Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2012
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 32:1 (Winter 2012).
Abstract
In the summer of 1876, the United States government launched the Great Sioux War, a sharp instrument intended to force the last nonagency Lakotas onto reservations. In doing so, it precipitated a series of events that proved disastrous for its forces in the short run and calamitous for the Lakotas in the much longer scheme of things.
On June 17, Lakotas and Cheyennes crippled General George Crook's l,300-man force at the Battle of the Rosebud in southern Montana. Eight days later and thirty miles to the west, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the "Boy General" of Civil War fame, led the 7th U.S. Cavalry into the valley of the Little Bighorn, a river Lakotas called the Greasy Grass. Along its banks sprawled the largest tipi village ever seen in the Great Plains, with camp circles housing thousands of people who responded to Lakota visionary Sitting Bull's freedom dream of retaining their way of life.
Comments
Copyright © 2012 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.