Woodbury Historical Tours
— adventures in American history --
Now accepting reservations for The Battles of the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, with historian Neil Mangum. October 16-20, 2018. Click on the "Little Bighorn" button below for a full itinerary, and registration information. 

[photo above: Indian Memorial at Little Bighorn National Monument, designed by Oglala Sioux artist Colleen Cutschall (Sister Wolf).
​Photo by David Woodbury]
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​"On a hot June Sunday in 1876, hordes of painted Indian warriors—perhaps as many as 4,000—swarmed over a treeless Montana ridge rising from the Little Bighorn River Valley. Five companies of U.S. Cavalry, about 215 blue-shirted troopers, contended briefly and hopelessly against overwhelming odds. When the guns fell silent and the smoke and dust of battle lifted, every soldier lay dead.

This was "Custer's Last Stand" the most spectacular triumph of the American Indian in his four-century struggle against the relentlessly advancing European civilization that finally crushed him. It forms a chapter of American history that has inspired intense study and provoked intense controversy, that has been chronicled endlessly in prose and verse and enacted time and again on motion picture and television screens, and that has earned a lasting place in the Nation's historical annals and popular folklore. In total defeat and death, Custer and his men achieved an immortality that even the most dramatic victory could not have won them." 

​— Robert M. Utley, National Park Service Handbook, Little Bighorn National Monument.
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