The Story of the Custer Fight Told in Sioux

This pencil manuscript, documented in Sioux language with accompanying illustrations, records a Native account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The text flows continuously across the page, bordered by sketched figures—warriors, horses, tipis, and portrait heads—rendered in a direct ethnographic style. Created during the period when American museums and photographers actively collected Native American materials and testimonies, the work represents an effort to preserve indigenous historical narrative and visual culture. The interplay of written account and marginal drawings reflects turn-of-the-century documentary practices that sought to capture both language and lived experience of Plains peoples.