The battle, which resulted in the defeat of U. Most battles in the Great Sioux War, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, were on lands those natives had taken from other tribes since Already in , Crow chief Blackfoot had called for U. The U. Five of the 7th Cavalry's twelve companies were wiped out, and Custer was killed, as were two of his brothers, his nephew, and his brother-in-law. The total U. Public response to the Great Sioux War varied in the immediate aftermath of the battle.
Custer's widow Libbie Custer soon worked to burnish her husband's memory and during the following decades, Custer and his troops came to be considered heroic figures in American history.
The battle and Custer's actions in particular have been studied extensively by historians. Van de Water, which was the first book to depict Custer in unheroic terms. On the way he noted that the Crow hunted buffalo on the " Small Horn River ". It was located near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers, about 40 miles 64 km north of the future battlefield. In the latter half of the 19th century, tensions increased between the Native inhabitants of the Great Plains of the US and encroaching settlers.
This resulted in a series of conflicts known as the Sioux Wars , which took place from to While some of the indigenous people eventually agreed to relocate to ever-shrinking reservations , a number of them resisted, sometimes fiercely.
On May 7, , the valley of the Little Bighorn became a tract in the eastern part of the new Crow Indian Reservation in the center of the old Crow country. The geography of the battlefield is very complex, consisting of dissected uplands, rugged bluffs, the Little Bighorn River, and adjacent plains, all areas close to one another.
