On the morning of June 27, 1876, the soldiers climbing the long bare hill above the Little Bighorn River found a scene they would struggle to describe for the rest of their lives. More than two hundred corpses lay scattered across the slope, baked under the June sun for forty-eight hours. The bodies were swollen, blackened, and unrecognizable. Clothing had been stripped away.
Faces were gone. The only way to identify some of the dead was a tattoo on an arm or a ring on a finger. As the officers walked the slope, soldiers beside them dropped to their knees and vomited. Near the highest point of the hill, they found a man leaning against two of the dead as if he had been placed in a sitting position.
He was naked, but his face was intact. His hair was intact. His body showed none of the mutilation surrounding him. An officer later wrote that there was no pain on his face, only the stillness of sleep, with a bullet hole in his left temple and another in his left breast.
That man was George Armstrong Custer, and the 250 men around him had been subjected to what no one could explain: while everyone else on that hill had been rendered unrecognizable, the commander of the campaign had been left untouched. To understand why, one must first understand what that mutilation meant. For the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors who fought on the plains, what was done to an enemy’s body was not random brutality or rage out of control. It carried a clear, ancient meaning.
A man’s body went with him even after death. A man whose eyes were gouged out could not see in the next world. A man whose hands were cut off could not hold a weapon there. A man whose legs were shattered could not chase you.
Mutilation was a form of insurance, a way to prevent the enemy you killed today from facing you again tomorrow. There was another layer: each tribe, sometimes each war party, had its own unique mark, a specific cut on a specific limb that served as a signature. Another group arriving later could look at the body and understand who had passed through. And there was mourning.
About ten warriors from the village at Little Bighorn died that day, but there were many more who had died over the decades. Women and children had been shot as they fled camps attacked at dawn. Hundreds had been massacred while sleeping at Sand Creek in 1864, and in some of those massacres white soldiers themselves had mutilated Native American corpses, even exhibiting body parts on stage in Denver as trophies. What happened on that hill did not happen in a vacuum.
It was the final page of a long reckoning. That reckoning began on the afternoon of June 25, when Custer divided his regiment for an attack on the valley. Major Marcus Reno entered the village from the southern end with three companies, was immediately repulsed, crossed the river, and took refuge on the bluffs of the eastern bank. Captain Frederick Benteen had been sent southwest with three companies to sweep the left flank and was miles away when the attack began.
Custer, with the remaining five companies of about 210 men, advanced north toward the other end of the village. The plan was for Reno to press the village from the south while Custer descended from the north to capture women and children. It had worked before on the plains. It did not work this time.
Reno’s attack collapsed in minutes, allowing the entire village to turn on Custer. That village was vastly larger than anyone had guessed, with estimates of over 1,500 warriors, some say more than 2,000. No one knows exactly how long Custer’s men held out. One Lakota warrior said it lasted as long as it takes a hungry man to finish his meal: about forty-five minutes.
When it was over, no one was left standing on that hill. Then the women and youths from the village went up the hill to do the necessary work. Trophies were gathered, bodies were processed, and the souls of the dead were sent crippled to the next world. The village remained there until the evening of June 26, so the work lasted more than a day.
When the column of Generals Terry and Gibbon reached the valley on the morning of June 27, the scene was what Custer’s men had been spared from seeing. One of the first officers to climb the hill was Lieutenant James Bradley, whose mission was to find Custer’s regiment. He still hoped Custer might have withdrawn to the north, and the hope lasted until he saw white dots on the hill that he first mistook for rocks. They were not rocks.
Bradley counted 197 bodies, and the number would ultimately rise to around 210. Most were unrecognizable. But Bradley included in his report a sentence that would become a legend: that Custer’s body, unlike those around him, had not been mutilated. His face looked peaceful, and death seemed to have come to him not as a terror, but as sleep.
That single sentence was staggering because a few steps away lay another Custer. Tom Custer, George’s younger brother, had won the Medal of Honor twice in the Civil War, one of very few Americans ever to do so. Tom’s body was so heavily mutilated that officers could not recognize him. He had no face.
His skull was crushed. His body was slashed open. The only way to identify him was the tattoo on his right arm: a figure of Liberty, two flags, and the letters TWWC, Thomas Ward Custer. Two brothers lay ten or fifteen meters apart.
One had been subjected to some of the heaviest mutilation history has recorded. The other lay as if he had never entered a battlefield. That could not be coincidence. The explanation America wanted to hear arrived quickly.
