Historian Donovin Sprague reframes Little Bighorn through Lakota memory and survival

RAPID CITY – Long before highway signs renamed it Little Bighorn National Monument, Lakota and Cheyenne families knew every draw, ridge and river crossing on that ground by the stories of their own relatives.

Historian and author Donovin Sprague spent an evening walking local listeners back across that contested landscape, from the chaos of Custer’s attack to the grief-stricken camp at Lodge Grass, the starvation march to Slim Buttes, and the long fight to carve Native names into the stone of the Indian Memorial.

Speaking to a full house, Sprague braided military detail, oral history, genealogy and personal memory into a narrative that insisted: this is not just Custer’s story, it is a Lakota and Cheyenne family story that stretches from the Bighorn River to Cheyenne River, Standing Rock and beyond.

Sprague began with numbers that non-Indian historians often favor.

The battle on the bluffs and in the village

On June 22, 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer moved toward the Little Bighorn with 647 men in 12 companies of the 7th Cavalry. With him were 35 Indian scouts, Arikara, Crow and a few Lakota, plus civilian scouts, interpreters and mule packers. Custer also brought his brothers Tom and Boston and a nephew who signed on as a beef herder.

Custer split his regiment, keeping Companies C, E, F, I and L under his direct command while Maj. Marcus Reno and Capt. Frederick Benteen led other companies on separate routes. Reno was ordered to strike the south end of the vast Lakota and Cheyenne village. Benteen rode farther south to look for additional camps and then return. By the time Benteen came back, Reno had already fought in the timber and pulled his men onto the bluffs, digging in under fire. “When he comes back, Reno has already dug in, and he’s, you know, under fire,” historian Donovin Sprague said. “A lot of the heat has went off of them to the north.”

On those bluffs, long simmering tensions surfaced. Benteen and Reno both had sharp differences with Custer. As heavy gunfire rolled from the north, Capt. Thomas Weir pressed to move toward Custer’s position. “He said, ‘Well, Reno, you’re not going to do anything. Have us check on Custer,’” Sprague told the audience. Weir finally disobeyed orders, pushed out to what is now Weir Point, and then had to fight his way back after being pushed by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.

While officers argued, Native families were trying to survive. Women, elders, children and disabled relatives moved away from the main fighting toward safer ground nearer the future trading post and highway, while warriors rode back and forth to check on them. “They didn’t just in all battles, they didn’t just abandon the camp because there were elders and there were children and disabled people, and they were coming back to check on them to see how their progress was,” Sprague said.

Memories of earlier attacks shaped every decision, especially Custer’s Battle of the Washita raid on a Cheyenne village. “Custer had overrun villages and was known to go in, you know, on the women and children,” Sprague said. “That’s what they knew about that, and they feared that.” By the time the guns fell silent on the northern ridges, Custer and his immediate command were dead. “Of course, the soldiers up here are all deceased,” Sprague said. “When the battle was over, it was over.”

When “done” meant done

Sprague described one of his favorite images in the Little Bighorn Visitor Center, a long mural of the aftermath.

In it, the bodies of soldiers lie scattered across the ridge while young Native men try on army trousers, boots and hats, “playing soldier” in a kind of dark mimicry of the invaders who had just been defeated.

That moment, he argued, points to a deeper difference in how each side understood war.

The hot walk to Lodge Grass

From Last Stand Hill, Sprague followed the Native exodus south. About 800 to 1,000 people left the Little Bighorn area, moving along what is now Interstate 90, down the Little Bighorn into the Big Horn River country.

Their first night’s camp was near today’s Lodge Grass, a wide green meadow most travelers speed past at 75 miles an hour.

“It was about 100 degrees on that Sunday of the battle, and they never even put up their teepees,” he said. “It was so hot, they just kind of collapsed out in that open meadow.”

Along that trail, south toward Wyola and on into the Tongue River country around Dayton and Ranchester, Wyoming, later generations would find a scattered record: soldier buttons, Seventh Cavalry insignia, pieces of equipment and, in some cases, bones.

Sprague described visiting a ranch where children playing in a hillside cave uncovered artifacts and human remains. A previous generation, the rancher told him, had placed skulls on fence posts as gruesome decorations and then used them for target practice.

“One thing that’s really sorry,” Sprague said quietly, “is that there were also skulls that came out of those caves… the generation before had put these on fence posts. They decorated their pasture, and they used it for target practice.”

From the Rosebud to Slim Buttes

Sprague reminded listeners that Little Bighorn was not an isolated clash but one episode in a running campaign.

Only eight days earlier, warriors had fought Gen. George Crook’s forces at the Battle of the Rosebud, a fight he and others will commemorate again this week. Some families were still mourning Rosebud dead when Custer rode into the valley of the Greasy Grass.

After Little Bighorn, the trail of conflict bent east into what is now Harding County, South Dakota, where Gen. Crook and Maj. Anson Mills led a desperate, under supplied column that struck a village at Slim Buttes.

There, in what soldiers later called the “starvation march,” the Army destroyed Indian winter food stores and then, short of provisions themselves, began killing their own mules for meat.

That is where the Seventh Cavalry banner, taken from Custer’s regiment, was recovered, flying outside a lodge some identified with American Horse’s people.

Sprague said he has long hoped to see that flag in person.

“I always wanted to see that flag,” he said. “Sometimes they put them in storage. But I want to see if it was broke, that it fits this piece,” he added, referring to the broken ferrule from a flagstaff found along the Native retreat route.

