Custer's Black Hills Expedition of 1874
ONe hundred years ago next month, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and some 225 troopers of the famed Seventh Cavalry Regiment crossed a low ridge above MOntana's Little Bighorn River. In the valley below, partly obscured by clumps of cottonwoods lingin the stream, lay a massive encampment of hostile Cheyenne and Sioux. As Custer and his men rode into history, they could not know that they were facing the largest assemblage of warriors ever gathered in the century long struggle for dominance of the Amercian West. Although the disaster at Little BIghorn, JUne 25, 1876, is the most famous incident of that struggle (and the subject controversy to this day), its background is less well known. The battle was the direct culmination of a chain of events that began two years earlier at Fort Abraham Lincoln on the banks of the Missouri river (the site of present day Bismarck, N.Dak.). Little was known of the Black Hills region in 1874. Rumors of fabulous mineral wealth in the area appealed to a country in thr grip of a severe ecominomic depression. They were viewed somewhat differently however by the northen plains tribes who held that the Black Hillls were sacred ground. The fact that the land
Classification
Stereographs
Description
a man on horseback with hundreds of people in the distance behind him
Credit Line
Gift of Dr. Charles F. Abell Jr. and Mrs. Genevieve Abell
