Battle of Slim Buttes

Battle of Slim Buttes
Part of the Great Sioux War of 1876
General Crook's field headquarters during the “Horsemeat March”, 1876
Date September 9–10, 1876 Location Great Sioux Reservation (Harding County, South Dakota) Result United States victory
Belligerents
Lakota	United States
Commanders and leaders
American Horse  † Crazy Horse	George Crook
Strength
~600–800	~1200
Casualties and losses
10 killed unknown wounded 23 captured	3 killed 27 wounded

The Battle of Slim Buttes was fought on September 9 and 10, 1876, in the Great Sioux Reservation in the Dakota Territory, between the United States Army and the Sioux.

The Battle of Slim Buttes was the first U.S. Army victory of the Great Sioux War of 1876 after George Armstrong Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn on June 25 and 26, 1876. Brigadier General George Crook, one of the U.S. Army’s ablest Indian fighters, led the "Horsemeat March," one of the most grueling military expeditions in U.S. history, destroying Oglala Chief American Horse’s village at Slim Buttes and repelling a counter-attack by Crazy Horse.

The American public was fixated on news of the Indian Wars after the defeat of Custer at the Little Bighorn, and war correspondents with national newspapers accompanied Crook and reported the events.

The Battle of Slim Buttes signaled a series of punitive blows that ultimately broke Sioux armed resistance to reservation captivity and forced their loss of the Black Hills.

In 1874, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led a military expedition of one thousand men from Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, to investigate reports of gold and to determine a suitable location for a military fort in the Black Hills of the Great Sioux Reservation. Before Custer's column had returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln, news of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills was telegraphed as an international news event. War correspondent John A. Finerty reported: “A wall of fire, not to mention a wall of Indians, could not stop the encroachment of that terrible white race before which all other races of white kind have gone down. At the news of gold the grizzled 49‘ers shook the dust of California from their feet and started for the far distant ‘Hills.’ The Australian miner left his pack and started by saddle and ship for the same goal; the diamond hunter of the Cape, the veteran prospector of Colorado and Montana, the reduced gentleman of Europe, the worried and worn clerks of London, Liverpool, New York, or Chicago, the sturdy Scotchman and the light-hearted Irishman, who drinks the spirit of adventure with his mother’s milk, the miners of Wales and Cornwall and the gamblers of Monte Carlo came trooping in masses to the new Eldorado.”

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