How Many Were Killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn?

History is often told from the perspective of the victors, but in the case of the battle fought on June 25–26, 1876, the most prominent accounts have been from the perspective of the vanquished. In the place the Lakota called Greasy Grass and the U.S. Cavalry called the valley of the Little Bighorn, a battle that would become known as Custer’s Last Stand entered American legend.

There is significantly less certainty about the cost of victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne than about the U.S. and allied defeat. Historians broadly agree that 268 soldiers, officers and others were killed during the three phases of the battle, including 210 men in the five units completely wiped out in “Custer’s Last Stand.”

Estimates for the warriors killed on the winning side vary much more widely, with reputable modern analyses ranging from around 40 to more than 100. The uncertainty stems partly from the way the battle was fought and ended and partly from how its history was written afterward.

On July 6, 1876, the East Coast newspapers published the first reports of the battle, in which several hundred soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer had attacked a temporary village of several thousand Lakota and their allies. Custer hoped to inflict a decisive defeat in the conflict over the Black Hills, a region spanning present-day South Dakota and Wyoming that was home to the Sioux Nation.

The U.S. commander had divided his force into three attacking groups. Six companies led by Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen had been pinned down in a tough and costly two-day, multiphase fight, while the five companies under Custer’s immediate command had been wiped out entirely. The breathless news reports of the battle put the U.S. death toll (of soldiers, officers and attached civilians) as high as 333, and suggested that Native casualties were at least that high.

The reports contained less information about the Native American death toll, as journalists tended to assume that Lakota and Cheyenne casualties exceeded those of the Army. An article in The New York Times reported that a Crow scout on the scene “believes Indians lost more than whites.” Crow scouts were Native warriors who served as auxiliaries to the U.S. Army. The New York Herald gave a hyperbolic report: “The Indian loss was very heavy, and it is said that after the battle was over … they were found piled up like cordwood, so effective was the fire of the soldiers.”

Reno, the highest-ranking surviving officer, gave the first formal military account of the battle on July 5, 1876. He estimated that 32 of his men had been killed in the charge on the village, another 18 had died during the overnight hilltop siege and that his forces had buried 204 bodies from Custer’s units. Reno said he saw the bodies of only 18 Indians, but suspected that many of the dead and wounded had been carried away as the groups from the village broke camp and dispersed.

Most early histories and analyses of the battle focused on the U.S. perspective, particularly the mystery surrounding Custer’s plans and actions and whether mistakes by Custer or Reno had sealed the 7th Cavalry’s fate. Because the conflict between the U.S. and the Lakota was ongoing, the many eyewitnesses to Custer’s defeat were neither available nor particularly sought out. The 1879 Court of Inquiry into Reno’s actions during the battle called no Native American witnesses from either side—neither the Crow scouts who had assisted the 7th Cavalry nor any of the Lakota and Cheyenne participants, who by then had begun giving their own accounts of the battle to outsiders.

Eight months after the battle, the U.S. Army commander at the Cheyenne River Agency, Colonel W.H. Wood, forwarded the testimony of Red Horse, a Lakota chief who had fought in the battle. Over the next few years, Red Horse gave several additional interviews through translators and created a set of 42 colorful ledger book drawings depicting the battle and its aftermath. In his 1877 testimony, Red Horse said “we lost 136 killed and 160 wounded” in the most intense part of the battle. In his ledger drawings, he depicted up to 60 individual dead Cheyenne and Lakota, although only 30 were drawn with blood coming from their mouths as a clear indicator of death.

In the decades that followed, dozens of accounts of the battle were recorded from Lakota and Cheyenne men and women. In 1931, a Hunkpapa Lakota named Moving Robe Woman gave her own account of how she joined in the battle following her brother’s death. “The brave men who came to punish us that morning were defeated; but in the end the Indians lost,” she said. “Over sixty Indians were killed, and they were brought back to the camp for scaffold burial. The Indians did not stage a victory dance that night. They were mourning for their own dead.”

In 1993, historian Richard Hardorff conducted a systematic analysis of recorded testimony. Among the 36 accounts he examined, estimates of Lakota and Cheyenne deaths ranged from 14 to 83, with most falling between 30 and 40. Based on the distribution, and his broader research, Hardorff concluded that the death toll was likely “thirty-one men, six women, and probably four infants.”

In his 2007 book The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn, Lakota historian Joseph Marshall III reported a similarly low death toll, writing of the scene after Custer’s force was wiped out: “the victors celebrated, treated the wounded, and gathered up their dead (which were less than forty overall).”

The National Park Service, which maintains the Little Bighorn Battlefield as a memorial to those who died there on the U.S. side and, more recently, the Lakota and Cheyenne sides, reports that between 30 and 100 Lakota and Cheyenne were killed. An NPS spokesperson familiar with the agency’s approach said, “When discussing Lakota and Cheyenne casualties, we use estimates or ranges because the historical record does not support a precise count.” While efforts to tally and reconcile names and numbers from eyewitness accounts can be helpful, the NPS believes that “they reflect individual knowledge, memory and experience rather than a complete accounting of everyone present.”

The death toll on the U.S. side was aided by military enrollment records and subsequent efforts to resolve discrepancies in the historical record. In April 1879, troops returned to the battlefield to gather the dead into a mass grave on Last Stand Hill, marked by a temporary monument made of cordwood and horse bones. In July 1881, Lieutenant Charles F. Roe of the 2nd Cavalry replaced it with the granite shaft that stands today, inscribed with 263 names: officers, enlisted men, Arikara scouts and civilians who died on the U.S. side. Even that list was incomplete: Five enlisted men who died of their wounds after being evacuated from the battlefield were not included. With them, the total rises to 268.

Despite its reputation, the Battle of the Little Bighorn was neither the deadliest nor the most lopsided defeat the U.S. Army suffered during a century of conflict with Native Americans. The 1791 Battle of the Wabash, fought in what is now western Ohio, saw Major General Arthur St. Clair’s force devastated in a matter of hours by a confederation of Miami, Shawnee, Lenape and other Native nations led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. More than twice as many U.S. soldiers and militia were killed that day as at the Little Bighorn—about 630, with an overall casualty rate of roughly 90 percent. The Native force lost only a few dozen warriors.