The story of the woman who had saved her brother traveled through the camp.

Eight days later, Custer arrived.

EXTENDED SECTION: THE VOICES THAT SURVIVED — CHEYENNE TESTIMONY ABOUT LITTLE BIGHORN

One of the richest bodies of historical evidence about the Battle of the Little Bighorn comes from Native American testimony — accounts given by warriors and other community members who participated in the battle, recorded by various researchers from the 1870s onward.

This testimony has had a complicated relationship with mainstream American historical scholarship.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Native accounts were dismissed or ignored — the goal of the Army investigation was to understand what had gone wrong with American military strategy, and the perspective of the people who had won the battle was not considered relevant to that inquiry.

But researchers who engaged seriously with Native testimony — who sought it out, recorded it carefully, and treated it with the same respect given to any historical source — preserved a body of evidence that has gradually reshaped understanding of the battle.

Among the most significant of these early efforts was the work of Thomas Marquis, a physician who worked on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in the 1920s and formed close relationships with Cheyenne veterans of the Little Bighorn.

Marquis recorded the accounts of individuals including Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne warrior who had fought in the battle and who gave extensive, detailed testimony about what he had seen and done.

Wooden Leg’s account, published in 1931 as “A Warrior Who Fought Custer,” remains one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of the battle from the Native side.