Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was catastrophic for the Seventh Cavalry, but what happened to his body and those of his men in the aftermath was so gruesome that military officials worked to hide the details from the American public. The victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors was not just a military triumph. For Custer’s enemies, it was a chance to humiliate the man who had inflicted so much cruelty upon them, and the treatment of the fallen soldiers reflected that desire for revenge. In keeping with their customs, the victors stripped the dead of their uniforms and belongings, looting weapons, jewelry, and horses left on the battlefield.
Lakota warrior Brave Bear recalled the commotion as men argued over captured property, with some boasting about the guns, tobacco, and coffee they had secured. The looting, however, was not gentle. According to Native accounts, the warriors spent hours taking scalps from the slain as war trophies, and the women of the camp also took part in desecrating the bodies. Two Cheyenne women reportedly drove nails into Custer’s ears.
Years later, it was revealed that an arrow had also been forced into a particularly humiliating location on Custer’s body, a detail the army suppressed to spare his widow. Lakota warrior Iron Hawk described the scene as the camp’s women began mutilating a soldier who had been pretending to be dead. When the elderly women started to dismember the corpse, the man suddenly sprang up to defend himself but was quickly killed. Iron Hawk admitted he found the sight of the naked soldier trying to fend off the women amusing.
The assault did not end with Custer’s death, as the majority of the Seventh Cavalry had survived the initial fight. Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen had entrenched their men on Reno Hill. Sitting Bull’s warriors attacked them through the night of June 25 and all day on June 26, only withdrawing on the morning of June 27 when scouts spotted American reinforcements approaching. It was those reinforcements, led by General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon, who discovered the true scale of the disaster.
Gibbon’s scouts first found bloody officer uniforms abandoned in deserted camps, stripped from the dead and discarded during the retreat. A second scout returned with even grimmer news, reporting that he had counted 197 dead white men lying in the hills. Gibbon and Terry feared the entire Seventh Cavalry had been annihilated, but their scouts soon located the survivors of Reno and Benteen’s commands. Benteen and Reno were battered but alive.
Neither was aware of Custer’s fate and had presumed he had abandoned them. Benteen was dispatched to locate Custer and was met with the overwhelming devastation of the battlefield. The exposed corpses had already begun to decompose under the hot Montana sun after two days. They found the bodies of L Company, commanded by Custer’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, still in their final defensive formation on Calhoun Hill.
Other bodies were scattered in ways that made it unclear if the soldiers had died in a panic or if the bodies had been moved. On Last Stand Hill, Private Jacob Adams was the first to spot the commanding officer and called Captain Benteen over to confirm his identity. Benteen responded, “That is him. ”
Custer’s body was found near the summit, twenty feet from his brother Tom.
He had been stripped of his clothing except for his socks. Custer had not been scalped, though his brother had been. The general’s body was found sitting upright against two other soldiers, his expression peaceful, as if he had simply fallen asleep. While Lieutenant James Bradley wrote to a newspaper claiming the bodies had not been significantly mutilated, Private Charles Wendorf, who accompanied Benteen, flatly contradicted that account, stating the bodies were severely mutilated, some to an extent too horrific to describe.
Most had been scalped, many pierced with arrows, and others damaged by axes or hammers. Isaiah Dorman, a black scout, had been extensively mutilated, with a kettle of his own blood left beside him as an insult. Custer himself had a bullet wound below the heart and another in his left temple, either of which could have been fatal, as well as a knife wound in his thigh. The soldiers agreed not to disclose the arrow wound, fearing it would only add to his widow’s distress.
Tom Custer was so badly mutilated that he was only identifiable by a tattoo on his arm; he had not only been scalped but disemboweled, with his skull crushed. The burial detail worked hastily. Worried that Sitting Bull might return, they buried 208 bodies in shallow mass graves where they had fallen. Custer and his brother Tom were wrapped in canvas and placed side by side in a grave barely two feet deep, marked with a sled and stones to deter scavengers.
Amid the devastation, Private Adams made another discovery: a survivor. A 14-year-old bay horse named Comanche had sustained seven wounds from bullets and arrows and had gone without water for days. Despite his injuries, the horse remained by his dead master’s side. Comanche recovered, became the Seventh Cavalry’s mascot, and in 1891 was given a funeral with full military honors.
As they marched back, the survivors faced a grim reality. Major Reno purchased eleven gallons of whiskey within 22 days of the battle. Captain Benteen also turned to drinking, which led to a drunken altercation with Captain Thomas Weir, who accused Benteen of abandoning Custer. Benteen challenged Weir to a duel, but Weir declined.
Reno, unable to bear the guilt of Little Bighorn, was found dead in his New York hotel room in December 1876. The steamer Far West carried the wounded and the news back to Fort Abraham Lincoln, breaking speed records by covering 710 miles in under three days. On the morning of July 6, officers knocked on Libbie Custer’s door. Her sister-in-law Maggie Calhoun was also with her, awaiting word of her brothers and husband.
Both women were devastated by the news. Libbie Custer insisted on personally accompanying the officers to inform the other 26 women at the fort that they had become widows. For the rest of her life, she worked to uphold her husband’s legacy, blaming Reno and Benteen for the disaster until her death in 1933.
News of the defeat reached Washington just days after the nation’s centennial celebrations, dominating newspapers and sparking nationwide speculation over who was responsible for the military catastrophe.