Battle of Slim Buttes Battle of Slim Buttes 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
Elizabeth Bacon Custer led the Seventh Cavalry in pursuit of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne who refused to be confined to the reservation system. After her husband's column was wiped out at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876, many in the press, Army, and government criticized Custer for blundering into a massacre. President Ulysses S. Grant publicly blamed Custer for the disaster. Fearing that her husband was to be made a scapegoat by history, Libbie launched a one-woman campaign to rehabilitate her husband's image. Her assistance to the author of the first Custer biography,