The soldiers did not die fighting. According to the man who watched them fall, they turned their weapons on themselves before the warriors could even reach them. Wooden Leg was a Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought against George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. His account, recorded decades later, challenges the enduring image of Custer’s men making a desperate last stand.
Instead, he described chaos and self-inflicted death among the soldiers. Born in the Black Hills around 1858, Wooden Leg was originally called Eats from His Hand. As a teenager, he chose the name Wooden Leg to honor a favored uncle, a captured Crow who had been adopted into the Cheyenne tribe and was known for his remarkable endurance on foot. Wooden Leg inherited that stamina, and even in his later years he could outwalk younger men.
In the 1920s, physician Thomas Marquis interviewed Northern Cheyenne survivors living on the Montana reservation. At that time, seventeen men who had fought at the Little Bighorn were still alive, including Wooden Leg. Their conversations were translated and collected in the book Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, which serves as the foundation of his account. Wooden Leg was born into the last generation of his people to grow up in the traditional way of life.
The Cheyenne had originated near the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay before moving into what is now Minnesota during the 1600s. By the 1730s they had reached North Dakota, acquired horses, and expanded onto the Great Plains to follow the buffalo. Their territory stretched from the Black Hills westward to the Big Horn River in Montana. By the time Wooden Leg was born, westward settlement was accelerating, and conflict with U.
S. authorities was becoming routine. After Red Cloud’s War, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 granted the Lakota a large reservation covering much of western South Dakota, including the sacred Black Hills. A vast area of unceded territory in Wyoming and Montana, including the Powder River country where Wooden Leg grew up, was designated as hunting ground for both the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne.
The U. S. government wanted to buy the Black Hills, but the tribes refused to sell. In 1875, gold was discovered there.
Officials then demanded that all roaming Lakota and Cheyenne report to the reservation agencies. When they failed to do so, General Sheridan authorized military action against the so-called hostiles. The January 31, 1876 deadline and the refusal to comply sparked the Great Sioux War of 1876. Wooden Leg later said his people did not fully understand the ultimatum at the time.
Some Cheyenne chose reservation life, but his father opposed it, insisting that Indians were not meant to live that way and that it was better to remain on their hunting grounds, a right they believed was guaranteed by the 1868 treaty. Custer himself expressed a similar sentiment. In his book My Life on the Plains, published just months before his death, he wrote that if he were an Indian, he would greatly prefer the free open plains over being confined to a reservation and receiving the blessings of civilization with its vices thrown in. The Cheyenne continued to receive visitors from the reservation, who warned them repeatedly that the soldiers were coming.
Most bands refused to come in, and the warnings were largely met with disbelief. That disbelief ended on March 17, 1876, at what became known as the Battle of the Powder River, roughly 35 miles southwest of present-day Broadus, Montana. According to Wooden Leg, early in the morning an old man climbed a nearby hill to observe and pray. Moments later he began shouting that the soldiers were right there.
The attacking soldiers had already positioned themselves between the camp and the horse herd. Women screamed, children cried, and the elderly hobbled away to escape the bullets. Braves seized whatever weapons they had and tried to meet the attack. Wooden Leg caught a pony, fired arrows toward the soldiers, and helped carry two young children to safety.
When he returned to the fight, it was too late. The soldiers destroyed the Cheyenne village and seized their horses, but they killed only one warrior. That night, the Cheyenne launched a counter-raid and recovered most of their ponies, around 500 head. A council was convened by the chiefs of the two Cheyenne bands.
It was decided that the Oglala Sioux and the Cheyenne would travel together to the camp of the Hunkpapa Sioux to the northeast. Those Hunkpapa had many animals and outnumbered the combined Cheyenne and Oglala groups, a likely factor in the decision to join them. The Miniconjou, under Lame Deer, soon joined as well. The gathering grew larger as they moved.
Alongside Wooden Leg’s Cheyenne band, numbering around 400, there were three separate bands of Lakota. Stragglers from the reservations continued to arrive, including Sans Arc, Blackfeet Sioux, and even a group Wooden Leg described as very poor, possessing little more than dogs and travois. With so many people gathered, food and grass for the horses quickly grew scarce. The group moved together to hunt, and its numbers continued to swell.
The loss of property at the Powder River was devastating, and in the freezing conditions without shelter, several more Cheyenne died. After a few days, they located an Oglala camp under the legendary Crazy Horse, who received them with full hospitality. Wooden Leg recalled that they fed them to fullness and gave them temporary shelter and robes. The final outcome came months later at the Little Bighorn, where Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was annihilated.
Wooden Leg’s description of that battle remains one of the most striking accounts from a Native American perspective. He described how the warriors rushed forward, constantly moving toward the soldiers, and how the soldiers, in his words, lost their minds and killed themselves before the Cheyenne could even reach them. The victory was celebrated as a triumph for the nations gathered there, but it also marked the end of an era.
Wooden Leg belonged to the last generation of his people to live freely on the northern plains, and his account, recorded half a century later, preserves a perspective that the standard histories long overlooked.