The amount of scholarship devoted to understanding exactly what happened on June 25-26, 1876 — the precise movements of the soldiers, the exact sequence of the fighting, the tactical decisions that led to Custer’s defeat — is enormous.

Libraries of books.

Decades of archaeological investigation.

Annual conferences.

Ongoing debate about exactly who did what and when.

And yet, for most of the history of that scholarship, the people who were defending the camp — who won the battle — were present primarily as background figures.

The Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who fought and won appear as tactical obstacles, forces to be analyzed, numbers to be estimated.

The women in the camp — the people who were the actual target of Reno’s charge, who ran with their children when the soldiers came, who fought back, who lost family members in the attack — were essentially absent from the historical record as the United States maintained it.