On June 25 and 26, 1876, nontreaty bands of Teton Sioux (Lakotas) and Cheyennes defended their summer hunting encampment against the U.S. Army in a battle on Montana's Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) River. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer commanded the attacking forces. The principal Indian leaders included Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa), Crazy Horse (Oglala), Hump (Miniconjou), and Two Moon (Cheyenne).
During the battle, approximately two thousand warriors decisively defeated Custer's troops and routed U.S. Army reinforcements under the commands of Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen. Custer's entire force of 215 cavalrymen were killed, while the Indians reported having lost 32 warriors themselves.
In the years prior to the battle, many Lakota tribes, including the Hunkpapas, Oglalas, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, and Blackfeet, together with several Cheyenne and Arapaho bands, had steadfastly refused to be confined permanently to reservations. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty had promised that they could range the buffalo grounds of the upper Missouri as long as the herds of buffalo survived. These groups were bolstered in the summer months by reservation-based kinsmen who came north to join in the hunt. These "nontreaty" Indians frequently raided Montana tribes and white settlements. (The site of the Little Bighorn battle was actually within the boundaries of land reserved by the Crows.)
The U.S. government responded to this pattern of raiding by ordering all unsettled Sioux tribes to the Dakota agencies by January 31, 1876, declaring all who refused to be "hostile" and subject to military action. The Indians, in a coalition fashioned by Sitting Bull, a medicine chief, refused. After the battle, the peoples scattered and were relentlessly pursued by the army. This pursuit intensified after Custer's defeat so that by the winter of 1876-77, most bands had surrendered or escaped into Canada.
