been cut from the clothing. The naked, mutilated dead, marked by their fatal wounds, were a horror that the soldiers would carry with them. With only half a dozen spades and shovels, a handful of axes, and a couple of picks among them, the men set to work.

Using knives and tin cups where the tools gave out, they hastily covered the bodies with a thin layer of earth. There was nothing more they could do. They left their comrades in that vast wilderness, hundreds of miles from civilization, with no trace of their loved ones to mark them. Trumpeter Jeppe Martini, who had ridden with Custer’s column earlier in the campaign but had been sent back with a message before the final assault, now walked the field as part of the burial detail.

He came upon a deep ravine between Custer’s position and the river, where a pile of dead soldiers lay. There, among the bodies, he found a first sergeant whose form was covered with torn pieces of paper money, amounting to about five hundred dollars. The men under his command had entrusted the cash to him for safekeeping, and it lay scattered over his body where the warriors had torn it and thrown it aside. Martini also reported that part of Adjutant William Cooke’s sideburns had been scalped off, the skin attached, and left there on the field.

Seventh Cavalry scout George Herendeen added another detail to the grim tally: four soldiers’ heads were found in the Sioux camp, severed from their bodies. The bodies themselves could not be located, neither on the battlefield nor in the village. Lieutenant Charles Roe of the Second Cavalry told of a white man’s head found in the Indian village, tied to a lariat, dragged through the camp until it separated from the body. Survivors who had been with Major Marcus Reno’s battalion, watching from across the river, contributed their own memories.

One of them, Jacob Adams, said that troopers had been lassoed from their horses and dragged into the heart of the village, where they were tied to trees and burned alive, witnessed by their helpless comrades in Reno’s command. John Ryan later stated that when the burial parties reached those sites, they found bones and remnants of blue uniforms where the men had been tied to trees and stakes. The five guidons, the swallow-tailed cavalry flags, carried by Custer’s companies into the fight had vanished in the chaos. Only one was recovered in the immediate aftermath.

It had been hidden beneath the body of Corporal John Foley, who had tried to escape the slaughter on horseback. Pursued by warriors, Foley shot himself in the head before they could overtake him. The flag beneath his body survived. It was found by the burial party and became known as the Culbertson guidon, named for Sergeant Ferdinand Culbertson, a member of that burial detail.

More than a century later, in 2010, that same guidon was sold at auction by Sotheby’s to a private collector for 2. 2 million dollars. The other four flags were never recovered. Standing on that hill on June 27, with the bodies half-covered under a thin layer of dirt and the heat pressing down, the men of the burial parties understood what had happened but could not yet grasp its full weight.

Custer and every man under his immediate command were dead. The village that had destroyed them, one of the largest gatherings of Plains Indians ever assembled, was gone, streaming southward toward the Bighorn Mountains. The survivors of Reno’s battalion, who had fought their own desperate defense on the bluffs across the river, would carry the memory of watching their comrades die without being able to help. Within days the news reached the East, arriving by the steamer Far West at Bismarck and then by telegraph, and a shocked nation learned that its most famous cavalry officer had been wiped out in a single afternoon.

In the weeks and months that followed, the army recovered the dead where it could, and the battlefield on the bluffs above the Little Bighorn became a permanent part of American memory. The bones and the blue uniform remnants, the cut-out names, the paper money torn on a sergeant’s body, the severed heads in the camp, the children playing with green saddle blankets for their mud horses, the whiskey bottles passed among the warriors on the ridge, all of it was absorbed into the story that the survivors told and the army recorded. One flag came home, sold two lifetimes later for a fortune. The others stayed where they were lost.

The hill where Custer fell kept its dead, and the men who buried them, digging with knives and tin cups in the thin earth over the dust of their comrades, never shook the sight from their minds.