SEPT 15: Are Those Bones Actually Custer’s?

Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana. (Credit: National Park Service)

On Sept. 15, 1991, The Los Angeles Times publishes an article by reporter David Germain, “Army May Have Made a Grave Error When it Buried Custer.” Germain cited multiple experts, including a forensic anthropologist who examined newly found bones at the Little Bighorn Battlefield in 1985, and chief historian at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana.

“I have a suspicion they got the wrong body,” said forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, of Norman, Okla. “The only way to put those suspicions to bed would be to look at the bones interred at West Point and see how they gibe with information we have on Gen. Custer.”  But, the Custer family would not permit an exhumation.

When soldiers set out in 1877 to exhume Custer’s body from a shallow grave at Little Bighorn, they did not find an Indian stretcher weighted down by rocks which had been left on top of the Custer burial site in June 1876. Soldiers found a “rotting uniform containing the skeleton (that) bore a corporal’s name.” Then, they apparently decided those bones were Custer’s and shipped them to West Point in New York for burial.