AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
CUSTER’S LAST STAND
TUESDAY, JANUARY 17 @ 6:00PM, 9:00PM & 12:00AM
On June 26, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and 261 members of his Seventh Cavalry were killed by Cheyenne and Lakota warriors, along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. Eleven days later, the news flashed across telegraph wires. Americans, still celebrating the nation’s 100th birthday, greeted the news with stunned disbelief. How could Custer, the Boy General of the Civil War, America’s most celebrated Indian fighter, the avatar of western expansion, have been struck down by a group of warriors armed with little more than bows and arrows? Like everything else about Custer, his martyrdom was shrouded in controversy and contradictions, and the final act of his larger-than-life career played out on a grand stage with a spellbound public engrossed in the drama. In the end, his death would launch one of the greatest myths in American history.
