Battle of The Little Bighorn - The Role of Indian Noncombatants in Custer's Strategy

The Role of Indian Noncombatants in Custer's Strategy

Lt. Colonel George A. Custer's field strategy was intended to use noncombatants at the encampments at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

He intended to capture women, children, the elderly or disabled to serve as hostages and human shields. Custer's battalions intended to "ride into the camp and secure noncombatant hostages" and "forc the warriors to surrender". Author Evan S. Connell observed that if Custer could occupy the village before widespread resistance developed, the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors "would be obliged to surrender, because if they started to fight, they would be shooting their own families."

Custer asserted in his book My Life on the Plains, published just two years before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, that:

"Indians contemplating a battle, either offensive or defensive, are always anxious to have their women and children removed from all danger…For this reason I decided to locate our camp as close as convenient to village, knowing that the close proximity of their women and children, and their necessary exposure in case of conflict, would operate as a powerful argument in favor of peace, when the question of peace or war came to be discussed."

On Custer's decision to advance up the bluffs and descend on the village from the east, Lt. Edward Godfrey of Company K surmised:

" must …have counted on finding the squaws and children fleeing to the bluffs on the north, for in no other way do I account for his wide detour . He must have counted on Reno's success, and fully expected the scatteration of the non-combatants with the pony herds. The probable attack upon the families and capture of the herds were in that event counted upon to strike consternation in the hearts of the warriors, and were elements for success upon which Custer counted."

The Sioux and Cheyenne fighters were acutely aware of the danger posed by the military engagement of noncombatants and that "even a semblance of an attack on the women and children" would draw the warriors back to the village, according to historian John S. Gray. Such was their concern that a "feint" by Cpt. Yates' E and F Companies at the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee (Minneconjou Ford) caused hundreds of warriors to disengage from the Reno valley fight and return to deal with the threat to the village.

Custer proceeded with a wing of his battalion (Yates' Troops E and F) north and opposite the Cheyenne circle at a crossing referred to by Fox as Ford D which provided "access to the fugitives." Yates's force "posed an immediate threat to fugitive Indian families…" gathering at the north end of the huge encampment.

Custer persisted in his efforts to "seize women and children" even as hundreds of warriors were massing around Keogh's wing on the bluffs. Yates' wing, descending to the Little Bighorn River at Ford D, encountered "light resistance", undetected by the Indian forces ascending the bluffs east of the village.

Custer was almost within "striking distance of the refugees" before being repulsed by Indian defenders and forced back to Custer Ridge.

Captain Robert G. Carter, writing to author W.A. Graham in 1925, discussed the vulnerability of U.S. Army troops to interception and destruction by Indian defenders, outside the context of the Indian villages:

"Who knows that the same Indians might have done to Gibbon and Terry, had not Custer attacked …on the 25th, instead the 26th…and Sioux and Cheyenne forces "moving toward, do the very same thing – overwhelm them by force of numbers…"