Custer's command was wiped out at the Little Bighorn

On June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry against an enormous village of Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho gathered along Montana’s Little Bighorn River—a place its defenders called the Greasy Grass. The encampment held thousands of people who had left their reservations in defiance of a U.S. order to return.

Underestimating their numbers, Custer split his regiment and attacked. Warriors under Sitting Bull’s leadership and Crazy Horse’s in the field overwhelmed his battalion of roughly 200 men, killing every one in less than an hour.

In all, 263 soldiers and others with the cavalry died over the two-day fight.

The defeat stunned a nation celebrating its centennial and turned “Custer’s Last Stand” into enduring American legend. Yet the victory was brief: the army intensified its campaign, and within a year the resistance it provoked had largely been broken.