George Armstrong Custer in Montana:

An elegy of empire and resistance

If one listens to the wind across the low, rolling hills beside the Little Bighorn River, that wind carries layered voices: the measured tread of cavalry, the high cry of war whoops, and the quieter, unrelenting narration of dispossession. Few figures from the nineteenth-century American West are as freighted with myth and memory as Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. In the public imagination he was the rakish “boy general,” a Civil War celebrity who met a dramatic end—“Custer’s Last Stand”—on a summer day in Montana Territory. In Native memory, and in sober historical accounting, his life and death were instruments and symptoms of a much larger collision: the seizure of land, the destruction of sovereignty, and the acceleration of a settler colonial project that reshaped the Plains. This essay traces Custer’s significance in Montana history and the mark he left on the Native American populations of the region, drawing from battlefield records, tribal testimony, and recent scholarship that together complicate the old triumphalist narratives.

Custer's place in Montana's landscape is both literal and symbolic. In 1874 he led an expedition into the Black Hills—land guaranteed to the Lakota by the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie—where his scouts and accompanying geologists announced the discovery of gold. That announcement set in motion a torrent: gold fever, an influx of prospectors, the federal government’s abandonment of treaty promises, and the deployment of troops to “pacify” the Plains. In this chain of events, Custer’s expedition is a pivot; it transformed an already fraught reservation system into a flashpoint for open conflict. The National Park Service’s history of the Black Hills expedition and subsequent military campaigns makes plain that Custer’s movements were not isolated adventures but elements of federal policy that would make southern Montana and the surrounding territories into zones of permanent contestation. 

The dramatic focus of Custer’s legacy in Montana is the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25–26, 1876). Here, Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacked a large village of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho people; the fighting ended with the annihilation of Custer’s immediate command and a shocking public spectacle that riveted the nation. The battle’s tactical particulars—Custer’s division of forces, his dismissal of scouts’ counsel, and the size and cohesion of the Native encampment—are well rehearsed in both popular and archival sources. But to reduce the battle to the image of a doomed gallantry is to miss the asymmetrical stakes at play: the engagement occurred within an existential struggle for land, livelihood, and cultural survival. The Little Bighorn was not merely a battlefield moment; it was a repudiation, for a time, of the U.S. Army’s capacity to expel and subdue Plains peoples, and it intensified federal resolve to do so. 

For Montana itself—geographically and politically—the Little Bighorn crystallized a kind of historical energy that shaped place names, tourism, and civic memory. Towns, counties, forts, and museums in southeastern Montana wear Custer’s name or the echoes of the campaign: Custer County, Fort Custer, the Custer Battlefield Museum at Garryowen. These commemorations have been double-edged: they attract visitors and sustain local economies, but they also enshrine a one-sided narrative in the landscape, often privileging the military story over Native experience. Local historical institutions have, over the last several decades, begun to reckon with this imbalance by incorporating tribal voices and by reorienting interpretation toward the perspectives of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho participants. 

The consequences for Native societies were profound and far from ephemeral. Immediately after the battle, federal policy hardened; the public outrage and grief that followed Custer’s defeat transformed into political pressure to “settle” the Plains by force. Within months and years the U.S. Army redoubled campaigns, compelled surrenders, and constrained mobility—destroying the seasonal round of hunting and ceremony that sustained tribal life. As historians have argued, Custer’s defeat paradoxically gave Washington the political capital it needed to pursue policies that would finish the military and legal subjugation of the Plains peoples. The Little Bighorn thus functions in historical sequence as both Native resistance and as a catalyst for intensified dispossession. 

Yet to capture the mark Custer left, we must move beyond cause and effect charts and sit, as historians should, with testimony—those voices that survived the guns and the textbooks. Oral histories collected from Northern Cheyenne and other descendants illuminate how the battle and its aftermath are woven into communal memory: tales of bravery and cunning, grief for lives lost, and stories of the hollowing out of political autonomy. These oral histories refuse the solitary narrative that casts Indigenous actors as passive: they insist on agency—on the strategic choices of leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—and they make visible the human costs of a war whose proximate cause might be described, in blunt terms, as American expansion driven by mineral desire. The archives that preserve these accounts are not ancillary; they are primary sources for understanding the lived effects of Custer’s campaigns. 

