About the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
On June 25 and 26, 1876, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defending their villages along the Little Bighorn River defeated the 7th U.S. Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. The monument near Crow Agency, in southeastern Montana, preserves 765 acres of that ground in two pieces: the main battlefield around Last Stand Hill, and the Reno-Benteen battlefield about three miles southeast, where the rest of the regiment held out on the bluffs.
The site's protection began as a graveyard. On January 29, 1879, the Secretary of War set it aside as a national cemetery to protect the soldiers' graves; in 1886 it became the National Cemetery of Custer's Battlefield Reservation, later shortened to Custer National Cemetery, which lies inside the park today. The Reno-Benteen ground was added in 1926, the War Department transferred the whole to the National Park Service on July 1, 1940, and on March 22, 1946, it was redesignated Custer Battlefield National Monument. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. A law signed December 10, 1991, renamed it Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and ordered an Indian Memorial, a shift that reframed the park from a shrine to one side into a place that interprets the battle from both.
The memorials tell that story in stone. The granite obelisk on Last Stand Hill was raised in July 1881 by the 2nd Cavalry over the soldiers' mass grave; the white marble markers scattered down the slopes, placed in 1890, show where troopers fell. Starting on Memorial Day 1999, red granite markers were added for warriors such as the Cheyenne fighters Lame White Man and Noisy Walking, and the Indian Memorial, a circular sandstone wall crowned by Colleen Cutschall's bronze "Spirit Warriors," was dedicated on June 25, 2003. A 4.5-mile tour road (9 miles round trip) connects Last Stand Hill with the Reno-Benteen site, and the Deep Ravine Trail leads on foot toward the river.
Collections and Research Services
The park holds an archival collection of 160,745 items: historic photographs, administrative records, oral histories, manuscripts, correspondence, artwork, maps, and resource-management files, alongside archeological material recovered on the field (cartridges, bullets, equipment, horse bones), Indian Wars-era uniforms and weapons, and ethnographic textiles and tools. Since 2011 the collection has been housed at the National Park Service's Western Archeological and Conservation Center in Tucson, Arizona, after decades in a basement that lacked climate control and fire protection; a full conservation survey was completed in 2013 and digitization is ongoing. The park states that it assists researchers studying the battle and its artifacts, so write or call ahead rather than expecting a reading room on site. Descendants of 7th Cavalry soldiers or of Native participants will also want the military and tribal records described in our guide to free family-history research, and finding where someone is buried covers national-cemetery interment searches.
Planning Your Visit
From Interstate 90 take exit 510 at the U.S. 212 junction and turn onto Battlefield Tour Road 756; mail goes to P.O. Box 39, Crow Agency, MT 59022, and the phone is (406) 924-9167. The park is open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day. In summer (Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day) the entrance gate, cemetery, and bookstore are open 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and the tour road, Last Stand Hill, and trails until 5:00 p.m.; in winter the gate is open 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and the road and trails until 3:30 p.m. Arrive at least 90 minutes before closing to drive the full road. Entrance fees are cashless: $25 per private vehicle, $20 per motorcycle, $15 per person on foot or bicycle. The main visitor center is closed for construction; a temporary contact station with orientation and the bookstore is open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pets must stay in vehicles. Check nps.gov/libi for construction updates. Elsewhere in Montana, Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site at Deer Lodge is also profiled on this site.
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