--- title: The True History of Custer's Last Stand description: How General Custer became a hero in American history- and why that perspective is complicated by the Native American experience of his most famous battle. canonical: https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-06-25T11:00:36.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-19T07:24:43.175Z article:section: History og:title: The True History of 'Custer's Last Stand' og:description: We're talking about 'Custer's Last Stand' all wrong. og:url: https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt81f17a4707a9e065/698a3e0909208f384341a75e/general-custer-little-big-horn-battle-0.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: Custer's Last Stand By Paxson og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The True History of 'Custer's Last Stand' twitter:description: We're talking about 'Custer's Last Stand' all wrong. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt81f17a4707a9e065/698a3e0909208f384341a75e/general-custer-little-big-horn-battle-0.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why We've Gotten 'Custer's Last Stand' Wrong for Nearly 150 Years > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=892841a7-01e6-40b8-b508-9ceae996e9f3&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=892841a7-01e6-40b8-b508-9ceae996e9f3&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Why We've Gotten 'Custer's Last Stand' Wrong for Nearly 150 Years [Watch (HLS stream): Why We've Gotten 'Custer's Last Stand' Wrong for Nearly 150 Years](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/7zT5yC65.m3u8) (8:42)  _Published 2023-06-25. Sometimes to get remembered in history, you need a great publicist. This weekend marks the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn—also known as ‘Custer’s Last Stand’—a chapter in U.S. history that some historians are arguing needs a rewrite._  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jun 25, 2023 11:00 AM UTC Sometimes to get remembered in history, you need a great publicist. This weekend marks the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn—also known as ‘Custer’s Last Stand’—a chapter in U.S. history that some historians are arguing needs a rewrite.  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jun 25, 2023 11:00 AM UTC Sometimes to get remembered in history, you need a great publicist. This weekend marks the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn—also known as ‘Custer’s Last Stand’—a chapter in U.S. history that some historians are arguing needs a rewrite. The story American students are generally taught is that[ “in one of the most decisive battles in American history,”](https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/news/little-bighorn-battlefield-national-monument.htm) Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 men from five companies of the Seventh infantry cavalry heroically died on June 25, 1876, in a sneak attack by Native Americans in what’s now Montana. It was part of the broader crackdown by the U.S. government on Native Americans, who were seen as threatening innocent white settlers. So how did a defeat become viewed as one of the greatest noble tragedies in American history? A persistent lobbying campaign by Custer’s widow, for one, and because the story of Custer as a martyr fit neatly in the larger story that Americans wanted to tell about the nation’s push westward after the Civil War, historians say. Only in recent years have we begun to learn more about the perspective of Little Bighorn from its Native American victors, whose roots at that site go back decades before the settlers arrived—and started to rethink the legacy of the man who led the charge. “When we think of Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of Little Bighorn… we should think of it as a successful defense by Native people against an attempted act of genocide,” says Lindsay Stallones Marshall, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, who got her start teaching about Custer as an AP U.S. History teacher. Marshall is writing a book on how distorted narratives about the “Indian wars” after the Civil War made their way into schools. The answer reveals a potent mix of the powerful who engage in history making: soldiers burnishing their own reputations, loved ones honoring family members, lawmakers lobbying for federal dollars, and textbook writers mythologizing American Manifest Destiny. “Textbooks are a specific kind of document designed for a specific purpose, and it’s not simply to tell students what happened in the past, but to give them a particular view, particularly of the American past,” says Marshall. Some of the early narratives about Custer came from the man himself; because of his celebrity as a Civil War hero, Custer ghost-wrote newspaper dispatches in which he pretended to be a correspondent and inflated his own role in battles and military exploits. (A couple of newspapers published these