The cultural afterlife of Custer—how he was remembered, mythologized, and marketed—also matters for Montana’s historical imagination. After the battle, Custer’s widow, Elizabeth “Libbie” Custer, tirelessly curated her husband’s image as a martyr and gallant leader. Her activities—lectures, memoirs, and correspondences—fed a creolized mythology that positioned Custer as the noble spearhead of civilization’s march across the Plains. For many decades that narrative dominated textbooks, monuments, and Hollywood, effectively marginalizing Native perspectives and sanitizing the brutalities of conquest. Recent scholarship and public history efforts, however, have sought to dethrone this one-dimensional portrayal. Works that interrogate “Custerology”—the study of Custer’s myth and its uses—explain how memory became a political tool, shaping national identity even as it occluded the realities of treaty violation and ethnic cleansing. 

An important dimension of recent reinterpretation is institutional: the very place where memory is anchored, the battlefield site, has been renamed and reinterpreted. In 1991 the Custer Battlefield was officially retitled the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, a semantic but meaningful move that acknowledged Native claims to the event’s significance and opened space for more balanced commemoration. The National Park Service today frames the site as “a place to honor and reflect” on sacrifices on both sides and to center Indigenous narratives of defense and survival rather than simply celebrating military heroism. This renaming is representative of a broader shift in public memory across Montana and the nation—one that has been contested and uneven but persistent. 

Still, the imprint of Custer on Native lives is not only symbolic. Policy outcomes—reservation confinement, the stripping of Black Hills rights, coerced assimilation via boarding schools, and the violent suppression of cultural practices—were part of the cascade that followed the 1870s campaigns. The legal and economic structures that emerged confined Indigenous people to marginal lands, severed access to traditional foodways (notably the buffalo), and precipitated cycles of poverty and dependency that echo to the present. In Montana this legacy shows in the socio-economic disparities between tribal and non-tribal communities and in continuing legal battles over land, hunting rights, and sacred sites. Custer’s role, in this light, is not merely that of a military man who died in battle; he is a hinge figure whose actions and their repercussions accelerated the remaking of Indigenous futures on terms forced by the federal state. 

Yet the story is not only one of dispossession. Native communities have been resilient, adaptive, and insistently narrative. The oral histories and tribal commemorations retell the Little Bighorn as a vital assertion of sovereignty, a moment of collective defense that sustained identity even in defeat. In museum galleries, in powwows, and in classroom curricula increasingly informed by tribal scholars, the narrative has been rebalanced. Historians now work collaboratively with tribes to foreground Indigenous evidence and to interpret the battlefield as a shared place of memory—one in which Custer is a character in a larger drama, not its protagonist. 

What then is the historian’s verdict on Custer’s significance in Montana? He is both less and more than the romantic silhouette burned into postcards and films. He is less because the “last stand” legend obscures the political and economic forces that produced the conflict; it paints Custer as fate’s victim rather than as an agent of a federal program that sought to open Indigenous lands to settlement. He is more because his actions—military, rhetorical, and exploratory—helped catalyze a decisive era in Montana’s formation: an era in which indigenous sovereignties were broken, reservation systems were solidified, and the map of the northern plains was redrawn. To walk the Little Bighorn today is to feel both the ache of absence and the stubbornness of survival. It is to know that landscapes remember not only events but the ideologies that made those events possible. 

Finally, historical memory is never inert. The work of historians, tribal elders, and public servants in Montana is to keep memory honest—neither to canonize Custer as a tragic hero nor to reduce Native people to footnotes. The closer we come to integrating archival records, oral testimony, and critical scholarship, the more the Little Bighorn ceases to be a simple symbol and becomes, instead, a complex teacher: about courage and cruelty, about treaty and treachery, about the ways in which a single figure can come to occupy an outsized role in a landscape’s moral geography. In that telling, Custer’s true mark on Montana is not a single monument or a county name; it is the enduring conversation between past and present about who belongs and who has the right to tell the story.

Selected sources

National Park Service, “Story of the Battle” and Little Bighorn Battlefield pages. 

Britannica, “George Armstrong Custer” biography and Little Bighorn entry. 

Time Magazine, “Why We've Gotten 'Custer's Last Stand' Wrong for Nearly 150 Years.” 

D. Johannesen, “Depictions of American Indians in George Armstrong Custer” (MDPI Humanities). 

University of Chicago Press, Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars (overview). 

Oral history collections of Northern Cheyenne descendants (archives).