June 25th was the 150th anniversary of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn. Col. George S. Custer and 267 US soldiers were massacred by thousands of outraged Indian warriors on the plains of eastern Montana.
In 1969, as a twelve-year-old traveling to a Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho, I visited the Custer Battlefield National Monument. I was riveted by the scene of the best-known showdown between the US Army and savages who were resisting the spread of civilization. I jotted a note from one of the plaques that the Seventh Cavalry’s “heroic defense made the nation yearn for details that no white man lived to tell.” My view of the battle was heavily shaped by They Died with Their Boots On, the 1941 Hollywood movie that featured Erroll Flynn as the heroic Custer who met a tragic fate.
Decades later, I recognized that Custer was tied to a long series of atrocities. In 1864, as a Union cavalry commander fighting under Gen. Phil Sheridan, Custer sent his troops on burning sprees that utterly desolated the barns, farms, homes and towns in the Shenandoah Valley where I was raised a century later. Stephen Starr, author of Union Cavalry in the Civil War, wrote, “The deliberate planned devastation of the Shenandoah Valley has deservedly ranked as one of the grimmest episodes of a sufficiently grim war. Unlike the haphazard destruction caused by Sherman’s bummers in Georgia, it was committed systematically, and by order.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with the Union army reported, “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North, not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”
When Confederates fiercely resisted the Union’s 100-mile arson spree, Custer responded by publicly hanging six captured Confederate soldiers in my old hometown, Front Royal, Virginia, in September 1864. After Confederate Col. John S. Mosby hanged captured Union troops in retaliation, Custer relented from killing captured Confederates. But Mosby’s men continued denouncing Custer as “Attila the Hun.”
Two years after the Civil War ended, Custer was court-martialed for ordering the summary execution of his own soldiers who had allegedly deserted when Custer was commanding a fight against Indians in Kansas. Custer was convicted on that charge and other abuses of his authority and suspended from the army for a year. Custer’s brutality against his own soldiers helped explain why he was hated by many troops under his command.
Custer was summoned back to active duty even before his suspension ended by Sheridan, who was supreme commander in the US Army fight against the Plains Indians. Sheridan is best known for telling an Indian chief in 1869: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Sheridan wanted a commander like Custer who would not hesitate to scourge the enemy without mercy.
On November 27, 1868, Custer launched a surprise dawn attack on a peaceful Indian village that was flying a white flag and was at peace with the US government. Custer’s troops slaughtered more than a hundred Indians, including scores of women and children. No one was permitted to surrender and many Indians were killed as they sought to escape. Custer denied that his unprovoked attack on the village was a “massacre” because not every Indian was killed. Many women and children were instead taken as hostages after the battle.
In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant approved a plan to trample US treaties with Indian tribes in order to seize the Black Hills territory after gold had been discovered there. Six years earlier, Grant publicly admitted: “Our dealings with the Indians properly lay us open to charges of cruelty and swindling.” But Custer was sent out as one of a series of military assaults that were the greatest swindle of them all. Grant’s attacks on the Indians were not supported by the top Army commander, Gen. William Sherman, who complained about “whites looking for gold [who] kill Indians just as they would kill bears and pay no regard for treaties.”
Custer’s arrogance and recklessness got all his troops killed. Assuming he could easily vanquish his Indian opponents, Custer divided his command shortly before the battle. He charged forward after doing little or no reconnaissance. Custer’s soldiers had single shot rifles because the Army Quartermaster believed that repeating rifles wasted ammo. The Indians didn’t have a quartermaster, so they had repeating rifles, which wreaked havoc on the US troops. Custer rejected an offer to take Gatling guns with him that could have helped balance the odds against thousands of opponents.
In 1991, Congress voted to change the name from the Custer Battlefield National Monument to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. That signaled a belated recognition that the Indians had legitimate grievances that spurred their resistance to the US Army.
The Trump administration, as part of its campaign to purportedly restore “truth and sanity to American history,” is targeting “signage describing broken promises to Native American tribes” at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, according to Montana television station KTVQ. Sitting Bull, one of the Indian commanders at Little Bighorn, said that white people had only kept one promise they ever made: “They promised to take our land, and they took it.”
The anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn is a reminder of the perils of official history that sweeps all government crimes and abuses under the rug. We can appreciate the heroism of both the US cavalrymen and the Indian warriors who died at Little Bighorn without putting George S. Custer on a pedestal.