posthumously, acknowledging Custer as the author.) But Marshall says a bigger reason ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ is so well known is because of the military officer’s widow, Elizabeth “Libbie” Bacon Custer, who worked to burnish her husband’s legacy. She published the 1876 bestseller _A Popular Life of General Custer_ with Frederick Whittaker and a memoir _Boots and Saddles_ in 1885, both of which glorified Custer’s exploits in battle. She also came out with a pamphlet defending her husband after one of the men who commanded a separate operation, Frederick Benteen, claimed that Custer recklessly endangered his troops. Over the next few decades, she wrote, and encouraged journalists to write, newspaper articles about her husband and organized commemorations of the battle and statues of him.  Portrait of General George A. Custer with his brother, Tom, and wife, Libbie. Corbis/Getty Images Part of the reason Libbie’s efforts were so successful is that no one from Custer’s five companies survived the battle, and Mark Kellogg, a journalist from the Bismarck _Tribune_ who had been covering Custer that summer, was also killed in the fight. This left a lot of gaps to fill in over the years—and opportunities to reframe the defeat. Many Custer experts don’t even know where the phrase “Custer’s Last Stand” comes from. But what they do know is that Libbie’s campaigning helped galvanize a cottage industry of amateur historians going out to the battlefield site looking for artifacts and trying to understand what exactly happened in the battle. During that time, several Indian wars veterans associations were also schmoozing members of Congress and valorizing Custer for introducing “civilization” to the West as a way to try to increase the size of military pensions and expand eligibility. They were pushing for the government to offer pensions to everyone who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn and all Indian wars beyond enlisted soldiers, as well as expand access to soldiers’ homes and healthcare for those who had been wounded. In 1917, in part thanks to these lobbying efforts, Congress approved a new system of compensation for military veterans that included more people who served in the post-Civil War Indian wars. Marshall’s research found that accounts praising Custer seeped into textbooks, which perpetuated Custer’s heroic reputation for generations to come. One 1880 textbook said that while Custer lost the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Native Americans were “soon beaten on every hand.” By the 1920s, most textbook narratives sounded like a 1919 textbook _Our United States_, which described Native American resistance as a “hopeless struggle…against the tide of civilization.” Over the last century, Marshall found that textbooks tend to depict Native Americans as “inconvenient” to the “triumphal story of American expansion.” Native Americans are described as “an obstacle to progress,” as Marshall puts it. “Assimilation into American society,” according to Marshall’s reading, is the only beneficial outcome of any encounter between the United States or settlers and indigenous peoples—and Custer’s story is instrumental in pushing that narrative.  Little Big Horn battlefield, 2019. Dukas/Universal Images Group/Getty Images In the 1920s, the author of a textbook for the dominant textbook publisher at the time, American Book Company, was going to leave out ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ because it didn’t change the course of western expansion, but Marshall found a revealing handwritten note in the publisher’s archives that said, “We shall have to make room for Custer.” The story of Custer was so inspiring that booksellers in the Northern Plain states told the American Book Company that they wouldn’t be able to sell a textbook that didn’t mention “Custer’s Last Stand.” American students today still learn some of these same lessons. “I did a bunch of forensic tracing and found phrases and specific details lifted straight out of books going all the way back to the 19th century,” Marshall says. “That’s how this framing remains preserved.” Students still tend to learn about Custer dying bravely during battle, for example, but not about the bravery of the Native Americans who defended themselves against settlers of European descent who were there illegally. What doesn’t fit neatly into the Custer story of the popular imagination is the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, which had given the area where the battle took place to Lakota. However, once gold was discovered in the Black Hills area where the battle occurred, settlers and miners flocked to the area. “These settlers were there against U.S. treaty law and native people were rightfully defending themselves,” says Marshall. Nor do American students often learn about the Battle of the Washita, which took place eight years before Little Bighorn and in which Custer led an attack on a village of mostly Southern Cheyenne