His death on a Montana hilltop in the centennial summer of 1876 became one of the founding myths of American military culture — a story of heroic last stands, of sacrifice, of noble defeat.

That story was not false.

Custer and the men with him did die at Little Bighorn.

Their deaths were real.

But it was radically incomplete.

It told the story of the battle from the perspective of the people who lost it, and in doing so, it rendered invisible the people who won — the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who defended their families, the women in the camp who ran and fought and mourned and endured, the Hunkpapa woman who heard that her brother was dead and picked up a weapon and rode into the fight.

Moving Robe Woman’s story does not replace the story of the soldiers who died at Little Bighorn.