Lone Tipi

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

There is a ridge along Reno Creek, in the rolling country south of the Little Bighorn River, where a man on horseback can see a long way in several directions and not see much of anything worth worrying about. Dry grass, scattered sage, the creek bottom threading through the coulees below. On the morning of June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer rode along this ridge with roughly 600 men of the 7th United States Cavalry, and somewhere behind that ridge, in a shallow swale, stood a single tipi.

Custer knew it was there. His scouts had seen it. He stopped his column.

The tipi was not a home. It was a burial lodge, raised over the body of a Sans Arc Lakota warrior who had been killed eight days earlier at the Battle of the Rosebud, where General George Crook's command had fought Crazy Horse's warriors to a standstill on June 17. The man inside had been laid out in the Lakota way, his weapons and personal effects arranged around him, the lodge sealed against the living world. His people had left him there when they moved the great encampment north and west to the valley of the Greasy Grass, the river the soldiers called the Little Bighorn.

Custer's Crow and Arikara scouts had been warning him since before dawn that the village ahead was enormous, far larger than anything the army had encountered in years of campaigning on the northern plains. From a vantage point called the Crow's Nest, fourteen miles back in the Wolf Mountains, the scouts had seen the pony herd at first light, a dark mass on the hillsides that one of them compared to worms crawling in the grass. Half Yellow Face, the leader of the Crow scouts, had told Custer through his interpreter Mitch Bouyer: "You and I are going home today by a road we do not know." Custer had not been impressed. He had been on the plains many years, he said, and he had never seen a village that could not be taken.

He had also been told, or believed, that his regiment had been spotted and that the Lakota and Cheyenne would scatter if he did not attack immediately. Whether this was true is one of the questions that has occupied historians for a hundred and fifty years without resolution. What is certain is that Custer decided to attack on June 25 rather than wait for the converging columns of General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon, who were supposed to arrive from the north on June 26.

When the soldiers approached the lone tipi, a group of Lakota men who had been lingering near the burial lodge saw them coming and rode hard for the village. Custer watched them go. This was the moment, if there was a single moment, when the decision became irrevocable. The fleeing men would reach the village before any cavalry could. The village would know soldiers were coming. Custer ordered Major Marcus Reno to take his battalion of roughly 175 men, cross the Little Bighorn River, and charge the southern end of the village. Custer himself, with five companies of about 225 men, would swing north and strike from another direction.

Before the column divided, some of the soldiers broke open the burial lodge. Inside they found the body of the Rosebud warrior, along with the Sun Dance lodge poles from Sitting Bull's great ceremony of the previous weeks, and a drawing on a piece of hide that showed soldiers falling upside down into a Lakota camp. Sitting Bull had danced for three days at the Sun Dance, offering pieces of his own flesh to Wakan Tanka, and had received a vision: soldiers falling like grasshoppers from the sky, falling into the camp, and the voice of the Great Spirit saying, "I give you these because they have no ears." The soldiers who found the drawing did not know what it meant. They burned the tipi.

Lieutenant Edward Godfrey of Company K described the division of forces that followed: "Major Reno's battalion marched down a valley that developed into the south branch of a small tributary to the Little Bighorn ... the Indian trail followed the meanderings of this valley. Custer's column followed Reno's closely, bearing to the right and rear. The pack train followed their trail. Benteen's battalion was ordered to the left and front."

Benteen's battalion, the third piece of the regiment, was sent off to scout the bluffs to the south and left, in case any Lakota had fled in that direction. This meant that when the fighting started, Custer's five companies would be operating alone, with Reno's men committed to a frontal charge on the village and Benteen somewhere out of sight over the hills.

Moving Robe Woman, a Hunkpapa Lakota who was in the village that morning, described what she saw from the camp: "I saw a cloud of dust rise beyond a ridge of bluffs in the east. The morning was hot and sultry. Several of us Indian girls looked towards camp and saw a warrior ride swiftly, shouting that soldiers were only a few miles away, and that the women and children, including old men, should run for the hills in the opposite direction."

The warriors who had been at the burial lodge had done their job. The village had its warning.

Reno's charge down the valley floor lasted perhaps twenty minutes before the sheer weight of the Lakota and Cheyenne response drove him back into the timber along the river. Low Dog, an Oglala Lakota leader, said afterward: "The soldiers had crossed the river and were coming toward the camp ... there were not many soldiers, and I knew they would be beaten because there were many Sioux and Cheyenne." He was right. There were, by the best estimates, between 1,500 and 1,800 warriors in the encampment, against Custer's total force of roughly 600 men, now divided into three widely separated groups.

Custer's five companies were never seen alive by any white soldier again. They died on the ridges north of the village sometime in the early afternoon of June 25, 1876, in a fight that lasted perhaps an hour. The exact sequence of events on those ridges remains, after a century and a half of investigation, archaeology, and argument, genuinely unknown.

The lone tipi was ash by then. The Sans Arc warrior inside it had been dead for eight days, killed at the Rosebud in a battle that the army counted as a victory, though Crook had retreated to Wyoming afterward to rest and resupply. The warrior's name has not come down to us. He was one of the first casualties of the summer of 1876, and the soldiers who burned his lodge over him were among the last.

See also

• Lone Tipi at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Erected by National Park Service)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Big Horn County