people and rounded up women and children as prisoners. Still, “Custermania” grew during the golden age of Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century. A 1936 movie _Custer’s Last Stand_ showed the phrase had taken hold and may have helped popularize this framing. Films like the 1941 _They Died With Their Boots On,_ starring Errol Flynn as Custer and Olivia de Havilland as his Libbie Custer, came out in time for the U.S. entering World War II, bolstering patriotic feeling and support for the troops. One of the most reproduced lithographs of all time is an Anheuser-Busch ad depicting[ “Custer’s Last Fight,”](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah%5F326129) showing Custer waving a saber and Native Americans pointing their weapons at him; it hung in bars in the 19th and 20th centuries. ## ‘Most students never got that part of the history’ In the last three decades, the Native Americans’ side of the Battle of Little Bighorn—which they refer to as “Battle of the Greasy Grass”—has become better known, further complicating Custer’s legacy. Lakota historian Donovin Sprague cites the renaming of Custer Battlefield to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991, as “a beginning” for Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations to incorporate more of the Native American perspective in displays at the monument and around the battle site. (TIME declared, “The Winners Get Their Due” in the Dec. 9, 1991, issue, when Congress approved a bill renaming the site.) “People are just beginning to see that it isn’t just this black-and-white, cowboys versus Indians theme, and that’s the way that it’s been portrayed in popular culture and Westerns,” says Mandy Van Heuvelen, a South Dakota native and enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who is a project manager at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum. Traditionally, the Native American side of the Battle of Little Bighorn has been passed down through families; she learned from her grandfather that his grandmother witnessed the battle. “Maybe we shouldn’t hold \[Custer\] on as high of a pedestal as we have,” she says. “It’s important to understand the history from multiple points of view.” **Read More:** [_Without Indigenous History, There Is No U.S. History_](https://time.com/6274071/us-history-indigenous-americans/) That perspective is slowly coming to the classroom, too. Donovin Sprague, a descendent of Crazy Horse, who led the Native Americans to victory in the Battle of Little Bighorn, now teaches the Native American side of this history at Sheridan College in Sheridan, Wy. “Most students never got that part of the history,” Sprague says. Every year, educator Jim Real Bird orchestrates a reenactment of the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana featuring about 150 participants. He says the goal of this year’s event is to feature Native Americans and focus on their often downplayed victory in the battle. “That’s why we do the show,” he says. “It heals people.”  Chief Crazy Horse, circa 1870. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images In the aftermath of [George Floyd’s 2020 murder](https://time.com/5847967/george-floyd-protests-trump/) and the conversation it sparked about the history of underrepresented voices in America, Native Americans and their supporters found a new opportunity to voice their concerns about the predominantly white men lionized in the nation’s monuments—Custer included. In Oct. 2020, the National Park Service announced plans to build a new visitors center on the site of Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument to offer more educational programming on the tribes that fought in that battle. In 2021, in Monroe, Mich., where Custer and his wife grew up, residents called for the monument of Custer on horseback to be removed. At a June 15 Monroe City Council meeting via Zoom, the city clerk read out a letter from George “Chip” Armstrong Custer IV, one of Custer’s descendants, against the removal of the monument, arguing that Custer and fellow U.S. military officers were simply following orders: “Custer has become the poster boy for all wrongs committed against the American Indian during our roughly 250 years as a nation.” The next month, the City Council unanimously approved a plan to develop, with local schools and Native American groups, a plan to expand the site of the monument to include a more complete representation of Custer’s military career and Native American perspectives. (That project and the fight to remove the monument stalled in 2022.) Marshall hopes illuminating how Custer became a heroic fixture in American memory will help Americans think more critically about their monuments, their reenactments, their oral histories, and their textbooks. “The stories we tell give us the reasons for acting the way that we do,” says Marshall. “So I think it’s really important to understand where our stories come from, so that we can correct them when