Custer's Last Stand and Early Photographs of the Little Bighorn Battlefield

An Interpretation by Gerald T. Davidson and James S. Brust

Today the most familiar image of Custer's Last Stand is the large chromolithograph made from a painting by Otto Becker, published by the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company of St. Louis in 1896. Titled "Custer's Last Fight," prints of this image have hung in saloons all across America. Becker's picture was supposedly based on an earlier painting of the battle done by Cassilly Adams in the mid 1880's. Both views are fanciful; nonetheless Becker's is the only early painting of the battle scene that represents the landscape faithfully.

We suspect that Becker used photographs of the battleground as a model for the painting/lithograph. It is unlikely that he ever visited the site or acquired detailed field sketches. That Becker worked from photographs seems to be confirmed by a 1939 letter to Anheuser-Busch discussing the Custer Battle, in which Becker speaks of the "background which I made after photos showing the Little Big Horn River in the distance." This is evidence that photographs of the battleground were available. Is it possible to locate and identify the photograph (or photographs) Becker used as a model?

Photographs of the Battlefield before 1900 are compared and analyzed in the following pages. The photographs are reproduced to approximately the same scale. They were all made from the same spot - within about 10 to 20 feet of the top of the hill where a monument stands today.

Becker's painting.

Modern photographs.

John H. Fouch photograph of 1877.

Stanley J. Morrow photograph of 1879.

D.F. Barry photograph of 1883.

F.J. Haynes photograph of 1894-95.

H.R. Locke photograph of 1894.

Comparison of photographs.

The history of early photographs of the Little Bighorn Battlefield points out several essential issues posed by the interpretation of old photographs, paintings, and printed illustrations. Is the medium consistent with the supposed date? This is particularly important in the period 1870 to 1900 when photography was undergoing revolutionary technical developments. What kind of equipment was available to the photographer? This can illuminate the photographer's intentions and relation to the scene; a photographer working on the western frontier would be unlikely to have access to the most sophisticated equipment. Have all the pertinent photographs of a scene been located? This is of obvious importance in tracing the origin of a painting or printed illustration. Last but not least, it is crucial that important subjects be resurveyed using modern equipment.

Though paintings and drawings dominated the iconography of Custer's Last Stand, at least five photographers considered the remote site sufficiently interesting to visit it between the time of the battle in 1876 and the mid 1890's. Each of them captured a scene that contained most of the elements Otto Becker used for the background of his painting, though no single photograph can be identified as the unique model for the painting. None of the photographs reproduced here truly matches the Becker image. Nonetheless, the Barry photograph of 1883 is the most likely model, in terms of date, field of view, lighting, and representation of details.

The only reasonable alternate conclusion is that another unidentified photographer visited the Little Bighorn Battle Site before 1895. There is no evidence to support this possibility.