Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was dead. And while that alone was catastrophic, what followed was even more disturbing. After years of suffering at the hands of the Americans, Sitting Bull’s people sought not just victory but humiliation. Custer’s long record of violence against them would be repaid in kind.
Part of what happened on that battlefield was so horrific that the U. S. Army hid the details from the public. Bodies were desecrated, soldiers were mutilated beyond recognition, and Custer himself was so badly damaged that officials lied to his widow to spare her the truth.
This is the rarely told reality of what unfolded after Custer’s last fight. For the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne, the first priority was looting. The fallen American soldiers carried valuable possessions, and the warriors rightly believed their enemies would have robbed them just the same had the outcome been reversed. Rifles, clothing, insignia, jewelry—anything useful or valuable, along with the remaining horses—now belonged to the victors.
Lakota warrior Brave Bear described the scene. There was constant quarreling over captured weapons and mounts. Warriors bragged to one another: “I have tobacco. I found coffee.
I captured a nice rifle. ” For them, the spoils were well-earned rewards. This process, however, was cruel to the dead. Nearly every body was stripped naked and left exposed to the summer heat.
Following ancient traditions, the Lakota and Cheyenne took scalps from fallen enemies, and Little Bighorn was no exception. Hours after the fighting ended, the hills echoed with warriors collecting scalp trophies. And it was not only the men. Indigenous women also came to the battlefield and took part in the desecration of the bodies.
Two Cheyenne women later admitted they had driven arrows into Custer’s ears. Even more disturbing was the revelation years later that an arrow had been thrust into Custer’s body in a place the Army refused to make public. Lakota warrior Iron Hawk recalled that a few of Custer’s soldiers had played dead hoping not to be discovered, but some were caught by the women. He described watching two older women strip and begin to dissect one body, causing the corpse to spring up and fight with them.
The man was quickly killed, but Iron Hawk found the sight of a naked soldier fending off two old women darkly humorous. One person reportedly disapproved was Sitting Bull. According to later interviews, his visions warned that disturbing the dead would bring misfortune, though they also predicted a great victory. Whether he truly objected is impossible to know.
Those interviews took place years after his own defeat, and he may have been trying to distance himself from actions the public considered barbaric. Yet the fighting did not end with Custer’s fall. The bulk of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment held out under Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen on what became known as Reno Hill. Sitting Bull’s warriors kept up the pressure through the night of June 25 and all day on the 26th, withdrawing only on the morning of the 27th when scouts reported approaching American reinforcements.
Reno and Benteen were too busy surviving to know what had happened to Custer. It was General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon’s troops who arrived first and realized the enormity of the disaster. Gibbon’s scouts found blood-stained officer uniforms in abandoned Native camps—loot taken from Custer’s fallen men and then discarded as the Indigenous forces retreated. Before word reached the commanders, another scout arrived with an even grimmer message.
“I have counted 197 bodies in the hills,” he said. “White men? ” someone asked. “Yes, white men.
”
Terry and Gibbon immediately understood something had gone terribly wrong. They feared the entire Seventh Cavalry Regiment had been wiped out. Soon, however, scouts found the battered survivors of Reno and Benteen’s command on the nearby bluffs. Terry and Gibbon hurried to them.
Reno and Benteen, exhausted and wounded, had assumed Custer had abandoned them to chase personal glory. They quickly learned the truth. Benteen and a detachment of his men were ordered to find Custer’s command. What they found was devastation.
Under the burning Montana sun, the naked bodies of their comrades were already beginning to decompose. The first group they encountered belonged to L Company, led by Custer’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun. The men still lay in the defensive positions they had taken in their final moments on Calhoun Hill. Elsewhere, bodies lay scattered with no clear formation.
It was unclear whether the men had fled in panic or whether their bodies had been rearranged after death. Another group lay on the hill later named Last Stand Hill. Private Jacob Adams was the first to spot the commander of the Seventh Cavalry. He immediately called Captain Benteen, who hurried over to confirm the identity of the corpse.
After a moment, Benteen could only say, “By God, there he is. ”
George Custer’s body lay near the top of Last Stand Hill, only about six yards from where his brother Tom had fallen. Like nearly all the other men on that slope, Custer had been stripped of everything except his socks. Unlike many of his soldiers, his scalp was still intact.
Tom’s was not. Custer’s body was propped upright against two other fallen soldiers, as if he were simply resting. His face looked more like that of a sleeping man. Lieutenant James Bradley later noted: “The rest of Custer’s men, about 200 of them, lay scattered over the ground between the hills and the river, near the abandoned camp of Sitting Bull.
” In a letter later published, Bradley tried to reassure the public by claiming the bodies were not badly mutilated. He insisted what he saw consisted only of mercy killings of already wounded men, but this was pure fiction. Private Charles Windolph, who had also accompanied Benteen to the battlefield, later explained Bradley’s lies. He was just being kind to the families.
The bodies were horribly mutilated, some in ways too gruesome to describe. Countless corpses had suffered appalling injuries. Isaiah Dorman, the Black interpreter and scout, was treated with particular cruelty. His attackers had even placed a cup of his blood beside his body, as a kind of mockery.
Many soldiers had been scalped. Others were riddled with arrows or mutilated with clubs, axes, or hatchets, long after death. The entire battlefield was a grim display of vengeance. Custer himself had not escaped such treatment.