The country was in the middle of its centennial celebrations, with a massive exhibition in Philadelphia, when the news of the annihilation broke. The shock was national. Amid that shock, the newspapers needed a story, and the story they produced was this: Custer was untouched because the Indians respected his courage. Even his enemies acknowledged his greatness, and because the victors knew this, they honored his body.
It turned a defeat into a kind of victory and a dead commander into a saint. Its only problem is that it was probably entirely made up. Dozens of interviews conducted over the next forty years with Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who participated in the battle produced not one testimony saying, “We didn’t touch Custer out of respect. ” There is a hidden assumption within the narrative: that the warriors knew that man was Custer.
What if they didn’t? In the summer of 1876, Custer did not have long blond curls flowing to his shoulders, the image that made him famous. Before setting out on the campaign in May, he had his hair cut very short at Fort Abraham Lincoln. The reason was mundane: summer dust, sweat, lice, and the burden of hair care on the march.
Everyone who knew him knew this, but no one in the village in the valley did. Nor was he wearing a blue army jacket that day. He wore a buckskin suit, a light civilian-looking outfit with no rank insignia. When the battle ended and bodies were stripped, whoever found him saw a naked man with short hair, in his forties, his torso and arms unburned but his face and hands tanned.
All the soldiers looked like that, their bodies two-toned from life out in the sun. There was also the fact that Custer’s hair was thinning, beginning to recede at the temples, and the trophy value of a scalp was directly related to its appearance. Short and thinning hair was not something anyone would want to tie to a horse’s mane. The strength of this explanation is that it requires no romanticism: no noble gesture, no mutual respect, no dramatic moment.
Just a simple fact. They did not recognize him. But this explanation does not solve everything, because there is a testimony that fundamentally alters the issue of recognition. Her name was Kate Bighead.
She was Northern Cheyenne and was in that village on June 25. Years later, in the 1920s, a man named Thomas Marquis, a doctor at the Indian Agency who had learned sign language, spoke with her at length. Kate Bighead was among those who went up the hill after the battle ended. There, she said, she saw two Cheyenne women standing over a body.
Those women recognized him. They were Southern Cheyenne, and years earlier, during Custer’s time on the southern plains, they had seen him up close. When warriors were about to mutilate the body, the women intervened and stopped them. “Don’t,” they said.
“This man is considered our relative. ”
The meaning of that sentence is one of the most sensitive topics Little Bighorn historians have debated for a century. Some Cheyenne oral traditions tell that Custer had a relationship with a young Cheyenne woman named Me-o-tzi, who was taken prisoner after an attack. The issue remains unresolved today, but the important thing is that the women accepted it as true, and in their eyes it was a bond that protected the body from mutilation.
The warriors backed off. But the women did not leave the body entirely untouched. One of them took an awl from her sewing kit, a thin pointed tool used to sew leather, and thrust it deep into both of Custer’s ears. Then she said, “Now he will hear better.
”
This was not torture. It was a message, and to understand it one must go back seven years. Near the Texas border, Custer had arrived with troops to negotiate an end to the war. Opposite him sat a holy man named Stone Forehead, keeper of the sacred arrows, one of the Cheyenne’s most sacred objects.
They sat in the sacred lodge. A pipe was lit, and on the plains a promise made around the pipe was sacred. Custer promised he would never fight against the Cheyenne again. Stone Forehead emptied the ashes of the pipe, not onto the ground but onto Custer’s boots, and told him: if you break this promise, you and your men will be destroyed.
Now think again of the awl thrust into those ears. “Now he will hear better. ” The message was this: this man once heard a warning and did not listen. Let him go to the next world with his ears open.
How much of this is historical fact and how much is oral tradition that took shape later is unknowable. Fifty years had passed by the time Kate Bighead told it. But the ash-spilling incident in 1869 was recorded by some of Custer’s own soldiers, so that part was not fabricated. And on the morning of June 27, some of the officers who found Custer’s body reported damage in or around his ears.
That detail was recorded decades before Kate Bighead’s narrative was published, when no one knew of such a story. Two independent sources meet in the same bizarre detail. There is another layer the American public did not hear for a century. The sentence “Custer was never touched” is not entirely true.
