Custer's 1874 Black Hills Expedition
| Black Hills Expedition (1874) | |||||
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| Part of the Sioux Wars | |||||
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| Belligerents | |||||
 United States
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||
 George A. Custer Frederick D. Grant
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| Units involved | |||||
| 7th United States Cavalry Regiment | |||||
| Strength | |||||
| ~1,200 Soldiers and Civilians | |||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||
| 1 killed | |||||
The Black Hills Expedition was a United States Army expedition in 1874 led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer that set out on July 2, 1874 from modern day Bismarck, North Dakota, which was then Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory, with orders to travel to the previously uncharted Black Hills of South Dakota. Its mission was to look for suitable locations for a fort, find a route to the southwest, and to investigate the possibility of gold mining. Custer and his unit, the 7th Cavalry, arrived in the Black Hills on July 22, 1874, with orders to return by August 30. The expedition set up a camp at the site of the future town of Custer; while Custer and the military units searched for a suitable location for a fort, civilians searched for gold, and it is disputed whether or not any substantial amount was found. Nonetheless, this prompted a mass gold rush which in turn antagonised the Sioux Indians who had been promised protection of their sacred land through Treaties made by the US government, and who were later to kill Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in the Great Sioux War of 1876-77 between themselves and the United States.
The entire expedition was photographed by William H. Illingworth, an English photographer who accompanied Custer after selection by the then-Captain William Ludlow. Ludlow, the engineer for the expedition, financed Illingworth's photography and paid him $30 per month to provide photographic plates for the US Army, of which he made 70 in all.
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