The Battle of the Little Big Horn - July 13, 2014

Since we had to wait in Sheridan for the Chevy dealer to open on Monday, we decided to take a short trip up to the Little Big Horn Memorial, where in the reality, the "final" real battle of the clashing Indian and White man's cultures took place.  A war of cultures that started when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, and although the war is still going on, the final real battle happened here at Little Big Horn.

Hollywood and history have painted a very distorted picture of the battle at the Little Big Horn.  Colonel Custer is always made out to be the hero and the underdog in a massacre by the Indians.  In fact, he was just an ambitious rank-climbing soldier following orders from his superior, Gen. Alfred H. Terry, and in turn Gen Terry was following orders from Washington, orders that were based on very bad expansionist policy and a total misunderstanding and lack of consideration for the Indian way of life.

It is no different today with the decision to invade Iraq.  Although the circumstances are a bit different, those decisions are guided by the same type of bad policy the misunderstanding and lack of consideration for a different way of life.  It is the common soldiers and the field commanders who face the consequences of bad and inconsiderate decisions.  It is easy to blame Col. Custer and the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry because they also committed atrocities and were about to commit a bigger atrocity with the extermination of a tribe who were minding their own business on their own land only interested in following their way of life.  The reason for the battle are written at the memorial at the Little Big Horn site by Crazy Horse, Low Dog and Red Feather, Lakota warriors

The U.S. Government was taking their land and systematically exterminating the western Indians like they had done with the Eastern Indians.

The plan was for General Terry and General, General George Crook and Col. John Gibbon to catch the Cheyenne and Lakota "renegades" in the valley of the Little Big Horn and, supposedly, drive them back to the reservations (yeah, right, the real plan was to exterminate them).  General Crook was to come up from the south and General Terry was to come down from the north and from the southeast.  He had Col. Custer and the 7th Cavalry come around with 600 men and bring the attack up from the south.

General Crook's troops were defeated eight days earlier by a Lakota-Cheyenne force south of the Little Big Horn at the battle of Rosebud.  Custer found the Lakota and Cheyenne celebrating the night before and wanted to catch them by surprise the following morning so he marched his men all night to reach the Indian encampment and attack in the morning.  What he did not know was that the encampment consisted of the Northern Cheyenne, the San Arc, the Minniconjou, the Brule, the Oglala, the Blackfoot and the Hunkpapa.  So instead of facing a force of less than 800 Indians, he would face a force of several thousand warriors.  With this lack of intelligence (although his Crow scouts gave him accurate information - they told him "there are more warriors that you have bullets"), Custer split his force in three trying to prevent Indians from escaping. Bad mistake, and a bigger mistake was not waiting for Terry and Gibbons troops to arrive from the north.  Well to make a long story short, he got his ass whipped.

Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the other Indian leaders, although caught by surprise, quickly put together a counter attacked strategy and executed a four-prong counterattack that led to the almost complete elimination of the 7th Cavalry.  They let the Maj. Marcus a. Reno and the remaining companies escaped extermination when the Indian force retreated so as to be able to escape the advancing force of Gen. Terry - who happen to miss the whole battle.

Depiction of battle scene

Battle field view today

Eventually however, then as it is now, technology and the arms manufacturing capacity of the industrialized Northeast was something that the Indians could not compete and they lost their way of life, land and culture when a few years later (after some of their leaders were killed) they all had to surrender and face life on the reservation.

From what I can tell walking this battlefield, the Little Big Horn Valley, on the Crow Indian Reservation, remains as isolated now as it was in June 25th of 1876.  One really has to love this land and the culture to be able to fight for it like the Indians at that time did.  The Lakota and Cheyenne were fighting to maintain a Nomadic way of life they had always had and they just wanted to be left alone.  A Cheyenne warrior named Wooden Leg, who fought in the battle of the Little Big Horn when interviewed in 1906, simply said about the battle:  "We had killed soldiers who had come to kill us."