they lead us astray.” _\-With reporting by Arpita Aneja_ ## Transcript [00:00] Unknown: The narrative of kind of how the West was won begins [00:07] to change over time. And people are just beginning to see that [00:13] it isn't just this black and white, you know, cowboys versus [00:17] Indians kind of thing. And that's the way that it's been [00:21] portrayed in media or popular culture or movies. [00:30] Anyone who's ever gone to school in the U.S. probably remembers [00:34] these three words from history class, Custer's Last Stand. [00:38] The event referred to as Custer's Last Stand was a battle [00:41] that took place on the northern plains, where we call Montana [00:45] today, in late June of 1876. The story goes that Custer, who was [00:49] a civil war hero, very gallant officer in the 7th Cavalry, was [00:53] attacked in a sneak attack by a huge group of Native people led [00:57] by Sitting Bull, and it was a shocking defeat. He gallantly [01:01] fought to the last. There are all these paintings of him [01:05] standing next to his fallen horse and comrades with, you [01:08] know, a pistol in each hand. And his entire unit was wiped out. [01:12] And this sent shockwaves throughout the nation and [01:15] spurred the U.S. military to crack down on Native nations and [01:19] protect what they termed innocent settlers from Native [01:23] warriors who were the villains in this story, who stood in the [01:27] way of westward expansion. So that's the story most of us know [01:31] and what the textbooks don't necessarily teach students is [01:35] the settlers were there illegally, the area where the [01:38] battle took place, gold had recently been discovered in the [01:42] Black Hills, which under the Treaty of Fort Laramie had been [01:46] promised to Lakota Nation for all time. And Lakota Nation [01:49] continues to contest this. And so the settlers were there [01:53] against U.S. treaty law, and Native people were rightly [01:57] defending themselves. And then the military came in and faced [02:00] with the choice between upholding treaty law and telling [02:04] the settlers, you know, forcibly removing the settlers, they [02:08] chose to protect settlers who were breaking the treaty law. In [02:12] addition to that, Custer wasn't tricked, he wasn't led into a [02:16] trap. He knew very well he sent his scouts out. He knew very [02:20] well there was an encampment of men, women and children, the [02:24] entire community along a river that Lakota people call the [02:27] "Greasy Grass", it's called the "Little Bighorn" in Western [02:31] sources. And he had a military success in 1868, called the [02:35] Battle of the Washita, which should more properly be termed a [02:39] massacre, where he attacked a village of mostly Southern [02:42] Cheyenne people under the leadership of a man named Black [02:46] Kettle, and open fire, took prisoners, women and children [02:50] who specifically targeted. He wrote in his book, "My Life on [02:53] the Plains", that was published in 1874, that he intentionally [02:57] captured women and children to try to break the spirit of the [03:01] warriors he was fighting. And Custer specifically was trying [03:05] to recreate that violence. So when we think about Custer's [03:09] Last Stand, or the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or whatever we [03:13] want to call it, we should think of it as a successful defense by [03:17] Native people against an attempted act of genocide. [03:22] This is the monument at Last Stand Hill. The Little Bighorn [03:28] National Monument, okay, they always had the monument there [03:33] for the soldiers. And there was nothing for the victors. No [03:38] mention, you know, growing up, we find, you know, in our [03:41] American Indian space programs, and most students never got that [03:45] part of the history. They—it looks like there's this land to [03:49] be taken and had for the just selling that and they didn't, [03:55] they don't realize that it was all inhabited. And it was all [03:58] occupied by American Indian people who had a different [04:03] concept of land ownership was, was sharing among themselves, [04:07] sharing the land, and nobody could fence the land, and call [04:12] that mine. And this is yours over here. [04:15] There's a whole narrative then that emerges about the Wild West [04:21] American Indians as savages right then, that justify the [04:25] need to conquer them or take their land. There's a whole part [04:32] of the, the narrative that feeds that and then, you know, the [04:35] fact that they won in this battle. I think that the story [04:39] emerges as a Custer as this hero, but over time, I think [04:43] historians, you know, uncovered, there are some big flaws that [04:48] were made and that whole campaign and we shouldn't hold [04:53] them on as high of a pedestal as, as we have. [05:00] Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Big Horn but this book [05:03] presupposes is, maybe he didn't. [05:06] The reason Custer's Last