General Crook’s retreat from the Rosebud had consequences that reverberated through the entire campaign.

He pulled his column south and established a defensive camp on Goose Creek, effectively removing more than a thousand men from the coordinated converging advance that had been planned.

He did not immediately communicate the extent of his setback to the other Army columns.

And so, on June 25, 1876, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led his regiment up the divide overlooking the Little Bighorn valley, he had no way of knowing that Crook’s force — the column that was supposed to be driving the hostile bands toward him from the south — was sitting sixty miles away, going nowhere.

He also had no accurate estimate of the size of the encampment below.

His scouts had warned him.

The Crow scouts who rode with the Seventh Cavalry looked at the pony tracks, at the size of the trail, at the enormity of the camp circle visible in the valley, and they told Custer there were more warriors than he could handle.

Custer did not change his plan.

The encampment in the Little Bighorn valley was, by this point, the largest gathering of Plains peoples in decades.

Estimates of its size vary widely in the historical literature, but most serious scholars place the number of fighting men somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand — perhaps more.