Today is the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn so the choice of subject matter for today's blog was an easy one for me:
In late 1875, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly left their reservations, outraged over the continued intrusions of whites into their sacred lands in the Black Hills. They gathered in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull to fight for their lands. The following spring, two victories over the US Cavalry emboldened them to fight on in the summer of 1876.
To force the large Indian army back to the reservations, the Army dispatched three columns to attack in coordinated fashion, one of which contained Lt. Colonel George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Sent ahead to scout for the column. Custer spotted the Sioux village about fifteen miles away along the Rosebud River on June 25.At that same moment Custer also found a nearby group of about forty warriors. Ignoring orders to wait, he decided to attack before they could alert the main party. He did not realize that the number of warriors in the village numbered many times his strength.
Dividing his forces in three, Custer sent troops under Captain Frederick Benteen to prevent their escape through the upper valley of the Little Bighorn River. Major Marcus Reno was to pursue the group, cross the river, and charge the Indian village in a coordinated effort. With the remaining troops under his command, he hoped to strike the Indian encampment at the northern and southern ends simultaneously, but made this decision without knowing what kind of terrain he would have to cross before making his assault. He belatedly discovered that he would have to negotiate a maze of bluffs and ravines which severely delayed his attack.
Reno's squadron of 175 soldiers attacked the northern end. Quickly finding themselves in a desperate battle with little hope of any relief, Reno halted his charging men before they could be trapped, fought for ten minutes in dismounted formation, and then withdrew into the timber and brush along the river. When that position proved indefensible, they retreated uphill to the bluffs east of the river, pursued hotly by a mix of Cheyenne and Sioux.
Just
as they finished driving the soldiers out, the Indians found roughly
210 of Custer's men coming towards the other end of the village, taking
the pressure off of Reno's men. Cheyenne and Hunkpapa Sioux together
crossed the river and slammed into the advancing soldiers, forcing them
back to a long high ridge to the north. Meanwhile, another force,
largely Oglala Sioux under Crazy Horse's command, swiftly moved
downstream and then doubled back in a sweeping arc, enveloping Custer
and his men in a pincer move. They began pouring in gunfire and arrows.
As the Indians closed in, Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses to form a wall, but they provided little protection against bullets. In less than an hour, Custer and his men were killed in the worst American military disaster to that date. After another day's fighting, Reno and Benteen's now united forces escaped when the Indians broke off the fight, fleeing from the two larger columns of soldiers which were now getting near.
After
the battle, the Indians from the village came through and stripped the
bodies and mutilated all the uniformed soldiers, believing that the soul
of a mutilated body would be forced to walk the earth for all eternity
and could not ascend to heaven. Inexplicably, they stripped Custer's
body and cleaned it, but did not scalp or mutilate it. He had been
wearing buckskins instead of a blue uniform, and some believe that the
Indians thought he was not a soldier and so, thinking he was an
innocent, left him alone. Because his hair was cut short for battle,
others think that he did not have enough hair to allow for a very good
scalping (I doubt either of those explanations). Immediately after the
battle, the myth emerged that they left him alone out of respect for his
fighting ability, but few participating Indians knew who he was to have
been so respectful. To this day, no one knows the real reason.
[I think the most likely explanation (and one that was not publicized at the time, for obvious reasons) was that, several years prior to this, Custer had kept an Indian mistress and her family. It is very possible that these were among the women from the village who stripped the soldiers of their gear following the battle. They probably recognized Custer and treated his body with more respect then the others]
In late 1875, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly left their reservations, outraged over the continued intrusions of whites into their sacred lands in the Black Hills. They gathered in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull to fight for their lands. The following spring, two victories over the US Cavalry emboldened them to fight on in the summer of 1876.
To force the large Indian army back to the reservations, the Army dispatched three columns to attack in coordinated fashion, one of which contained Lt. Colonel George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Sent ahead to scout for the column. Custer spotted the Sioux village about fifteen miles away along the Rosebud River on June 25.At that same moment Custer also found a nearby group of about forty warriors. Ignoring orders to wait, he decided to attack before they could alert the main party. He did not realize that the number of warriors in the village numbered many times his strength.
Dividing his forces in three, Custer sent troops under Captain Frederick Benteen to prevent their escape through the upper valley of the Little Bighorn River. Major Marcus Reno was to pursue the group, cross the river, and charge the Indian village in a coordinated effort. With the remaining troops under his command, he hoped to strike the Indian encampment at the northern and southern ends simultaneously, but made this decision without knowing what kind of terrain he would have to cross before making his assault. He belatedly discovered that he would have to negotiate a maze of bluffs and ravines which severely delayed his attack.
Reno's squadron of 175 soldiers attacked the northern end. Quickly finding themselves in a desperate battle with little hope of any relief, Reno halted his charging men before they could be trapped, fought for ten minutes in dismounted formation, and then withdrew into the timber and brush along the river. When that position proved indefensible, they retreated uphill to the bluffs east of the river, pursued hotly by a mix of Cheyenne and Sioux.
As the Indians closed in, Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses to form a wall, but they provided little protection against bullets. In less than an hour, Custer and his men were killed in the worst American military disaster to that date. After another day's fighting, Reno and Benteen's now united forces escaped when the Indians broke off the fight, fleeing from the two larger columns of soldiers which were now getting near.
[I think the most likely explanation (and one that was not publicized at the time, for obvious reasons) was that, several years prior to this, Custer had kept an Indian mistress and her family. It is very possible that these were among the women from the village who stripped the soldiers of their gear following the battle. They probably recognized Custer and treated his body with more respect then the others]
Little Bighorn was the pinnacle of the Indians' power. They had achieved their greatest victory yet, but soon their tenuous union fell apart in the face of the Cavalry onslaught. Outraged over the death of a popular Civil War hero on the very eve of the American Centennial (news of the massacre reached Eastern Cities on July 4th, 1876), the nation demanded and received harsh retribution. The Black Hills dispute was quickly settled by redrawing the boundary lines, placing the Black Hills outside the reservation and open to settlement. Within a year, the Sioux nation was defeated and broken.
"Custer's Last Stand" was the Native Americans last stand as well.
Live Long and Prosper...
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