“Greasy Grass” is the Lakota name for the area along the Little Bighorn River in Montana where one of the most famous battles in American history took place on June 25-26, 1876. The name comes from the tall, dew-soaked grass that grew thick in the river valley, which left a slick, greasy-looking sheen on moccasins and horse bellies as people moved through it.
What the Name Describes
The Little Bighorn River valley sits in southeastern Montana, where fine-grained sediments extend to the surface and the water table stays relatively high. That combination produces dense, lush grass along the riverbanks and floodplain. When morning dew or moisture from the soil collected on those deep grasses, anyone walking or riding through them came away with legs, feet, and leather that looked wet and oily. The local Native peoples who lived and traveled through this landscape noticed that their moccasins and their horses’ bellies took on a greasy appearance after passing through the grass, and the name stuck.
It was a practical, descriptive name, the kind of place-naming common in Lakota tradition: call a place what it looks like, feels like, or does to you when you’re there.
A Lakota Name for a Lakota Victory
Most Americans know the events of June 1876 as the Battle of the Little Bighorn or “Custer’s Last Stand.” Both of those names come from the U.S. military perspective. The Lakota and the broader Oceti Sakowin (the alliance of Sioux nations) called it the Battle of Greasy Grass, and they viewed it very differently: not as a dramatic last stand, but as a decisive victory.
The distinction matters. “Little Bighorn” is the English name for the river. “Custer’s Last Stand” centers the narrative on one American officer. “Greasy Grass” is the name the people who actually lived in that valley used for the landscape itself, long before any battle happened there. As the Lakota Times has put it plainly: “We called it Greasy Grass.” The historians gave it a different name, but the Lakota, who were victorious, had their own.
Why the Name Has Gained Wider Use
For most of the 20th century, “Greasy Grass” appeared mainly in Native oral histories and tribal publications. That has shifted. The Library of Congress now references the Battle of Greasy Grass alongside the more familiar names. The battlefield site itself, managed by the National Park Service in Big Horn County, Montana, increasingly acknowledges the Lakota name in its interpretive materials.
This shift reflects a broader effort to present the history of the Plains Wars from more than one perspective. Using “Greasy Grass” doesn’t erase the name “Little Bighorn.” It restores the name that existed first, the one rooted in the physical experience of walking through a river valley so lush that the grass left your skin looking like it had been rubbed with fat. That image, vivid and grounded in the land, is exactly why the name has endured for more than a century and a half.