LOW DOG GAVE CUSTER HIGH MARKS

”no white man or Indian ever fought as bravely as Custer and his men,” said the veteran of the June 25–26, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn to a reporter before an 1881 gathering of Indian chiefs and rapt American officers at Fort Yates, Dakota Territory. “If Reno and his warriors had fought as Custer and his warriors fought, the battle might have been against us.”

The veteran in question was neither a soldier nor a Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer partisan seeking to spare widow Libbie Custer’s feelings. He was Low Dog, an Oglala Lakota war chief who five years earlier had fought Colonel Custer and his bluecoats on that Montana Territory battlefield. Furthermore, Low Dog had played an important role in the shocking (at least to the