Posted on 06/25/2021 6:12:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
Five score and forty-five years ago, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the “Boy General” of the Civil War, and most of his troopers were killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn—or were they?
I’ve written a series of comic novels that tell the story of how Custer was actually rescued by an Indian princess, and went on to lead a life, undercover, as a knight-errant in the West. The stories are meant to funny, and driven by action and adventure, but I confess, they have a point.
That point is easily summarized by asking what it means to be an American—and how long American civilization, as we have traditionally understood it, can last. I won’t keep you in suspense. As I told a recent interviewer, I reckon it’s later than many of us would like to think.
Anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and watched the movie Patton, had to have an uncomfortable feeling, during the opening monologue, when Patton explains “why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war,” and worry about America’s future, post-Vietnam.
Maybe even more to the point is the opening monologue from a less well-known movie, the John Milius-Tom Berenger 1997 film Rough Riders, where a soldier reminisces about the events leading up to the Spanish-American War and the formation of the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry: “My God we were young. Well, it was a young country then, full of promise and hope. Anything was possible if—if you were an American.”
He goes on: “Wasn’t the same for other folks. Down South—Cuba—hell, they just wanted to be left alone, breathe free, like we done. Them folks in Spain, the Old World, wouldn’t let ’em. It caused quite a fuss.”
Coming together as “Rough Riders” were cowboys, Indians, Mexican Americans, former Confederates, an East Coast, noblesse oblige, Shakespeare-quoting aristocracy—an e pluribus unum force united by a sense of freedom, liberty, and manifest destiny.
Who would define our country as such today?
Indeed, those heroes—some of them (like Theodore Roosevelt) or men just like them—and their ancestors were the sort who had their statues toppled just last year, and not only toppled by mobs, but shamefacedly removed by government officials all across the country.
Fighting Joe Wheeler, a Confederate general who also served as a general with the Rough Riders, is one of those Confederate heroes (with a bronze statue in the United States Capitol and several locations named after him) that Democrats and a distressing number of Republicans would rather banish than honor.
Things many of us considered certainties, even in the supposedly crazy 1960s and 1970s—that men are men and women are women; that a husband takes a wife, not another husband; that the founders were political geniuses who gave us a precious system to protect our God-given unalienable rights; that the Civil War was an American Iliad of courageous Greeks versus valiant Trojans each, in Theodore Roosevelt’s famous words, fighting “with equal bravery and equal sincerity of conviction, each striving for the light as it was given him to see the light”—have been utterly overturned. It’s happened suddenly—though, if one is so inclined, it’s easy to trace the steps that radicals laid, and that many well-meaning people unthinkingly followed, that brought us here.
I remember growing up with Custer as a hero. My vision of him was embodied by Errol Flynn in the movie They Died with Their Boots On. I knew others disagreed, but I dismissed them as the same sort of anti-American leftists who protested the Vietnam War and thought that nearly every American military officer was a crazed, bloodthirsty imperialist eager to commit a My Lai Massacre. As a boy from the provinces, I was surprised, later, to find “conservatives” who agreed with the Left on Custer (and also agreed with the Left on the French Revolution, “systemic” racism, and just about every “social” issue).
I leave you with this warning: a society that will not acknowledge the basic truths of human biology (and indeed propagandizes against them); that does not honor its founding fathers and jealously guard the constitutional rights they promulgated for us; that does not honor the men who served the nation (like Custer); that does not regard with magnanimity the contending sides of our tragic Civil War, as Custer, a Union officer, actually did: (he did not hate his Southern foes any more than his Indian foes; he actually liked and admired both of them); that believes our country was ill-founded, a source of vicious racism, with a history of nearly ineradicable bigotry from which we should all repent; will not long stand.
What is an American? Custer knew. We all knew until practically yesterday. But ask kids of your acquaintance, ask your liberal neighbors, ask even your Republican congressman, if you have one, and you might be surprised by the answers. You might be horrified too. Remember Ronald Reagan’s much quoted lines that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation.” Then ask yourself what you have done to defend freedom, and truth, and our vision of what America was, is, and should be. The hour is late, the task before us is daunting, but our preservation, if it is possible, begins with reclaiming our patriotic past.
Insightful! Great Post!
I just rewatched a film favorite from when I was but a lad: Little Big Man.
Good film, but even when I was a boy, I thought the depiction of Custer in it was a tad unfair.
Yes, raving hysterical lunatic was pretty unfair.
Unfair? The whole movie was a lie! But still a funny movie!
