The summer campaign against the Lakota was barely a month old when the order came down from the White House, and it had nothing to do with military strategy. President Grant wanted George Armstrong Custer off the expedition. Custer had testified before Congress against the president’s own brother, and Grant retaliated by yanking the lieutenant colonel from the command he had been given. Custer had to go groveling through Generals Terry and Sheridan just to ride along, and even then Grant allowed it only with Terry in overall command.

The man who would die at the Little Bighorn was not executing the president’s orders. He was trying to salvage his career. The orders he finally received from Terry were, to say the least, vague. “It is impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement,” Terry wrote, “and were it not impossible to do so, the department commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability to wish to impose upon you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy.

” Terry would indicate his own views, the dispatch continued, and he desired Custer to conform to them “unless you shall see sufficient reason for departing from them. ” The phrasing left Terry room to cover himself no matter the outcome. Custer was given discretion, and he used it. Before any of that could unfold, there was the question of why the campaign existed at all.

The story begins with the Black Hills. The Lakota took them by force from the people who lived there first, and they held them for roughly a hundred years before somebody else took them by force again. Both facts are true, and both matter. The hills sat on the far eastern edge of Crow territory, shared at one point with the Kiowa.

By the mid-1700s the Arapaho and Cheyenne had moved in, and then came the Lakota. Most of the actual fighting between the Crow and the Lakota over the years was not over the Black Hills at all but over hunting grounds much farther west, near the Powder River country, which the Lakota eventually took. The Crow split off from the Hidatsa long ago, and by the mid-1700s they were living near the Bighorn Mountains in present-day Wyoming and Montana. Their first known contact with white men, according to Crow tradition, came in 1743 near present-day Hardin, Montana, a few miles from the Little Bighorn battlefield.

That Bighorn country, not the Black Hills, was the heart of Crow homeland. The Lakota’s own oral traditions place them in the Black Hills by the winter of 1775, when a chief known as Standing Bull reached the hills, recorded in the winter counts. From there the Lakota gradually pushed out the Arapaho and Cheyenne, a slow squeeze mostly finished by around 1815. Outside sources corroborate the account.

A French trader named Jean Baptiste Truteau described the Teton Sioux, the Lakota, dominating the country west of the Missouri in the mid-1790s. When Lewis and Clark passed through in 1804, they met a French trader who had just spent the previous winter in the Black Hills with the Cheyenne, which suggests the Lakota had not yet wholly displaced them. But by then the Lakota and Cheyenne were already allies conducting joint raids against the Crow hundreds of miles to the west. There was never one decisive battle that gave the Lakota control of the hills, and no single uncontested date.

But by the 1770s, at the latest, they had a presence there. The Lakota never built a city in the Black Hills and never lived there year-round. It was seasonal. Summers were spent on the Great Plains following the bison herds.

Winters were spent in the hills, which served as a refuge with sheltered valleys, fresh water, game, and timber. It was also where they conducted many of their religious ceremonies. A winter refuge, a grocery store, a lumber yard, and a church all rolled into one. They called the Black Hills the heart of everything that is.

The United States government promised the Lakota they could keep the Black Hills forever. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 recognized the surrounding land as unceded territory, and the Lakota had every legal right to camp there. Then someone found gold. The country was in bad shape.

The panic of 1873 had ushered in a depression. Bankruptcies were frequent, crime rates were up, farm prices were down, partly due to one of the most severe grasshopper plagues ever to hit the Midwest. Hundreds of thousands of out-of-work men, many of them Civil War veterans, were desperate for employment. The public and the press clamored to open the Black Hills.

Unrestrained newspaper accounts trumpeted potential fortunes, some going so far as to claim that Black Hills gold could pay off the national debt. As historian James Donovan put it, some people in the government began to consider another option: buy the Black Hills from their owners. An infusion of gold would be good for the precarious economy. At first the government tried to do things legally.

