MDZ
On June 28, 1876, three days after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, survivors of the 7th U.S. Cavalry under the command of Major Marcus A. Reno began the painful task of burying Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's command. The men were buried where they fell in shallow graves, marked with wooden tipi poles collected from the abandoned Indian village. In 1877, the partial remains of Lt. Col. Custer and many of the officers were re-interred at various location in the eastern U.S., Custer's remains were re-interred at West Point, New York. In 1881, a granite memorial was erected on Last Stand Hill by the War Department. The remains of soldiers and attached personal buried on the field were collected and re-interred in a mass grave around the base of the granite memorial on Last Stand Hill. In 1890, Army personnel erected white marble markers at the original solider gravesites.