George Armstrong Custer in the context of "7th Cavalry Regiment"

The Battle of the Washita River (also called Battle of the Washita or the Washita Massacre) occurred on November 27, 1868, when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's 7th U.S. Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's Southern Cheyenne camp on the Washita River (the present-day Washita Battlefield National Historic Site near Cheyenne, Oklahoma).

The Cheyenne camp was the most isolated band of a major winter encampment along the river of numerous Native American tribal bands, totaling thousands of people. Custer's forces attacked the village because scouts had found it by tracking the trail of an Indian party that had raided white settlers. Black Kettle and his people had been at peace and were seeking peace. Custer's soldiers killed women and children in addition to warriors, although they also took many captives to serve as hostages and human shields. The number of Cheyenne killed in the attack has been disputed since the first reports.

"Garryowen" is an Irish tune for a jig dance. It has become well known as a marching tune in Commonwealth and American military units, most famously George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry Regiment.

The Black Hills is an isolated mountain range rising from the Great Plains of North America in western South Dakota and extending into Wyoming, United States. Black Elk Peak, which rises to 7,242 feet (2,207 m), is the range's highest summit. The name of the range in Lakota is Pahá Sápa. It encompasses the Black Hills National Forest. It formed as a result of an upwarping of ancient rock, after which the removal of the higher portions of the mountain mass by stream erosion produced the present-day topography. The hills are so called because of their dark appearance from a distance, as they are covered in evergreen trees.

American Indian tribes have a long history in the Black Hills and consider it a sacred site. After conquering the Cheyenne in 1776, the Lakota took the territory of the Black Hills, which became central to their culture. In 1868, the federal US government signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, establishing the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri River, and exempting the Black Hills from all non-indigenous settlement “forever”; however, when American settlers discovered gold here as a result of George Armstrong Custer's Black Hills Expedition in 1874, a gold rush swept in miners. The US government conquered the Black Hills and forcibly relocated the Lakota, following the Great Sioux War of 1876, to five smaller reservations in western South Dakota, selling off 9 million acres (36,000 km) of their former land. Unlike most of South Dakota, the Black Hills were settled primarily by European Americans from population centers to the west and south of the region, as miners flocked there from earlier gold boom locations in Colorado and Montana.

The Henry repeating rifle is a lever-action tubular magazine rifle. It is famous for having been used at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and having been the basis for the iconic Winchester rifle of the American Wild West.

Designed and introduced by Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860, the original Henry was a sixteen-shot .44 caliber rimfire breech-loading lever-action rifle. It was produced from 1860 until 1866 in the United States by the New Haven Arms Company. The Henry was adopted in small quantities by the Union in the American Civil War, favored for its greater firepower than the standard-issue carbine. Many later found their way West, notably in the hands of a few of the Sioux and Cheyenne in their defeat of George Armstrong Custer's U.S. Cavalry troops in June 1876.