In September 1875, federal officials met with the Lakota and offered to purchase the Black Hills for six million dollars. The Lakota refused. According to historian Peter Cozzens, the outcry for annexation brought Grant to a crossroads. He had taken office in 1869 on a pledge to keep the West free of war.

“Our dealings with the Indians properly lay us open to charges of cruelty and swindling,” he had said. His administration was staked to a peace policy intended to assimilate the Plains nations into white civilization. Now Grant had to choose between the electorate and the Indians. He had no legal reason for seizing the black Hills, so he invented one.

Cozzens wrote that four documents held at the Library of Congress and the United States Military Academy Library leave no doubt that the Grant administration launched an illegal war and then lied to Congress and the American people about it. Part of that lie came from a man named Irwin Watkins, an inspector for the Indian Bureau. His job involved checking the account books at Indian agencies in Montana and the Dakotas, basically counting rations. On November 9, 1875, he filed a report claiming the non-treaty bands were wild and hostile, that they “richly merit punishment for their incessant warfare and their numerous murders of settlers and their families,” and that they scorned white civilization.

There was not a drop of evidence for any of it. Watkins worked directly for the Secretary of the Interior, Zachariah Chandler. Just a few days before Watkins filed that report, Grant held a meeting at the White House. Present were General Sheridan, General Crook, the Secretary of War, and Chandler.

During that meeting they made a conscious decision not to enforce the laws keeping prospectors out of the Black Hills. Three weeks later the government issued an ultimatum ordering all bands in the unceded territory to report to the agencies. The timing was not accidental. It was the dead of winter.

Even if the Lakota had wanted to obey, most of them could not have traveled. When they failed to report, they were declared hostiles. About eight weeks after that, the bands were officially declared hostile. The entire thing was orchestrated with a single goal: stealing the Black Hills.

It had nothing to do with Lakota raids on settlements or the taking of slaves. In August 1875, a reporter asked General Crook how the off-agency bands were behaving. Crook answered that they had been quiet. Asked if there was any danger of an Indian war, he said, “Not just now.

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The notion that the Lakota were constantly at war with the United States going back to Lewis and Clark does not hold up. When Lewis and Clark first met the Lakota in 1804, things got tense, but cooler heads prevailed and nobody got hurt. That was pretty much how it went for the next fifty years. American fur companies traded with the Lakota extensively.

At one point the army and the Lakota even teamed up to make war on the Arikara. After an Arikara attack, the army marched north with mountain men, including Hugh Glass, and about a thousand Lakota warriors to attack the Arikara in return. In 1851 the Lakota signed a treaty allowing wagon trains to pass through their territory, hardly the action of a nation at war. The first real clash between the army and the Lakota did not come until 1854, a full half century after Lewis and Clark, and even then it was avoidable.

With a different officer or a different interpreter, the Grattan Massacre would likely never have occurred. Nor were the Lakota rampaging across the frontier slaughtering settlers and carrying off women in the years before the Black Hills conflict. Between the Treaty of 1868 and the arrival of the prospectors, the number of settlers massacred by the Lakota was, as far as the historical record shows, damn near zero. There were exceptions: a couple of horse-stealing raids into Nebraska, a couple of killings at the Red Cloud Agency in 1874.

Most of the fighting between the Lakota and white people in those years happened when white people pushed into Lakota territory, army wood cutters, survey crews, prospectors. It was not a situation of Lakota warriors riding around raiding settlements and slaughtering homesteaders. The government literally had to fabricate a false report to start a war against them. Even the Supreme Court eventually ruled the seizure of the Black Hills an illegal taking of tribal property, calling it “a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings” that would “never, in all probability, be found in our history.

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The Lakota were not saints. They were aggressive against other tribes, the Crow, the Pawnee, the Shoshone, the Arikara. In August 1873, a large war party of Lakota attacked a Pawnee village, killing somewhere between seventy and one hundred fifty people, most of them women and children. The Lakota bands involved in that massacre were also present at the Little Bighorn.

