General George Armstrong Custer’s battle plan for Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, was tactically sound in concept. He ordered Major Marcus Reno to attack one end of the camp while Custer himself moved against the opposite end. Reno’s initial assault threw the village into confusion, sending women and children fleeing northward. By shifting his forces north and crossing the river, Custer aimed to seize hostages, a tactic he believed would cripple the warriors’ resistance.
This approach had worked at the Battle of Washita, but his failure to communicate the full strategy to his subordinates, Major Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, proved to be a critical mistake. Custer’s decisive error was his reluctance to abandon the attack. When he finally saw the immense size of the village, the position revealed the overwhelming force needed for success. Across the river, thousands of non-combatant Indians were streaming toward the hills.
At the Washita, Custer had achieved victory with just 53 hostages, but the situation here demanded far more men than he had. At that moment, Custer could have preserved his command by halting the attack, withdrawing to a more defensible position, and fortifying it, exactly as Major Reno had done when faced with superior numbers. At a later court of inquiry, Captain Benteen stated: “I think that discretion would have been the better part of valor had he done so. ” Instead, Custer risked everything, holding his position in the hope that Benteen would arrive with the reinforcements necessary to execute his original plan.
Custer and all 225 soldiers under his direct command were killed. Yet at the other end of the battlefield, the situation was equally dire and its outcome uncertain. Captain Benteen, who had received a hastily written note from Custer reading, “Come on quick, bring packs,” discovered Reno’s besieged unit, which had come under violent attack after charging into the village. At Reno’s request, Benteen paused to wait for the supply train carrying vital reserve ammunition.
At that time, Captain Thomas Weir advanced, defying orders to remain with Reno’s command, heading toward the sound of the fighting in an attempt to help Custer. After the supply train arrived, Benteen and Reno moved forward to join Weir. These potential rescuers were attacked by a large force of Sioux warriors and conducted a fighting withdrawal back to Reno’s original fortified position. There, they were besieged for a day and a half by the same warriors who had just eliminated Custer, until General Terry’s forces finally rescued them.
Reno and Benteen sustained 53 casualties. Historian Edgar Stewart offers a critical perspective on the battle from the Native American viewpoint. Each tribe contained many warrior societies, each with its own chiefs and subordinate leaders. Despite some being renowned as fighters, they could not issue orders in battle and expect them to be obeyed.
Their influence was therefore more symbolic than practical. This absence of formal military discipline was why indigenous forces rarely defeated trained soldiers. The Indian warrior viewed combat from an individual perspective, with little regard for coordinated group maneuvers. Historical accounts of other engagements with native forces compiled by historian James Donovan suggest that had Custer halted his attack earlier and fortified his position, his unit might have held.
When facing organized forces that maintained a defensive posture, Indian warriors typically withdrew after one or two failed assaults to break their lines. For example, on August 2, 1867, a group of 30 soldiers and two civilian woodcutters formed a defensive semicircle behind 14 large storage boxes and held off roughly 500 warriors for six hours. The soldiers suffered only four deaths. In a later incident in September 1868, Major George Forsyth and 50 scouts fortified a small sandbar covered with trees on the dry Arikaree Fork of the Republican River, repelling 600 warriors while enduring direct attacks and a week-long siege.
Custer’s greatest asset, his aggressive mindset, ultimately proved to be his biggest flaw. General Phil Sheridan later wrote: “I am deeply sorry for the loss of Custer and his men. I feel that it was an unnecessary sacrifice due to miscalculation and an excess of courage. ” President Ulysses Grant stated: “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops that was brought on by Custer himself and was wholly unnecessary.
” Wholly unnecessary.