Reno's Valley Fight

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

Major Marcus Reno had been ordered to attack, and so he attacked. This is not a complicated fact, but it has spent a hundred and fifty years being made complicated by men who were not there. Reno crossed the Little Bighorn River on the afternoon of June 25, 1876, formed his three companies into a column, and galloped down the valley toward the largest gathering of Lakota and Cheyenne people on the northern plains. He had perhaps 175 men. The village had perhaps 1,800 warriors. He did not know the second number when he started. By the time he learned it, he was already committed.

The valley of the Little Bighorn is wide and flat at this point, a good mile across, the river running along the western edge with a fringe of cottonwood timber, the bluffs rising sharply on the east. Reno's battalion came out of the hills to the southeast, crossed the river at a ford, and formed a column of fours for the charge. The plan, as Reno understood it, was that Custer's battalion would support him from the right. Custer's battalion did not appear.

What appeared instead was a cloud of dust.

Low Dog, an Oglala Lakota leader who was in the village that morning, said afterward: "I heard the alarm but I did not believe it. I thought it was a false alarm. I did not think it possible that any white men would attack us, so strong as we were." The village was strong. Sitting Bull had called the bands together for the summer hunt, and they had come from every direction: Hunkpapa, Oglala, Minneconjou, Sans Arc, Blackfoot Lakota, Brule, and Northern Cheyenne. The camp stretched for more than two miles along the river. The pony herd alone numbered in the thousands.

Reno dismounted his men about a mile from the southern end of the village and formed a skirmish line across the valley floor. The troopers knelt in the grass and fired toward the lodges. The range was long and the results were modest. What was not modest was the response.

Reno himself described what he saw: "The very earth seemed to grow Indians and they were running towards me."

They came on horseback and on foot, from the village and from the hills to the left, riding in the loose, fluid style that made Plains warriors so difficult to fight with conventional infantry tactics. Lieutenant George Wallace, commanding Company G, watched them come: "They were fighting in regular Indian style, riding up and down, some few on foot and some few on the hills to the left passing around and coming in on our rear, filling the whole space in our rear, a mile or two, with scattered Indians riding about."

The warriors were working around the flanks. The left flank was the dangerous one. If the warriors got behind the skirmish line and cut off the ford, Reno's battalion would have nowhere to go. The skirmish line began to contract. The men on the left fell back toward the timber along the river. The line that had stretched across the valley floor was now bent into a curve, and the curve was getting smaller.

Waterman, an Arapaho warrior who was present, remembered the moment when the outcome became clear: "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."

Sitting Bull, who was not a war chief but a holy man and the spiritual center of the gathering, moved through the village directing the women and children and old men to flee to the north and west, away from the fighting. He had seen this kind of thing before. He had dreamed of it, in fact. At the Sun Dance three weeks earlier, he had received a vision of soldiers falling into camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky, upside down, their hats falling off. He had told the people the soldiers would come and the people would win. The soldiers had come.

Reno pulled his skirmish line back into the cottonwood timber along the river. The timber offered cover but not safety. The warriors followed the soldiers into the trees, and the fighting continued in the brush and shadows for another thirty minutes. Then Reno ordered a retreat, and the retreat became a rout, and forty men were killed getting back across the river. The survivors climbed the bluffs on the east bank and dug in to wait for Benteen.

The marker here stands near the place where Reno's skirmish line formed and collapsed. It quotes Reno and Wallace and Waterman and Low Dog, four men who saw the same event from four different positions and described it in four different ways, all of them accurate. The valley is quiet now. The grass grows the same way it grew that afternoon, long and dry in the June heat, moving in the wind off the Wolf Mountains.

See also

• Reno's Valley Fight at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Erected by National Park Service)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Big Horn County