The aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn did not end with George Custer’s death. What followed the defeat was a scene of such brutality that some details were kept from the American public for years, and even Custer’s widow was shielded from the full truth of how her husband’s body was found. In the hours after the battle, Lakota and Cheyenne warriors began looting the fallen soldiers. Weapons, clothing, badges, and horses left on the field were taken as spoils of war.
Lakota warrior Brave Bear described the scene: “There was much commotion and disputes over the horses and firearms that were seized. The Indians were telling one another, ‘I have some tobacco. I have coffee. I have a fine gun.
’”
The looting showed little regard for the dead. Nearly all the fallen soldiers were stripped of their clothing and left to decay in the sun. Some had their feet severed so their boots could be removed. For hours, warriors removed scalps from the dead as war trophies, a customary practice in Plains Indian warfare.
Native accounts also describe women from the camp approaching the bodies and desecrating them. Two Cheyenne women later claimed they had driven awls into Custer’s ears. It was also revealed years later that someone had forced an arrow into a humiliating location in Custer’s trousers, a detail the army chose to suppress out of concern for his widow. Lakota warrior Iron Hawk recalled an incident involving two elderly women who began stripping and dismembering a corpse they believed to be dead.
The soldier suddenly rose and tried to fight them off. He was quickly killed. Iron Hawk admitted he found the sight of a naked man trying to repel two elderly women to be humorous. Sitting Bull reportedly warned that his warriors would be cursed if they disturbed the dead, claiming his visions had predicted a significant victory.
However, historians have noted uncertainty about whether Sitting Bull genuinely opposed the mutilation, as his interviews took place years after his defeat, and he may have been trying to distance himself from actions the public considered scandalous. The battle was not over with Custer’s death. Most of the Seventh Cavalry had survived under Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, who had entrenched themselves on Reno Hill. Sitting Bull’s warriors attacked them through the night of June 25 and all day on June 26.
The assault only ended on the morning of June 27 when scouts spotted American reinforcements approaching. Benteen and Reno had been too preoccupied with their own survival to know what had happened to Custer. It was the reinforcements under General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon who first understood the scale of the disaster. Gibbon’s scouts were the first to find bloodied American officer uniforms in abandoned camps near the battlefield, plundered from the dead but left behind when Sitting Bull retreated.
Soon after, a second scout arrived with worse news. He reported counting 197 dead bodies lying in the hills. When asked if they were white men, he answered yes. At that moment, Terry and Gibbon realized something had gone terribly wrong.
They feared the entire Seventh Cavalry might have been annihilated, but scouts soon located survivors from Benteen’s and Reno’s commands on nearby hills. Benteen was sent with some of his men to locate Custer. What they found was devastating. The naked corpses of their comrades had begun to decompose after two days under the hot Montana sun.
They first found the bodies of L Company, commanded by Custer’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun. Those bodies remained in the defensive formation they had assumed in their final moments at the top of Calhoun Hill. Most of the other bodies did not show such a formation, and it was unclear whether the men had been killed in a panic or whether the bodies had been moved afterward. Another group of bodies was concentrated on what became known as Last Stand Hill.
Private Jacob Adams was the first to discover the commanding officer of the Seventh Cavalry. He called Captain Benteen, who rushed over to verify the identity. “By God, that is him,” Benteen exclaimed. George Custer’s body was found near the summit of Last Stand Hill, twenty feet from his brother Tom.
Like the other men, he had been stripped of all clothing except his socks. Custer had not been scalped, although Tom had. The body was discovered in an upright position, leaning against the corpses of two other soldiers, as if at rest, with a facial expression resembling that of a man who had simply fallen asleep. Lieutenant James Bradley later noted that the remaining two hundred bodies from Custer’s command were strewn between the hills and the river near Sitting Bull’s abandoned camp.
In a letter to a newspaper, Bradley told the public that the remains had not been subjected to severe mistreatment. He wrote that there was minimal mutilation and that the injuries he saw seemed to result from the act of finishing off a wounded individual. Nothing more. Bradley was not truthful.
Private Charles Windolph, one of the soldiers who accompanied Benteen to the battlefield, later remarked, “It was considerate of him to protect the feelings of the relatives, but the bodies were indeed severely mutilated. Some were so badly damaged that it was difficult to discuss. ”
Most of the corpses exhibited horrific damage. Isaiah Dorman, a Black scout, was extensively mutilated, and the enemy had left a kettle filled with his own blood beside him as an insult.
Most of the bodies had been scalped. Many had been pierced with arrows or had suffered blunt force trauma from axes or hammers after death. Custer did not escape this treatment. Officially, soldiers documented only his visible wounds: one bullet wound in his chest just below the heart, another in his left temple, and a knife wound in his thigh.
Either bullet wound could have proved fatal. The soldiers agreed not to disclose the fact that an arrow had been inserted in a humiliating location in his trousers. Such a detail would only distress his widow and remained confidential for many years. His brother Tom had suffered even more severe injuries.
