The June 1876 The Battle of the Little Bighorn, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, featured Custer’s Last Stand. Its as a battle between the Plains Indians and the US Army. Here, Richard Bluttal considers how history has viewed the battle - and how it is viewed today.
Custer's Last Stand by Edgar Samuel Paxson, 1899.
Every June Enos Poor Bear Jr. traveled from his home in Martin, S.D., to a wind-swept promenade in southeastern Montana to pay homage to his forebears who fought in one of the seminal battles of the American West.
In June 2003, Mr. Poor Bear, a Lakota Sioux, walked past all the tourists who inevitably congregated at a white obelisk marking the site where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and members of his 7th Calvary died in the battle. He and his friends, instead, stopped down the slope, where they prayed , performed cleansing rituals, and turned their heads away from the battle reenactments occurring in the distance. On this warm Wednesday afternoon in 2003, Poor Bear and hundreds of other native Americans no longer had to celebrate one of the great military triumphs ever achieved on US soil from the relative shadows. A Native American Memorial commemorated the sacrifice of the Arikara, Apsaalooke (Crow), Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Oyate (Lakota Sioux) tribes in the Battle of the Little Bighorn as they fought to protect their diverse values and traditional way of life. The theme of the memorial, "Peace Through Unity", carried the commemoration further by acknowledging the need for cooperation both among Native American tribes and between tribal governments and the federal government. The relevancy and significance is further highlighted when one considers it is the only memorial to the Native American experience mandated by Congress and constructed with federal funds.
Why would federal funding or any funding be used to construct a monument where Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 men from five companies of the Seventh infantry cavalry heroically died on June 25, 1876, in a sneak attack by Native Americans in what’s now Montana.
Monuments
During much of the 20th century, the lion's share of public education at the battlefield focused on the movements of the cavalry, treating Native Americans as nearly invisible. Indeed, with no significant markers to call their own, many Native Americans have felt oddly out of place, even here. The worst indignity, they say, was having to pray all these years in the shrine erected to Custer and his men.
Slowly, public attitudes about how history should be presented here have evolved. In 1991, the name was changed from "Custer Battlefield" to the more neutral Little Bighorn Battlefield. Also, in addition to the white headstones marking where soldiers fell, a smattering of red granite headstones have appeared to commemorate specific warriors who died. Now native Americans have their own dedicated piece of hallowed ground.
There seems to be more to the background story of the Battle at the Little Big Horn. People are just beginning to see that it isn’t just this black-and-white, ‘cowboys versus Indians’ theme, and that’s the way that it’s been portrayed in popular culture and Westerns,” says Mandy Van Heuvelen, a South Dakota native and enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who is a project manager at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum. Traditionally, the Native American side of the Battle of Little Bighorn has been passed down through families; she learned from her grandfather that his grandmother witnessed the battle. “Maybe we shouldn’t hold [Custer] on as high of a pedestal as we have,” she says. “It’s important to understand the history from multiple points of view than we were taught in school.”
Not so simple
Students still tend to learn about Custer dying bravely during battle, for example, but not about the bravery of the Native Americans who defended themselves against settlers of European descent who were there illegally. What doesn’t fit neatly into the Custer story of the popular imagination is the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, which had given the area where the battle took place to Lakota. To some historians, the Battle of the Little Bighorn happened because the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie, in which the U.S. government guaranteed to the Lakota and Dakota (Yankton) as well as the Arapaho exclusive possession of the Dakota Territory west of the Missouri River, had been broke. Custer was tasked with relocating all Native Americans in the area to reservations by January 31, 1876. Any person who didn’t comply would be considered hostile .Controversy over possession of the lands known as the Black Hills, and the second 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie were critical factors that pitted Plains Indians tribes against the US. federal government. The refusal of Lakota and Cheyenne tribes to live confined within the boundaries of Native American reservations led to the U.S. government's decision to seize the Black Hills and force the Native American tribes onto reservations. In school we rarely learnt about the Battle of the Washita, which took place eight years before Little Bighorn and in which Custer led an attack on a village of mostly Southern Cheyenne people and rounded up women and children as prisoners.
In 1873, Custer faced a group of attacking Lakota at the Northern Pacific Railroad Survey at Yellowstone. It was his first encounter with Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, but it wouldn’t be his last. Little did Custer know at the time the two Indigenous leaders would play a role in his death a few years later.
In 1874, an Army expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer found gold in the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. Once gold was discovered in the Black Hills area where the battle occurred, settlers and miners flocked to the area. At the time, the United States recognized the hills as property of the Sioux Nation. The Grant administration tried to buy the hills, but the Sioux, considered them sacred lands.
Why was the Battle of Little Bighorn significant?
It was a huge victory for the Plains Indians over the U.S. military, but it also spelled the eventual doom of the Native Americans because it ensured retaliation by the U.S. Army. It was both the high point and the beginning of the end to the freedom of the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes.
In hindsight, the Battle of the Little Bighorn has come to symbolize an inevitable clash between two irreconcilably different cultures: the buffalo-hunting, mobile culture of the Northern Plains tribes, and the sedentary, agriculture-based culture of the U.S. settlers. This battle was not an isolated confrontation, but part of a protracted series of skirmishes between settlers and U.S. officials on the one hand, and Lakota and Cheyenne Native Americans on the other.
What do you think of the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Let us know below.
Now read Richard’s series of articles on trauma and medicine during war, starting with the American Revolution here.
