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.
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.
"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.