Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn at 150
- Chipco Preserve
- Jun 7
- 2 min read
This month marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, also remembered by many as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Today, Chipco Preserve begins a Facebook series following the campaign through eyewitness accounts, military reports, newspaper dispatches, Native testimony, battlefield chronology, and public memory.
The old story usually begins near the end: Custer, the 7th Cavalry, and the final moments on the ridge. That version became familiar because it was simple. It was also incomplete. It turned a larger campaign, a Native victory, a living village, military misjudgment, scouts, families, terrain, journalism, and national mythmaking into one man’s death.
The fuller history is harder. It is also more important.
The battle did not begin on June 25, 1876. It grew out of a wider military campaign, federal pressure on Native nations, federal treaty violations, moving villages, scouts reading the country, and the determination of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho people to defend their lives, families, and homelands. Before Custer reached the Little Bighorn Valley, General George Crook’s column had already been challenged at Tongue River Heights and then stopped at the Battle of the Rosebud.
The road to Little Bighorn was already contested.
This series begins before the battle because the battle itself cannot be understood without the road that led there. Some entries will be drawn from military reports. Others will use newspaper dispatches from correspondents traveling with Army columns. Others will turn to later Native accounts, including those of Red Horse and Wooden Leg, whose recollections help restore the village, family movements, and Native battlefield experience to the center of the story.
Some days may be skipped. The standard is substance. If a date does not offer a meaningful source, event, report, or interpretive point, we will not force it. This is not a countdown for its own sake. It is a public history series built on evidence.
Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn was a Native victory. It was a deadly military defeat for the United States. It was a village emergency and a command failure. It was a struggle over land and power, and it is a story carried by survivors, soldiers, scouts, Native witnesses, correspondents, family members, military investigators, and later monument builders.
Chipco Preserve’s anniversary series asks readers to slow down and move through the record carefully. The whole field includes land, movement, Native resistance, U.S. expansion, soldiers, scouts, families, horses, terrain, reports, newspapers, monuments, and memory.
Follow the series beginning today on Chipco Preserve’s Facebook page.
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