Hollow Horn Bear at the Little Bighorn — Fighting Reno and Custer (1876)

In June 1876, Hollow Horn Bear was twenty-six years old and camped with the great village on the Greasy Grass — the river the whites call the Little Bighorn. Thousands of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had come together with Sitting Bull rather than be driven onto the agencies, and three army columns were hunting them. According to the accounts he gave in later life, Hollow Horn Bear had been out with a party of Two Kettle Lakota searching for lost horses when they encountered soldiers of General Alfred Terry's command in the days before the battle. On June 25, when Custer's Seventh Cavalry struck the village, Hollow Horn Bear fought in both actions of that day — first against Major Marcus Reno's battalion, driven back across the river in the valley fight, and then in the fight that destroyed George Armstrong Custer's five companies on the ridge above the Greasy Grass. He said afterward that he had fought both Reno's men and Custer's personally. He was one of thousands of Lakota warriors that day — the day the people remember as their greatest victory, won in defense of their own families in their own camp. His recollections of the Custer fight were among those gathered from Lakota veterans in later decades, and historians still study them. Within a year of the victory the bands were forced to the agencies, and the Black Hills — guaranteed forever by the 1868 treaty — were taken. Hollow Horn Bear laid down the rifle and took up the harder fight: forty years of speaking, negotiating, and holding the government to its word. ——— CREDITS & SOURCES About: Chief Hollow Horn Bear (Matȟó Héȟloǧeča), Sicangu Lakota, 1850–1913. This is a compiled account, drawn from the sources below — not a first-person telling, though it follows the recollections he himself gave. Sources: Richard G. Hardorff (ed.), "Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight"; Frederic C. Wagner III, "Participants in the Battle of the Little Big Horn"; "Hollow Horn Bear," American National Biography (2000), by Duane Hollow Horn Bear; Wikipedia, "Hollow Horn Bear" (with full citations). Photo: Hollow Horn Bear, Bain News Service, 1913, Library of Congress (public domain). Shared in honor of Chief Hollow Horn Bear and his descendants.