The Battle of the Greasy Grass (Battle of Little Bighorn): The Complete Story in 18 Drawings

June 25th marks the anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, as it’s known to the Lakota. Who better to tell that story than Red Horse, a Minneconjou Lakota Sioux warrior who fought against George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry at that battle?

Red Horse was living on the Cheyenne River Agency, a reservation in South Dakota, when he drew 42 ledger drawings that showed the indigenous perspective of the battle.

Red Horse wasn’t just a warrior, he was also a respected artist. He made his drawings of Little Bighorn in 1881, five years after the battle, as a testimony about the battle.

“These candid pictures show the reality of warfare at the time, but also Red Horse’s efforts to show the heroism of his friends, his fellow warriors,” Scott Sagan, a political science professor, told The Guardian in January 2016, when a series of 12 of the drawings were on display in California. “So he shows them fighting hand-to-hand combat against what he viewed as the invaders from the United States.”

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The drawings tell the full story of the battle—they show the initial attacks, Custer’s forces in battle, they show a graphic portrayal of Native casualties, a field of dead horses, and in the end, both sides leaving the battlefield.

“What’s particularly fascinating about these is they’re so honest in the brutal depictions of warfare,” Stanford undergrad Sarah Sadlier, who has ancestors who were at Little Bighorn and a great-great-uncle who may have been Red Horse’s translator, told The Guardian in early 2016. “In many ways, Red Horse’s work is the most trustworthy sort of visual depiction we have of the battle of Little Bighorn, a Little Bighorn that’s not Custer-centric, one that nativizes from a participant who is a very respected person among the Lakota.”

Scott D. Sagan, a professor of political science at Stanford University, called the drawings “brutally honest” in a June 2016 New York Times article. “His depiction of the scalped and mutilated bodies is an uncensored portrayal of the consequences of revenge and hatred.”

The ledger drawings are not currently on display, but are housed by the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution.