The message arrived on the morning of June 27 at the headquarters of Gen. Alfred Terry, who had marched west a month earlier with a column of 1,000 U.S. Army troops out of the Dakota Territory’s Fort Abraham Lincoln.

“I have had a most terrific engagement with the hostile Indians,” began Maj. Marcus Reno’s frantic dispatch.

Terry’s force made up one part of a three-pronged attack the Army had planned in its 1876 war against the Lakota Sioux, who had been deemed “hostile” after resisting settler encroachment on the Black Hills, sacred land reserved for them by an 1868 treaty. Reno was the senior officer under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, whose seasoned 7th Cavalry force had been ordered to advance towards a Sioux village on the banks of the Little Bighorn River, in present-day Montana.

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“I have not seen or heard from Custer since he ordered me to charge with my battalion,” Reno reported to Terry. “Send me medical aid at once and rations. As near as I can say now I have over 100 men killed and wounded.”

Things were much worse for the 7th Cavalry than Reno knew: No message arrived from Custer, because he and the entire force of over 200 men under his direct command had been killed, a few miles north of Reno’s position. Custer, a Civil War hero and veteran of the Army’s wars against Plains Indian tribes, had led a force of fewer than 600 cavalry troops into a pitched battle with roughly 2,000 Sioux warriors, suffering one of the most famous defeats in U.S. military history as a result.

Just a few hundred miles to the south, the Colorado Territory had followed the events of the Great Sioux War of 1876 more closely than much of the rest of the country. Over the preceding two years, after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, thousands of fortune-seekers had left Colorado’s gold and silver mining camps to try their luck in the Dakotas instead.

“FOR SALE — CHEAP — SALOON … going to Black Hills,” read a February 22 classified ad in the Rocky Mountain News.

The Rocky Mountain News had a war correspondent, Robert Strahorn, embedded with an Army force under Gen. George Crook, another prong in the planned attack against the Sioux, which had launched an expedition from Wyoming’s Fort Fetterman in the spring.

But in an age when the telegraph had made near-instantaneous communication across the United States routine, news of Custer’s annihilation in the Battle of Little Bighorn took a relative eternity to reach the American public.

As the battered remnants of Terry’s column made a slow retreat north and east from the Montana badlands, the earliest accounts of the defeat appeared in Bozeman and Helena newspapers on July 2 and 3, but other papers across the country wouldn’t receive official confirmation until late in the night on July 5, a day after celebrations of the nation’s Centennial had concluded, and Strahorn’s exclusive report for the News wouldn’t be published until later in the month.

Constitutional referendum

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Convention had met in St. Louis from June 27 to 29 and selected New York Governor Samuel Tilden as the party’s 1876 presidential nominee.

The Colorado Territory’s Republican establishment geared up for a tough election fight, rallying an outdoor crowd in Denver on the night of June 28 to “ratify” the GOP’s nomination of Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes.

Thomas Nelson Haskell, a pastor and professor who had helped found Colorado College in 1874, addressed the crowd and spoke of the Republican faithful’s “most important preliminary duty” — to approve a state constitution in the July 1 referendum election, securing Colorado’s right to cast three electoral votes in the high-stakes presidential contest.

“Who would defeat the Centennial State?” Haskell asked, as recorded by the News. “Who would not rather wake the song of joy on all our plains and mountains, and send it on to the Atlantic and Pacific that a new star is born in freedom’s sky — a bright and faithful star is set in this Centennial year, and that star is no less than the beautiful Rocky Mountain state in which we dwell.”

In the end, there was little suspense about the result. Despite earlier fears that voters might reject the document — as they had to thwart a previous attempt at statehood in 1864 — citizens across the Colorado Territory went to the polls on July 1 and adopted the constitution in a landslide, with 15,443 votes for and 4,062 against.

The next day, the News ecstatically reported the victory, and the high turnout: “For once in her history, Denver cast a full vote yesterday,” the paper observed. But its article on the referendum was followed by a lengthier and gloomier report on the previous day’s “Waterloo defeat” — the one suffered by the Georgetown baseball club in its “match” in Denver against a rival team from Cheyenne.

Despite enjoying a 5-3 lead after the first inning, the Georgetown club struggled to keep up with the “muscular Wyomings,” the News reported, and went on to lose 26-9.

“Colorado was overmatched, and couldn’t win,” said the News. “Still, the boys themselves will admit that a score of 26 to 9 indicates rather loose fielding on the losing side, as there is nothing like that difference in the play of the two clubs.”

“After the game was over,” the report added, “the Georgetown boys visited the second ward polls, and consoled themselves for their defeat by voting for the constitution.”

Selected sources

• The Rocky Mountain News, June 29 & July 2, 1876
• Gray, John S. “Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876”