ARLINGTON, Va. - s4story -- by Ed Lengel for David Bruce Smith's Grateful American Book Prize

The Battle of Little Bighorn, June 1876

Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong Custer, the commander of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, led one of the U.S. Army columns that moved along Montana's Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876. Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull, energized by a dream that seemed to foretell a great victory by his people, aligned with Crazy Horse; Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho leaders, to attack the Americans, who were decidedly more vulnerable by Custer's decision to split them into small detachments. Two of them were nearly destroyed; Custer's force of 210 men was annihilated–and although there are no eyewitness accounts of what actually happened, the battle–really a series of engagements–was a great, but Pyrrhic victory, for Sitting Bull's tribal coalition. Custer's death led to renewed U.S. determination to crush Native American independence—forever.

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For more information about the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Grateful American Book Prize recommends Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn (2010).

History Matters is a feature courtesy of the Grateful American Book Prize. For more book recommendations, information about the annual award, or to submit a book for the 2026 Grateful American Book Prize, visit https://gratefulamericanbookprize.org/.