The Day America Lost Its Best General — Custer At Little Bighorn, 1876

On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his 210 Seventh Cavalry men were defeated in less than an hour at the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana, where they faced the largest gathering of Plains tribes any white man had ever seen. Despite Custer's confidence in his cavalry's superiority and his belief that no force of Sioux or Cheyenne could stand against them, he was outflanked, outfought, and outnumbered by Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The battle resulted in the deaths of all white soldiers under Custer's command, with only one horse (Comanche) surviving. This defeat marked the last clear chance for the Plains nations to face the United States on relatively equal ground, after which the Lakota were never strong enough to win again and the buffalo country was finished as a way of being on the earth.