Official reports mentioned only his visible wounds: a bullet through the chest below the heart, another through his left temple, both fatal, and a stab wound in his thigh. But the men agreed to remain silent about the humiliating placement of an arrow driven into his body. His body lay beneath his clothing. Revealing that detail, they thought, would only torment his widow.
Tom Custer’s condition was far worse. He had been scalped, his skull crushed, and his abdomen cut open. Without a tattoo on his arm, he could not have been identified. Because two days had passed since the battle, the corpses were already decomposing when found.
The Montana summer heat only made matters more gruesome. Colonel Gibbon admitted the dead were already emitting an unpleasant odor when he arrived on the scene. The sight and smell haunted the survivors for the rest of their lives. Most people assume Benteen found all the men on Custer’s Hill dead upon arrival, but that was not entirely true.
Private Jacob Adams, who said he discovered Custer’s body, reported another shocking find on the same hilltop. As the soldiers searched through the slaughter, they heard a weak, pained sound among the bodies. A survivor called out, but it was not a human. It was a horse.
A 14-year-old bay gelding named Comanche. He belonged to one of Custer’s officers, whose body lay nearby. Comanche had suffered seven bullet and arrow wounds and had gone days without water. Yet he remained beside his fallen rider.
Adams and the others rushed to help him. No cavalryman lacked respect for his horse. Despite his injuries, Comanche managed to stand and was led back to the remaining men of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment. Although other horses were recovered in the following days, Comanche’s resilience and solitary presence during the final battle earned him special status.
He healed, lived the rest of his life as the regiment’s mascot, and died in 1891. He would become one of only four horses in American history to receive a full military funeral. June 27 was spent counting and identifying the dead. Many bodies could never be identified, and even with identified bodies, the identification was often uncertain.
Nineteen men were not found at all. Over the decades, bones continued to turn up around the battlefield, suggesting some soldiers had indeed escaped the initial slaughter before being tracked down and killed. On June 28, the grim work of burial began. Benteen counted 208 bodies to be buried.
Bradley recorded 206. Whatever the exact number, the burials were done in haste. The men feared Sitting Bull’s warriors or other hostile groups might return. There was no time to dig individual graves for more than 200 fallen soldiers.
Most were laid in shallow pits where they lay, or buried together in mass graves. Some of the dead received grave markers. Custer and his brother Tom were buried side by side. Their grave at the foot of the hill was barely two feet deep, just enough to cover them.
Wrapped in canvas, the brothers were laid side by side, and stones and a small sled were placed over the site to keep scavengers away. Accounts of who dug the grave vary; several men claimed the honor. By 6:30 p. m.
, the burials were complete. General Terry was eager to leave and begin the long march back to the Big Horn River. Fifty wounded men needed treatment, and news of the disaster had to reach authorities as quickly as possible. The return trip to the confluence of the Little Bighorn and Big Horn Rivers, where the steamboat Far West awaited, was grueling.
Medical officers tended the wounded as best they could. At least one man required amputation, and several others succumbed to their injuries before reaching the boat. The aftermath weighed heavily on the survivors. Major Reno sought solace in alcohol, drinking forty gallons of whiskey in the 22 days after his return from Little Bighorn.
Captain Benteen also numbed himself with drink, which eventually led to a heated, drunken confrontation with Captain Thomas Weir. Weir accused Benteen of abandoning Custer on the battlefield, a charge Benteen refused to accept. He challenged Weir to a duel to defend his honor, but Weir refused. Weir himself did not escape the psychological toll of what had happened.
Guilt and tension consumed him, and in December 1876 he was found dead in a hotel room in New York. Meanwhile, the steamboat Far West raced up the Missouri River with the grim news and 38 wounded soldiers aboard. The ship set new speed records by covering the 710 miles back to Fort Abraham Lincoln in less than three days. The sound of the steamboat’s arrival woke Libbie Custer before dawn on July 6.
Not long after, around 7:00 a. m. , several senior officers of the fort knocked on her door. Libbie hurried to let them in.
By then, her sister-in-law Maggie, the wife of Lieutenant James Calhoun, was also awake and desperately seeking news of her family. The officers led the women into the parlor and broke the devastating news. Libbie and George had been in love since their teenage years and had been married for twelve years. Their surviving letters show a deep, loving bond, making his loss unbearable for her.
Lieutenant Gurley later said that bringing the news to Libbie was one of the hardest tasks he ever had to perform. He remembered the sorrow of that moment: those desperate women, their uncontrollable sobbing, grief pouring out without any comfort. Despite the shock, Libbie refused to let her grief stop her from doing what she thought was right. She insisted on accompanying the officers as they informed the other 26 women in the fort who were now widows.
From that moment on, Libbie Custer’s entire life revolved around what she had lost on that battlefield. For the rest of her life, she worked to protect her husband’s reputation and publicly placed the blame for the disaster on Reno and Benteen. She maintained that belief until her death in 1933. News of the defeat became public the very next day.
Washington received the telegram that morning. Only three days earlier, the nation had celebrated its centennial. Now it was in shock. Newspapers were full of the story, and speculation ran high.
Who was responsible? Custer’s recklessness, the decisions of Reno and Benteen? The country could do nothing but mourn one of the most devastating losses the U. S.
Army would ever suffer at the hands of Indigenous forces.