He had been scalped, his skull was crushed, and he had been disemboweled. Had it not been for the tattoo found on his arm, he would have been unidentifiable. Because two days had passed since the battle, the bodies were already in a state of decomposition by the time they were discovered. Colonel Gibbon acknowledged that the bodies had become quite offensive by the time he arrived at the scene.
Most people assume that everyone on Custer’s Hill was dead by the time Benteen arrived. That is not entirely accurate. Private Jacob Adams, who claimed to be the first to locate Custer, also made another discovery on the same hill. As the soldiers moved through the devastation, they heard a distressed sound from among the dead.
A solitary survivor called out to them: a fourteen-year-old bay horse named Comanche, belonging to one of Custer’s officers whose body lay nearby. Comanche had sustained seven separate wounds from bullets and arrows and had not had water for days, yet he remained by his master’s side. The soldiers hurried to help him. Despite his injuries, Comanche managed to stand and rejoin the rest of the Seventh Cavalry.
Other surviving horses were also retrieved from the surrounding area, but Comanche’s wounds and his solitary presence on Last Stand Hill earned him special attention. Comanche eventually recovered and enjoyed a long retirement as the mascot of the Seventh Cavalry before passing away in 1891. He is one of only four horses to receive a funeral with full military honors. June 27 was dedicated to counting and identifying the dead.
Many bodies could not be identified, and those that were identified often lacked certainty. Nineteen bodies from the battle were never located. In the years that followed, human remains continued to be discovered in the hills around the battlefield, suggesting that some men may have escaped the initial chaos at Last Stand Hill only to be hunted down later. On the morning of June 28, soldiers began burying the dead.
Benteen’s men counted 208 bodies to be interred that day, while Lieutenant Bradley noted 206. Whatever the actual figure, it was a hurried task. Concerned that Sitting Bull or other hostile warriors might appear, they could not afford the time to dig two hundred proper graves. Most of the dead were interred together in hastily dug mass graves or in shallow graves at the locations where they fell.
Some graves were marked with names. Custer and his brother Tom were laid to rest together. A grave was excavated at the base of the hill, barely two feet deep, just enough to cover the bodies. The brothers were wrapped in canvas and placed side by side.
A small sled and a circle of stones were positioned to deter scavengers. Conflicting reports exist about who precisely dug the grave and buried Custer, with several men eager to claim the honor. By 6:30 p. m.
, the task was complete. General Terry was eager to depart and begin the long march back to the main Big Horn River, setting out that evening. There were still fifty wounded men requiring proper medical attention, and news of the defeat needed to be relayed to authorities. The journey back to the confluence of the Little Bighorn and Big Horn River, where the steamer Far West awaited the wounded, was a long one.
Medics did their best on route. At least one man underwent a leg amputation, and several died from their injuries. The aftermath took a significant toll on the survivors. Major Reno resorted to alcohol, purchasing eleven gallons of whiskey in the twenty-two days following his return from Little Bighorn.
Captain Benteen also turned to drinking. This led to a drunken altercation between Benteen and Captain Thomas Weir, who held Benteen responsible for abandoning Custer during the battle. Benteen challenged Weir to a duel, which Weir declined. Weir could not bear the guilt of Little Bighorn for long and was found dead in his hotel room in New York in December 1876.
The steamer Far West sped up the Missouri River carrying news of the defeat and thirty-eight of the wounded. It broke speed records, completing the 710-mile journey back to Fort Abraham Lincoln, home of the Seventh Cavalry, in under three days. The sound of the ship’s arrival roused Libby Custer before dawn on July 6. Shortly after, at 7 a.
m. , a group of the fort’s senior officers knocked on her door. Libby hurried to answer, and the officers insisted on speaking with her privately. By this time, her sister-in-law Maggie was also awake, eager for news about her brothers and her husband, Lieutenant James Calhoun, who had served alongside them.
The officers escorted the women to the parlor and conveyed the heartbreaking news. Libby and George had been teenage sweethearts and had been married for twelve years. Their surviving love letters illustrate the depth of their affection for one another. His death was profoundly devastating for her.
One of the officers, Lieutenant Gurley, recalled it as one of the most difficult tasks he had ever undertaken. “Imagine the sorrow of those bereaved women, their sobs and their tears that offered no solace,” he wrote. To her credit, Libby Custer did not allow her grief to interfere with her responsibilities. She insisted on accompanying the officers to inform the other twenty-six women in the fort who had now become widows.
The remainder of Libby Custer’s life was shaped by her loss at Little Bighorn. She defended her husband’s legacy and held Reno and Benteen accountable for the disaster until her death in 1933. The news became public the following day. Washington received the telegram that morning, just three days after celebrating the nation’s one-hundredth birthday.
The news of Custer’s defeat was shocking. It dominated the newspapers for several days, and speculation ran rampant. Many began to search for someone to blame: Custer’s recklessness, or the shortcomings of Benteen and Reno.
The nation mourned one of the most significant defeats it had ever endured at the hands of Native American forces.