Stand becomes so powerful, I think in [05:12] public memory was, first of all because of the reporting [05:15] surrounding it. But also newspapers played a huge role in [05:18] inflating these conflicts because most Americans were [05:22] primed for news about military conflicts. And as soon as the [05:24] Civil War is over, they're looking for that sort of news [05:27] because of Custer celebrity and how well publicized he was. He [05:30] even ghost wrote newspaper dispatches, which he sent to be [05:34] published back east, pretending to be a correspondent inflating [05:38] his own role. And a couple of them were actually published [05:40] posthumously. And the newspaper editors highlighted the fact [05:44] that this is actually Custer writing about this. So he was [05:47] just a public figure at the point, but really where the [05:51] national imagination took hold of this story with the efforts [05:53] of his wife, Elizabeth Custer, after she was widowed, she [05:57] collaborated with another author and published a series of books [06:01] about Custer. Also, the image of Custer became very popular in [06:05] Wild West shows. And some early silent films, Errol Flynn [06:10] famously played Custer himself in "They Died with their Boots [06:14] On". So by the time public schooling is more widespread, [06:19] the textbooks are telling the story Custer's already enough of [06:21] a legend, that in the 1920s, the American Book Company, which was [06:26] the most popular textbook company in the country, tried to [06:29] publish a book without Custer because the author of this new [06:33] U.S. history textbook said this battle is not important. It [06:36] didn't turn any tides, it didn't have a lasting military impact. [06:40] It didn't change the course of westward expansion. We just [06:44] don't need Custer, the booksellers in the northern [06:46] plains states told the company we will not be able to sell this [06:50] textbook if Custer is not in it. The thing that's very important [06:53] to remember, in thinking about how we think about this period [06:57] of history is particularly when we talk about schooling, history [07:02] textbooks are not history books. And that's very hard for us to [07:06] understand sometimes, because a lot of times the only textbook [07:09] history books that we have read, but textbooks are a specific [07:11] kind of document designed for a specific purpose. And it's not [07:15] simply to tell students what happened in the past but to give [07:18] them a particular view, particularly of the American [07:20] past. That's why American history textbooks tend to shy [07:25] away from the fact that framers of the Constitution, founding [07:31] fathers who signed the Declaration, who argued for [07:34] liberty, were slaveholders. We mentioned it occasionally. But [07:39] we don't really ask students to wrestle with that contradiction. [07:42] And the same thing is true, especially with native history. [07:44] My grandfather's grandmother was a young girl at the battle, she [07:50] was around 16 years old, and there when Custer attacked, so [07:54] that history was really passed down to me through—through my [07:59] grandfather, I grew up in South Dakota and went to public [08:03] school, those histories weren't really brought into the [08:08] classroom, necessarily. And I almost in a way that I just [08:12] never even like put two and two together, of my own family [08:17] history and how it tied into the content or the curriculum that [08:22] we were learning in school. [08:24] And so the role that a you know, exciting battle like Custer's [08:28] Last Stand plays in the textbook is actually remaking American [08:32] identity. But that's at the expense of native people on [08:36] their sovereignty. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education/"},"headline":"Why We've Gotten 'Custer's Last Stand' Wrong for Nearly 150 Years","datePublished":"2023-06-25T11:00:36.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-19T07:24:43.175Z","description":"Why we've gotten 'Custer's Last Stand' wrong for 150 years.","url":"https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education/","keywords":["Education","feature","uspoliticspolicy"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt81f17a4707a9e065/698a3e0909208f384341a75e/general-custer-little-big-horn-battle-0.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Olivia B. 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This weekend marks the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn—also known as ‘Custer’s Last Stand’—a chapter in U.S. history that some historians are arguing needs a rewrite.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/7zT5yC65/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2023-06-25T10:30:00.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/7zT5yC65.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education/","duration":"PT8M42S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```