During the Dakota War of 1862, over four hundred unarmed settlers were slaughtered in about six weeks. According to historian Curtis Dahlen, who spent years documenting the victims, roughly one hundred of the dead were children ten years old or younger, some of them infants. Some of the very men who helped defeat Custer were themselves guilty of the same kind of atrocities laid at his feet. Yet the desire to treat history like a team sport runs deep.

Many people want only one truth to stand: either the Lakota were victims or they were aggressors. Both are true. The campaign that led to the Little Bighorn was built on faulty intelligence. Indian agents had inflated the numbers of Indians living on the reservations in order to pocket the annuities allotted to those no longer present, and that created a completely wrong picture of what the expedition would face.

The army assumed they were chasing a few hundred renegades. When Custer finally found the village, he assumed the natives would turn tail and run. One persistent tale holds that Custer wanted to run for president and that his recklessness at the Little Bighorn came from ambition. By 1876 Custer was one of the most famous men in America.

He published a memoir at thirty-four, dined with presidents, wrote for magazines, and moved among tycoons and foreign dignitaries. He was a Democrat at a time when the Grant administration was riddled with scandal, and the Democrats were eager to put one of their own in the White House. But the only evidence that Custer wanted the office is a single remark he made to a scout named Red Star, through an interpreter, that he would become the Great Father if they won a big victory over the Sioux. Had he lived past thirty-six, he probably would have tried for office eventually.

Men like Custer do not retire to rocking chairs. But whatever ambitions he had, he kept to himself except for that one remark. Another story has Custer taking his own life with his pistol, supposedly kept quiet until his widow passed. There is no documentation for it.

If any genuine document existed showing Custer killed himself, it would be among the most famous documents in American history, and every Custer historian of the past century would crawl over broken glass to publish it. The truth is that nobody knows exactly how or when Custer died. The mystery remains. What is true is that his widow Libby outlived him by more than fifty years and spent most of them defending him, writing books and giving lectures that made him out to be a martyr hero.

Many of the men who survived the battle kept their mouths shut, out of respect or fear. It was really not long after Libby’s death that people finally started talking. The claims that Custer was a drunk or a morphine addict have no basis in the evidence. He was known for the opposite.

In the early 1860s, home on leave, he got so drunk he embarrassed himself, after which he completely swore off alcohol. There is plenty of legitimate material for his critics without resorting to unsubstantiated charges. Whatever Custer was, he was not a coward. Cowards do not charge headlong at the front of their troops into the enemy.

He led from the front and led by example. At Washita, he had used women and children as human shields, a deliberate, planned action, not the desperate improvisation of a surrounded nineteen-year-old trooper. He took those hostages before he was attacked by the larger force. He was planning to do the same thing at the Little Bighorn, capturing the old, the women, and the children to force the warriors to break off the fighting, not to kill them but to use them.

The government’s own Indian agent for the Cheyenne, Edward Wynkoop, resigned over Washita and called it a massacre. Custer’s contemporaries condemned him for the same reasons people do today. The disaster at the Little Bighorn was not any one person’s fault. Benteen should have come quicker.

Reno should have continued his charge into the valley. Custer should have done more reconnaissance and not split his men up as much as he did. Crook should not have left after the Rosebud. Terry and Gibbon should have arrived earlier.

The Indian agents should not have lied about the number of bands at the agencies. The government should not have started an illegal war over gold. It was a chain of bad decisions and delayed actions. Custer did act aggressively and independently, seeking a decisive engagement.

The Gatling guns he left behind would indeed have slowed him down. His men were trained to fight dismounted, in groups of four, one man taking the horses to the rear while the other three formed a skirmish line; that was in the drill book and remained the method well into the twentieth century. The copper-cased cartridges in their Springfield rifles were prone to jamming, but archaeology suggests the problem affected only about one round in thirty, not enough to lose a battle. Some of the warriors facing Custer had repeating rifles.