Whose names on the land?

For Sprague, the story is not just about movements of troops and warriors, but about how the United States later named the land, and who was erased in the process.

“As a historian, I almost had to go and research every superintendent who ever was at the Little Bighorn,” he said. “Because there’s like Luce Ridge, and all these names are none of our names. But you know, Calhoun and Reno Hill, and they have names for these, and none of them are with us, you know.”

He recalled how the site long carried the federal name “Custer Battlefield National Monument,” centering the fallen lieutenant colonel while Lakota and Cheyenne dead went unmentioned in the title.

That changed with the renaming to Little Bighorn National Monument and the creation of the Indian Memorial, a circular, open air stone structure next to Last Stand Hill.

“This is the Indian Memorial right here, the one Enos was part of,” Sprague said, referencing the late Venus “Enos” Poor Bear Sr., an Oglala Lakota elder who helped push for the project. “It’s circular, open to the air, and the sides are like marble, engraved with all their names.”

The memorial also features a large wrought-iron sculpture designed by artist Colleen Cutschall, selected through a national competition.

When Marlene Poor Bear asked whether her father’s name, Enos Poor Bear, appeared on the memorial, Sprague didn’t hesitate.

“Oh yeah, it is,” he said. “He was instrumental.”

Warriors, sacrifice and “brave boys”

During the talk, Sprague read out names familiar to students of Lakota and Cheyenne history: Rain in the Face, Crow King, Gall, Iron Dove, Black Moon, Big Road, Crazy Head, Two Moon, Brave Bear, Dewey Beard (Iron Hail) and many more, including warriors from the Cheyenne River bands Minneconjou, Itázipcho (Sans Arc), Oóhenu.pa (Two Kettle) and Sihásapa (Blackfoot).

He lingered on one especially painful episode: a group of young men who chose a form of sacrificial charge, fully expecting not to return.

“Because of our wellness and healing today, I don’t like to use the non-Indian word for picking one’s life,” he told the room. “But for a lot of groups it was honorable to sacrifice your life, and there was a big ceremony for these boys that they knew they were going to do this.”

Elder Kate Big Head, he noted, described watching that ceremonial procession as the young men rode out to meet the soldiers, dying quickly but remembered in story and prayer.

Crazy Horse, Hump and the horse herd

Audience members had specific questions about Crazy Horse and which relatives rode with him. Sprague explained that both Crazy Horse and the Cheyenne River leader Hump initially missed some of Reno’s early fighting because of trouble in the horse herd.

“I know they had some problems with the horses acting up,” he said. Hump’s mount was so wild he could not control it, and warriors had to ride a long distance “from here up to about where Fifth Street is,” in Sprague’s comparison to bring in fresh horses from a huge remuda.

By the time they remounted and rode hard for the north end of the fight, Reno’s phase was already shifting. Crazy Horse and Hump eventually converged on the sector around Calhoun Hill and what soldiers would later call Last Stand Hill, then traveled south together once the battle ended.

Later that summer, Crazy Horse led people through Sioux Pass into the Powder River country, where they stayed some weeks before their paths intersected again with Army movements near Slim Buttes.

From the pool hall mural to the archive

As the formal presentation gave way to smaller conversations, Sprague’s talk turned more personal.

He remembered growing up in Eagle Butte and Faith, spending his boyhood just minutes away from a pool hall that held a giant Budweiser mural of Custer’s “Last Stand” a romanticized, Euro-American fantasy painting he would later contrast with far older Native accounts.

“When I was a little kid, I grew up in a pool hall on our rez. From our back door I could be in the back door of this pool hall in four minutes, under four minutes,” he said, smiling.

Over time, he sought out different images created by Native artists, including a detailed Little Bighorn painting based on interviews at Standing Rock. In that work, he said, the faces are real people, warriors and relatives described by surviving witnesses, not mythologized poses.

Right there on the canvas, he pointed out, is Hump, along with figures labeled Crazy Horse, Rain in the Face, Crow King, Gall, Spotted Eagle, Two Moon, White Bull and others.

Living history: conferences, rides and reenactments

Sprague closed by connecting this history to the living calendar of events that continue today.

Each June, he noted, the Little Bighorn Associates convene at a hotel in Sheridan, Wyoming, bringing together historians for three days of talks and bus tours to the Rosebud and Little Bighorn battlefields. On June 25 – Victory Day in Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho memory – he’s scheduled around noon to speak under the National Park Service agenda, at the request of his own tribe and another.

He is also slated to speak at a separate gathering on privately held “200 Acres” along Reno Creek, where Custer advanced and where the “Lone Tepee” of a mourning Itázipcho family once stood before being burned by scouts.

South of the monument, on Real Bird family land along the Little Bighorn River, reenactors stage mounted portrayals of the battle each year, while the town of Hardin offers a more tourist oriented show.

“If any of you want to do reenactment and ride horses, show off a little bit…” he joked, before sharing a sober story about a toddler nearly thrown when a reenactor’s horse spooked during a photo-op.

Sprague, whose forthcoming 500 page book includes major chapters on Little Bighorn, Rosebud, the Ghost Dance and Cheyenne River figures such as Iron Lightning, said it has taken about seven years to push the manuscript toward publication.

As the evening ended, community members lined up to have books signed, compare family trees and plan their own trips north, some for the first time, others following the path of fathers and grandfathers who made a point of riding in on Victory Day.

(Contact Ernestine Anunkasan Hopa at editor@nativesunnews.today)

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