The discovery came on the afternoon of June 27, 1876, two days after the fighting had ended. A burial detail from the Seventh Cavalry climbed the slopes above the Little Bighorn River and found the body of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. He was stripped naked but for his socks, his body propped against fallen soldiers as though he were only sleeping. But it was not sleep.
His chest and head were pierced with bullets. His brother Tom lay gutted beside him, his scalp torn away. The men who found him made a decision that would echo for generations. They told the world that Custer died bravely, untouched by the horrors around him.
That was a lie. They lied to his widow. They lied to the public. The truth was far more brutal.
The battle itself had been a catastrophe. On June 25, 1876, Custer had led the Seventh Cavalry into the valley of the Little Bighorn, where thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors had gathered under leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Custer divided his regiment, sending Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen to attack from one direction while he pushed forward with five companies. He and his entire command of more than two hundred men were overwhelmed and killed.
For the victorious warriors, the first task after the battle was looting the fallen. The soldiers had valuable belongings, and by the custom of war, these now belonged to the victors. Weapons, jewelry, uniforms, badges, and abandoned horses were taken. Lakota warrior Brave Bear remembered the fussing and quarreling over captured horses and guns, with warriors calling out what they had gotten: tobacco, coffee, a good gun.
To the warriors, these spoils were a rightful reward of battle. But the process was brutal for the dead. Nearly every fallen soldier was stripped of clothing and left exposed under the blazing Montana sun. In some cases, feet were cut off to remove boots more easily.
The Lakota and Cheyenne customarily took scalps from fallen enemies, and this battlefield was no exception. For hours, warriors claimed scalps as trophies of war, and women joined in the desecration. Cheyenne women later said they had driven awls into Custer’s ears. Years afterward, it was revealed that someone had forced an arrow into a degrading place on Custer’s body, a detail the army deliberately hid to protect his widow.
Some of Custer’s men tried to escape the carnage by pretending to be dead. Lakota warrior Ironhawk recalled seeing two elderly women strip a man who had been lying still and begin cutting him apart. The soldier leaped up and fought them off, but they quickly killed him. Ironhawk admitted that he found the sight of a naked man battling two old women strangely comical.
Not everyone laughed. Sitting Bull himself was reportedly troubled. His visions had promised victory, but they also warned of a curse if the dead were disturbed. Whether he truly opposed the mutilations remains uncertain, since accounts of his words came years later and he may have been distancing himself from acts condemned by outsiders.
The fight was not yet over. Much of the Seventh Cavalry had survived under Reno and Benteen, fortified for two days on a ridge that became known as Reno Hill. Sitting Bull’s warriors harassed them through the night of June 25 and throughout June 26, finally breaking off on the morning of June 27 when scouts reported that American reinforcements were approaching. Reno and Benteen had been too engaged in their desperate defense to know what had happened to Custer.
It was the forces of General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon who uncovered the scale of the disaster. Scouts first stumbled upon bloodied uniforms of American officers and an abandoned camp, the loot left behind when the warriors withdrew. Soon after, another scout delivered worse news. He had counted 197 dead bodies lying in the hills.
When asked if they were white men, he replied, “Yes, white men. ”
Terry and Gibbon immediately realized that disaster had struck. They feared the entire Seventh Cavalry had been destroyed, but their scouts soon located Reno and Benteen’s survivors. Terry and Gibbon hurried to meet them, finding them battered but alive.
Both officers had assumed that Custer had left them to chase glory. Instead, they learned of his fate. Benteen and part of his men were sent to locate Custer. The scene they found was horrific.
The corpses of their comrades lay rotting after two days in the July heat. They first came upon the bodies of Company L, led by Custer’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, still arranged in the defensive line where they had fallen at a rise that became known as Calhoun Hill. Elsewhere, the dead were scattered, either killed in panic or moved after death. Another cluster of bodies lay on the slope that would be remembered as Last Stand Hill.
Private Jacob Adams was the first to spot the fallen commander. He called Captain Benteen, who confirmed, “By God, that’s him. ” Custer’s body was found near the top of the hill, just twenty feet from his brother Tom. Like the rest, he had been stripped naked, saved for his socks.
