The Lakota and Cheyenne practice of mutilating enemy dead had specific cultural meanings — it was tied to beliefs about the afterlife and the warrior’s spirit — but none of that context reached the American reading public.

What reached them was horror, and horror sold newspapers.

Within weeks, the story of Little Bighorn had become a story of savage cruelty and American martyrdom.

Custer’s flamboyant image, his golden curls, his self-cultivated mythology as a daring cavalry commander, all of it fed directly into a narrative that positioned his defeat as an atrocity demanding revenge.

What the newspapers did not print, because they had no access to it, was what the Lakota and Cheyenne people experienced.

No reporter was embedded in the village on the Greasy Grass.