The way America remembers Little Bighorn has changed significantly since 1876.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the dominant cultural response was grief, rage, and the demand for vengeance.

The newspapers that reported the battle did so from a perspective that treated the Lakota and Cheyenne victory as an outrage — a crime against civilization — rather than as a military engagement between two forces with competing claims to the same territory.

The mythology that developed in the following decades — Custer’s Last Stand, the brave soldiers dying against overwhelming odds, the noble sacrifice on the hilltop — served specific cultural and political purposes.