Sergeant John Ryan, who served in Company M, survived the siege on Reno’s Hill, and participated in the burial details on June 28, later recounted that there was an arrow wound in Custer’s body, shot into his genital area. Ryan had no reason to lie, and writing such a detail would have been considered highly inappropriate at the time. Other records mention a gash in the thigh. Some say a finger was taken.
Some imply that the reason the body was thought intact was simply that the face had been preserved. The truth might be this: Custer’s body was touched, but far less than the others, and most importantly, his face was preserved. The face is what allows recognition, and ensuring a corpse could be recognized mattered to those who knew who it was. Why, then, was the story frozen as “he was never touched”?
Here steps in the most powerful and most invisible actor in the story: Elizabeth Bacon Custer, whom everyone called Libby. She was thirty-four when Custer died and lived for another fifty-seven years, dedicating the vast majority of them to a single task: protecting her husband’s memory. She wrote three books that sold well, traveled the country giving lectures, and spoke with journalists. A silent but highly effective shadow fell over the career of almost any officer who dared criticize Custer’s decisions.
Captain Frederick Benteen, one of the harshest critics, could not stand Custer even when he was alive, but what Benteen said could never overtake Libby’s narrative while she lived. What Libby needed was a story where her husband died heroically, making a last stand, respected even by his enemies. The sentence “His body was untouched” was the most valuable piece of that story. An arrow wound would have ruined it.
So it was not exactly censorship. It was a choice between what is told and what is left untold, and for a century the untold remained silent. There is also the unresolved issue of the two fatal wounds. The wound in Custer’s breast hit just below the heart and was almost certainly fatal.
The wound in his left temple was also fatal. How does a man receive two separate fatal wounds? The simplest answer: both came during the battle in a place where hundreds of bullets were flying. But there is another possibility, too taboo to be uttered in nineteenth-century America: suicide.
Soldiers feared being captured alive, and some saved the last bullet for themselves. A bullet hitting the temple brings this to mind, but the theory has serious problems. No powder burns were reported on the wound, a sign of a close-range gunshot. Custer was right-handed, and the wound was on his left temple.
And the temple wound could have been inflicted after death. Today most historians reject the suicide theory, but it circulates because it cannot be definitively closed. The body never underwent a proper medical examination. The burial itself was almost unimaginably grim.
On June 28, Terry’s men had few shovels. They scraped a few inches of dirt and prairie grass over the bodies using canteens, mess kits, and hands. A little more was done for Custer. He was placed in a slightly deeper trench with his brother Tom, with a basket and dirt placed over him.
Then the army left the valley, and for a year wolves, coyotes, and rain worked on the hill. In the summer of 1877, a team returned to recover the remains of the officers and send them to locations families requested. The scene was a different horror: bones scattered across the slope, parts dragged hundreds of meters, skulls sitting on top of the soil, most grave markers disappeared or shifted. The team found the spot they thought was Custer’s and dug.
One of the sergeants later said of the recovered remains: “I think it was him, but I’m not sure. ” The remains were placed in a coffin and sent east. On October 10, 1877, they were buried with full military honors at the West Point Military Academy Cemetery, with cannons and speeches as the country buried its hero. But who was really in that coffin?
No one knows. There were no dental records, no photographs, no modern identification methods. In one of the most famous graves in American history, the bones of a lieutenant or a sergeant might well be resting. The grave was never opened and never will be.
In 1881, a large granite monument was erected on top of the hill, and the bones of soldiers scattered across the battlefield were gathered and buried around it in a single mass grave. It is unknown who lies where in that mass grave. They lie mixed together. It is highly probable that some of Custer’s bones are also there, for the team that came in 1877 could not collect all the scattered remains.
In death, an equality the army could not achieve was realized. There is one last detail to the story Kate Bighead told. After the women protected the body, they did not tell the warriors who that man was. They simply stopped them and left.
On the day the battle ended, perhaps three to five people in that valley knew that man was Custer. A year later, all of America knew his name. Books were written, paintings were made, monuments were erected across the country. But on that day, on that hill, he was a hero to no one.
He was just a nameless corpse. For him to become a hero, someone had to come along and tell the story. The answer to why Custer’s body was left untouched is not a tale of heroism. A short haircut, a buckskin jacket, a chaotic battlefield, a promise made seven years before, and a sewing awl all came together.
Then a widow spent decades turning it into a myth. The most famous man of America’s most famous last stand has two graves, and we do not know exactly what is inside either of them.