Many had old muskets. A great many more used bows and arrows. The notion that the government deliberately sent Custer to his death while arming the soldiers with faulty rifles does not hold water. Nobody in Washington had any idea Custer would come up against such a huge village, and when he was killed it proved to be a major embarrassment to the administration.

Hanlon’s razor applies: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. The incompetence here was bad intelligence and underestimating the enemy. The Lakota may not even have known they were fighting Custer. The Battle of the Rosebud had happened just eight days earlier, and some of the warriors thought they were fighting Crook’s contingent again, taunting the soldiers that they should have brought their Shoshone and Crow warriors with them.

It was a reasonable assumption. Reno’s collapse in the valley had its own terrible moment. His scout Bloody Knife, one of Custer’s favorites, was half Lakota on his father’s side and had grown up with the Hunkpapa, Sitting Bull’s people. He was tormented for being half Arikara, mostly by a young man named Gall.

Eventually Gall and others beat him, stripped him naked, and spit on him. Gall later led a war party that killed two of Bloody Knife’s brothers. Years later, Bloody Knife led a detachment of soldiers to Gall’s lodge. When Gall put up a fight, he was bayoneted and left for dead.

Bloody Knife tried to put a bullet in him but an officer stopped him, figuring Gall was done for. Gall survived and became one of the leaders at the Little Bighorn. In the opening minutes of the fight, around the time Reno charged the valley, two of Gall’s wives and three of his children were shot dead, possibly by Bloody Knife and the Arikara scouts. And then Bloody Knife himself was shot in the timber, his brains splattering across Reno’s face.

Having a man’s brains splattered on your face could certainly affect your mental well-being. What happened to the Lakota after the battle is not in dispute. Within five years, Crazy Horse was dead, Sitting Bull had surrendered, and the Lakota were no longer a free people. They lost.

But Red Cloud’s War, from 1866 to 1868, had seen the Lakota and their allies fight the army to a standstill, forcing the government to shut down forts and sign a treaty agreeing to Red Cloud’s demands. The government ultimately won through sheer attrition. There were roughly forty-five million Americans in 1876, with factories, railroads, and an almost endless supply of soldiers. The Lakota had none of that, and the buffalo, their main source of sustenance, was well on its way to extinction.

They and the Cheyenne could have outfought the army at every turn and still lost simply through numbers. Taking pride in fighting despite defeat is a very human trait. People still talk about the Spartans and the Alamo. In 1980, the Supreme Court ordered the government to pay the Lakota for the taking of the Black Hills.

The court awarded the value of the land, seventeen million dollars, plus five percent interest per year running back to 1877. The government appealed, and lost. The award grew to over one hundred million. The Lakota refused to accept the money, and federal law required it to be placed in an interest-bearing trust account.

The money is still sitting there, drawing interest, now thought to be worth around two billion dollars. It is not reparations. It is a court-ordered debt the government legally owes the tribe for stealing their land. Custer’s defeat was not the work of a conspiracy against him.

The conspiracy was to take the Black Hills, and that was going to happen whether Custer lived or died. They did not need Custer and more than two hundred of his men killed to steal the hills. He was brave, and he was a glory hound who committed atrocities. The Lakota were victims of one of the most dishonorable land grabs in American history, and yet three years earlier some of their warriors had massacred a village full of women and children.

Grant helped save the Union, and then as president he launched an illegal war. The government broke its word, and so did the Lakota in smaller ways. You do not get to keep only the half you like and disregard the rest. You can love this country and admit that what it did in 1876 was wrong.

You can admire the Lakota and admit that what they did to the Pawnee at Massacre Canyon was also wrong. You can think Custer was an ass and still say he died game. None of that makes you a traitor or a bleeding-heart liberal or a racist. It just makes you honest.

The two facts stand together. The Lakota stole the Black Hills. The United States government manufactured a war to steal them back. Both are true.

Most people want only one of them to be true, depending on which side they have chosen. The evidence does not care what team you are on.