The warriors pulled the square green paper money from the pockets of the dead troopers and stared at it, baffled. It was foreign to them, this thin paper with its strange engravings, and for a time it seemed worthless. The children of the village took the bills and used them as saddle blankets for their toy mud horses. The silver coins were another matter entirely.

The Cheyenne found a better use for those, hammering them into buckles that gleamed against leather. This was what remained of George Armstrong Custer’s command. On June 25th, 1876, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, five companies of the United States 7th Cavalry had been completely obliterated. Now the dead lay scattered across the ridgelines and ravines, and the men who had killed them moved among the bodies, taking what they could find.

Wooden Leg, Little Hawk, and Bobtail Horse, warriors who had been in the fight, each reported the same discovery: bottles of whiskey tucked into the saddlebags and coat pockets of the fallen troopers. The liquor was another prize, though it would not last long in the summer heat of the Montana plains. Two days passed before the rest of the 7th Cavalry reached the field. On June 27th, the burial parties rode up from the valley and met the scene that the scouts had been dreading.

The cavalrymen had been dead in the sun since Saturday afternoon, and the June heat had done its work. One of the first men to arrive was a soldier who later described the field as pale earth dotted with the bloated forms of men and horses, a haunting image of death and desolation that weighed heavily on his heart. He remarked that the scene was one he would never forget. They began the grisly task of identifying the fallen, and the first body they came to that mattered most was that of Captain Tom Custer, the general’s younger brother.

He was found near the top of the hill, just north of where the general lay. He was lying face down, but his face had been distorted beyond recognition. His body bore multiple arrow wounds, including one in his back and another in his head, where an arrowhead had bent and embedded itself deep in the bone. His skull had been shattered, and nearly all his hair was gone, scalped off except for a small patch at the nape of his neck.

In stark contrast, the body of General George Armstrong Custer had not been mutilated. He lay on his back with his hands folded across his abdomen, a familiar position to the men who had marched with him, for they had often seen him nap in exactly that manner. He had two fatal wounds: one in the front of his left temple and another near his heart. Whatever else the battle had taken from him, it had left his body intact, and the men who buried him took some small comfort in that.

Boston Custer, the youngest of the three Custer brothers on the field, lay roughly two hundred yards from the hill that would bear his brother’s name. His body had been stripped bare, saved only for his white cotton socks, and even those had their labels cut out. Across the field, several other bodies had remnants of bloody undershirts, trousers, or socks, but in every case, the names had been cut from the fabric. The soldiers searching for their comrades found the naked, mutilated bodies marred by fatal wounds, and the sight presented a scene of gut-wrenching horror.

The burial party had almost nothing to work with. Half a dozen spades and shovels, a handful of axes, and a couple of picks were all they could find. The soldiers did their best. Using knives and tin cups, they hastily scraped out shallow graves and covered the bodies with a thin layer of earth, leaving their comrades behind in the vast wilderness, hundreds of miles from civilization and far from the comforting presence of their loved ones.

Trumpeter Jeppe Martini had been one of the last men to leave Custer’s side during the battle, carrying orders from the general to Captain Benteen. Now he walked the field and recalled seeing a pile of dead soldiers in a deep ravine between Custer’s position and the river. Among them lay a first sergeant whose body was covered with torn pieces of about five hundred dollars in paper money, which had been entrusted to him for safekeeping by the men under his command. The warriors had ripped the bills to shreds, either out of contempt or confusion, and left the scraps scattered across the dead man’s chest.

Martini also reported that part of Adjutant Cook’s sideburns had been scalped off with the skin still attached, a detail that stayed with him for the rest of his life. George Harrington, a scout with the 7th Cavalry, added his own grim discovery: four soldiers’ heads were found in the Sioux camp, severed from their bodies, and the bodies themselves could not be located anywhere on the battlefield or in the village. Lieutenant Charles Roe of the Second Cavalry shared a similar finding. In the Indian village, they discovered a white man’s head tied to a lariat, a rope that had been dragged through the village until the head separated from the body.

The rope was still attached when they found it. Survivor Jacob Adams told a darker story still. He said that troopers had been lassoed from their horses during the fight and dragged into the heart of the village, where they were tied to trees and burned alive. These horrific acts were witnessed by their comrades from Benteen’s division, who were pinned down across the river and helpless to save them.

John Ryan later stated that bones and remnants of blue uniforms were found at the sites where men had been tied to trees and stakes, long after the fires had burned out. Of the five guidons that Custer’s troops had carried into their last stand, only one was recovered immediately after the battle. It had been hidden beneath the body of a fallen soldier, Corporal John Foley, who had tried to escape on horseback. Pursued by warriors, Foley had shot himself in the head before they could overtake him, and his body had fallen over the flag, concealing it from the village’s scavengers.

When the burial party found him, they discovered the guidon beneath him. This recovered flag later became known as the Culbertson Guidon, named after Sergeant Ferdinand Culbertson, who was part of the burial party that found it. For more than a century, the flag passed through private hands and public collections, a relic of a battle that had become a national obsession. In 2010, it was auctioned by Sotheby’s to a private collector for a remarkable 2.

2 million dollars. For a piece of cloth that had spent two days hidden under a dead man’s body on a Montana hillside, it was a strange and distant end. The burial parties finished their work as best they could, covering the dead with the thin earth they could scrape from the ground. They left the field on June 28th, carrying the wounded and the recovered flag, and rode south toward the steamer Far West on the Bighorn River.

Behind them, the wolves and the weather would finish what the battle had begun, scattering the bones of the 7th Cavalry across the ridgelines, where they would be gathered and reburied in later years. The battlefield itself became a monument, and the names of the fallen were carved into stone. But the memories carried by the survivors were not so neatly arranged. Jeppe Martini carried the image of the sergeant buried under torn paper money.

The soldier who had said he would never forget the scene carried it to his grave. And the children of the village, who had used the strange green paper as saddle blankets for their toy mud horses, grew up with their own stories of what had happened on the Greasy Grass that June. The money was worthless to them. The silver they had turned to buckles.

The whiskey had been drunk. Only the dead remained, and the stories that the living told about them.