I bought this book at the visitor center at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in May and started reading it immediately, having been so powerfully affected by the ranger talk and the driving tour of the battlefield. The good news is that it is very well written. The bad news is that this is a story of bad, incompetent men behaving so badly and so incompetently that their bloody end on the battlefield can only be regarded by any sane person as justified. Proof of that there is in plenty.

Take for example the Battle of the Washita (although Slaughter of the Washita would be more accurate), which occurred on November 27, 1868, eight years before Little Bighorn. Custer and the 7th Calvary attacked a village of 150 Cheyenne and wiped out 100 of them. The rest, most of whom were women, were held in sexual slavery by the officers, including Custer, of the 7th Calvary for the rest of the winter.

There was a saying among the soldiers of the western frontier, a saying Custer and his officers could heartily endorse: “Indian women rape well.”

Eight years later Sitting Bull and everyone with him would have known that story, and of the story of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 as well.

On June 15th, ten days from Little Bighorn

…[the 7th]…came upon the remains of a large Lakota burial ground…Custer and his troopers systematically desecrated the graves.

And looted them. Sitting Bull and his people would undoubtedly have known about that, too. One of Custer’s own soldiers

…cautioned the lieutenant “that G Troop might be sorry for this.”

You think?

And the reason Sitting Bull’s mobile encampment was so large, almost 3,000 people? The United States government had created reservations for Native Americans, where the government promised they would be fed. Remember that by now White hunters had decimated the massive herds of buffalo that once roamed the Great Plains and supported the Native American tribes so food was hard to come by and a lot of Native Americans took them up on the offer. I mean, wouldn’t you, rather than watch your kids starve to death? Except that, you guessed it, the US didn’t deliver, and the Native Americans on the reservations heard about Sitting Bull feeding his people in a place where there still were buffalo and left the reservations in whole tribes to join him. 

So essentially the federal government, in actions both set in motion and not taken, was itself the author of the 7th Cavalry’s defeat.

Not, as I said above, that they didn’t roundly deserve defeating. Most of the officers were drinking if not outright drunk, and drunk or sober almost every one of them was an egotistical blowhard focussed more on personal glory and promotion rather than on serving their country. Few of the soldiers even knew how to ride a horse and they learned how to shoot by doing so in action as they didn’t have enough ammunition for practice.

The subsequent century-long hagiography of Custer and the 7th undertaken by Custer’s wife was unfortunately unstoppable. The accounts of those of the 7th Calvary who survived and the people who issued their orders were universally suspect because they were all busy either hiding or whitewashing their own actions to avoid being courtmartialed or publicly pilloried or both. Remember, too, that Little Bighorn happened in 1876, the centenary of the nation. President Grant was pulled out of an event celebrating the nation’s hundredth birthday to hear the news of Custer’s defeat. The Native Americans won the battle, all right, but you can imagine that their utter annihilation was authored in that moment.

At the beginning of this narrative Philbrick makes what feels like, well, one even might call it a frantic case that Custer was indeed the best calvary officer the Union had during the Civil War. The way the Little Big Horn plays out either that is a complete falsehood or traditional calvary tactics just didn’t suit ethnic cleansing as the US was practicing it on the post-Civil War frontier.

Book Review Monday Chatter Uncategorized Nathaniel Philbrick The Last Stand