Battle of Little Bighorn
The Battle of Little Bighorn was fought between a regiment of the US 7th Cavalry led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and a force of Sioux and Cheyenne Amerinds on 25 June 1876, in what is now the state of Montana. Gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills in 1874: this had led to the inevitable massive and overnight influx of White prospectors into what was Amerind land: immediately the Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall, organized raiding parties on the White intruders.
By 1876, the US 7th Cavalry had been posted to protect the White prospectors: in June of that year, a single regiment - 655 men - of the 7th cavalry advanced on party of in excess of 4000 Sioux at the junction of two rivers, the Bighorn and the Little Bighorn rivers.
The White soldiers were, it transpired later, unaware of the actual size of the heavily armed Sioux force. Custer realized his error too late: in a desperate attempt to break the Sioux force, he personally led a frontal charge of 260 of his men into the waiting Amerinds: the charge failed and Custer and his tiny force were surrounded. Fighting standing literally back to back with each other, Custer and his White soldiers were slowly cut down one by one and all were killed.
Although this battle was a White defeat, it would be the last. Within a year, follow up operations by the White armies had crushed the last of the Sioux and Cheyenne resistance, most of the Amerind survivors were then moved to a reservation in Oklahoma. Isolated clashes then took place in the late 1870s, but by 1880 the conflict had all but petered out, only flaring up again briefly in 1890.
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