Unlike Tom, he had not been scalped. His body was propped as if seated against fellow soldiers, his expression strangely peaceful, almost like sleep. Lieutenant James Bradley later wrote that about two hundred more bodies from Custer’s command were scattered between the hills and the river near Sitting Bull’s abandoned camp. In a letter, he reassured the public that the fallen had not been badly treated, that mutilations were minimal.
This was false. Private Charles Windolf later admitted that Bradley’s words were intended to spare grieving families. In truth, the mutilations were shocking. Some bodies were damaged beyond description.
Isaiah Dorman, a Black scout, had been so badly defiled that a kettle of his blood was left beside him as an insult. Most soldiers had been scalped, riddled with arrows, or struck with axes and war clubs after death. Custer’s body officially showed only two gunshot wounds, one to the chest and one to the head, either of which could have been fatal, along with a knife wound in his thigh. But the more degrading details, such as the arrow violation, were deliberately concealed from the record to protect Libby Custer.
Tom Custer fared worse. Scalped, his skull crushed, his body disemboweled, he could only be identified by a tattoo on his arm. Two days in the summer heat had left the bodies already decomposing, the smell unbearable. Colonel Gibbon admitted the scene was overwhelming, and survivors never forgot it.
Some later insisted that everyone on Last Stand Hill had been dead when the reinforcements arrived. But Private Adams remembered something different. Among the corpses, he and others heard a faint noise. It came from a survivor, a horse.
It was Comanche, a gelding belonging to Captain Miles Keogh, lying wounded but alive beside his dead rider. Struck by multiple bullets and arrows, parched and exhausted, the horse had endured days without care, yet had remained near Keogh’s body. Soldiers quickly tended to him. Though other horses survived the battle, Comanche’s ordeal and his solitary presence on Last Stand Hill made him a symbol.
He recovered, became the Seventh Cavalry’s mascot, and lived until 1891, honored with a full military funeral. On June 27, soldiers counted and tried to identify the dead. Many could not be named with certainty. Nineteen bodies were never recovered.
Over the years, remains continued to be found in the hills, suggesting that some soldiers fled the hill only to be hunted down later. The following morning, June 28, the burials began. Benteen counted 208 dead. Bradley counted 206.
Time was short and danger lingered. Fearing renewed attack, the soldiers dug shallow mass graves or buried men where they fell. Custer and Tom were laid side by side in a makeshift grave at the base of the hill, wrapped in canvas, with stones placed to deter scavengers. Who dug the grave remains debated, with several men later claiming the honor.
By evening the burials were complete. General Terry was eager to withdraw. Fifty wounded needed urgent care, and word of the disaster had to reach command. The column marched toward the Big Horn River, where the steamer Far West awaited.
Along the way, medics treated the injured as best they could, amputating limbs when necessary, though some still died on route. For the survivors, the psychological toll was severe. Major Reno drowned his pain in alcohol, purchasing eleven gallons of whiskey within weeks of returning. Captain Benteen also turned to drink, eventually quarreling with Captain Thomas Weir, who accused him of abandoning Custer.
Benteen challenged him to a duel, which Weir declined. Racked with guilt, Weir died later that year in his New York hotel room. Meanwhile, the Far West sped up the Missouri River with thirty-eight wounded and the devastating news. In under three days, it traveled 710 miles back to Fort Abraham Lincoln, setting speed records.
At dawn on July 6, Libby Custer awoke to the sound of the ship’s arrival. Hours later, officers delivered the news to her and her sister-in-law, Maggie. Both women collapsed in grief. Libby, married to George for twelve years, had been his childhood sweetheart.
The officers remembered the moment as unbearable, their sobs and tears without comfort. Yet Libby quickly turned to duty, accompanying them to console the twenty-six other widows at the fort. For the rest of her life, Libby Custer defended her husband’s legacy, blaming Reno and Benteen for the disaster until her death in 1933. The public first learned of the defeat on July 7, only three days after celebrating America’s centennial.
The shocking news dominated the press, sparking debate over blame: Custer’s recklessness, Reno and Benteen’s failures, or both. The nation was left stunned, mourning one of the gravest defeats ever suffered by the United States Army at the hands of native warriors. The tragedy is not only that hundreds of men died that day, but that their deaths were quickly recast into legend, their suffering softened to spare families and to preserve reputations. The truth of the nation’s greatest battlefield defeat was buried under carefully crafted lies.
Custer was not remembered as he was. He was manufactured into a hero, and the real story of what happened after his last stand remained hidden for years.