Sad so many people only get their history from movies like LITTLE BIG MAN and Soldier Blue, another lie of a movie.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I believe Son of the Morning Star was a better, more even handed depiction of Custer. Despite his shortcomings and mistakes at Little Big Horn, he was still regarded as a good soldier by many of his contemporaries.
bump
FTA: “...(he did not hate his Southern foes any more than his Indian foes; he actually liked and admired both of them)...”
I doubt Southern Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle would agree with the above statement.
A quick history lesson on why Custer is hated.(What you never learn from the school books or movies)
The Washita.
The Cheyenne tribe had accepted a treaty in which they would move to Oklahoma. Their reservation would be between the Cimarron river, Arkansas rivers and the Kansas line. Washita was a long way west of there. Years later they got the Washita area reservation but not in 1868.
One day they sent a war party into Kansas to raid the pro-US Kaw and Pawnee tribes.
When that party left, the Indian agent, Wynkoop, made a distribution of goods to the tribe so they could go buffalo hunting.
Eighty Lancaster rifles, and 100 pistols along with powder and lead, and 15,000 percussion caps were issued. He then reported that those happy Indians left to go buffalo hunting.
But they DID NOT go buffalo hunting. They joined the first war party in Kansas. When the first party saw they had missed out on all the goodies they got their feelings hurt and instead decided to raid settlers instead of the Pawnee.
As the slaughter of settlers continued, Custer was under orders to find and punish the hostiles. His Osage Indian scouts followed the trail in the snow right back to Black Kettle’s camp where they were having a big Scalp Dance, and it was NOT Pawnee or Kaw scalps they were dancing over.
The next morning he hit the camp as he was under orders to do. It was said the Osages were the ones killing women and children due to raids on their own people in the past, but Custer still got the blame. Yet Custer took lots of women and children back to Ft Supply as prisoners.
So Custer did NOT just go off on his own to kill Indians.
Son of the Morning Star
An excellent Made-For-TV movie.
"In November 1868, Custer led a raid on a Cheyenne camp along the Washita River in what is now Oklahoma. There were disagreements over Custer’s claim that he had killed a significant number of warriors, but it was the Army’s first significant victory in the region, and brought Custer more fame.
In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered all Sioux out of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming by the end of the following January. Well aware that they would be unable to make the trek during a harsh winter, the government planned to use this as an excuse to expand hostilities.
These actions broke the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had recognized the Black Hills as Sioux land. But in 1874, gold had been discovered in the region – thanks to a mining expedition led by Custer – and the U.S. government wanted to permanently remove the Sioux. Among those who resisted American aggression was Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man."
President Grant, facing financial issues at home due to the debt incurred in the (not so) Civil war, sent Custer secretly (breaking treaty agreements with Native Americans) into Indian lands to verify reports of gold deposits there.
When Custer found gold, Grant opened the west to settlement. This started the westward expansion (and exporting a lot of his detractors raising issues at home with his administration), and pushing the Native Americans off their land that had been allocated to them less than a decade earlier.
Sorry to bust your bubble. Custer was a tool of the early Deep State, and was no hero...
Chief Rain in the Face supposedly ate Tom Custer’s heart at the battle of the Greasy Grass/Little Big Horn. He ended up a sideshow attraction at Coney Island. And I always loved the George Custer story from the Civil War when the Union was winning a battle and the Generals decided to halt and set up camp by a river. Custer rode up screaming at them that they were on the run and they can be crushed right now. Why was the army stopping? The Generals pointed to a map and said we are looking for a place shallow enough to cross the river. Custer jumped on his horse rode to the middle of the river right in front of the Command Post where it was not deep at all and yelled back “Right Here”. And they still wouldn’t go.
"The news of Custer’s Last Stand stunned the nation. His death at just 36 made him a martyr, with newspaper stories, articles, books, advertisements and Hollywood movies glorifying his life and career.
Chief among those burnishing his fame was Libbie Custer, who spent her widowhood writing a series of best-sellers about their life, continuing to cultivate his legacy for more than 50 years until her own death in 1933.
As popular opinion about America’s mistreatment of Native Americans shifted, so to did attitudes about Custer, who remains a highly controversial figure."
The victor is the one that writes the history books..
Son of the Morning Star
Beautiful soundtrack too.
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
It definitely is. The book by Evan S. Connell is excellent.
On this day in 1876 warriors from the Sioux, Cheyenne and other tribes brutally annihilated five of the 7th Cavalry’s twelve companies along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory.
This massacre ultimately led to the complete destruction of the plains Indian culture by the largely black troopers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry (the Buffalo soldiers).
Oh Great Spirit when will the African American community pay the reparations they owe our Native Americans. When will the US government give us our Juneteenth?
I agree, i must have watched it over 20 times over the years and still will again.
Who shot that guy?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.