My latest novel, “Hostile” is set in the Dakota territory of the Old West in the year 1876, and has necessitated no small amount of research. The time period is, of course, controversial by its very nature, but the inclusion of those three terms – Dakota, West, and 1876 – bring immediately to mind one of the most controversial figures in American history: George Armstrong Custer.
In six days, it will be Sunday, June 25, 2006 – one hundred and thirty years, to the day, even to the day of the week, since Custer led a detachment of five companies of his Seventh Cavalry to their deaths at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Thirteen decades and a host of excuses, rationalizations, theories, recriminations, and investigations later, we still do not know exactly what happened on that dusty Montana hillside that Sunday afternoon, but one thing that we do know is that Custer’s name is often enough to either begin an argument or, at the least, unleash a torrent of venomous opinion.
Since my research has meant so much study of the famously coiffed commander and the battlefield which until recently bore his name, I thought it would be interesting to spend the next six days leading up to the one hundred thirtieth anniversary in discussing this final, greatest victory of the Plains Indians over the United States Army.
It must be clearly understood that none of the “facts” which I will discuss are necessarily to be taken as gospel truth. No man in Custer’s immediate command survived, and the survivors of the battle told their stories under circumstances even less convivial to true memory than eyewitnesses to other notable events. Indian survivors, for example, had a very real (and sometimes justified) fear of retaliation when asked for their stories of the battle. White officers may have colored their tales in order to cover their own actions or to grind a personal grievance against Custer or some of the other commanders in his regiment. Later writers, swayed by their partisanship for Custer, Reno, Benteen, or any of the other figures in this dramatic story, have placed importance and emphasis on different and even conflicting stories, each to buttress his own theory.
But before touching on the movements, the actions, the mistakes made by the officers involved, it is important to remember that the truth is that Custer lost the battle and his life because his enemies won. Custer didn’t “lose” the Battle of the Little Big Horn – the Sioux and Cheyenne “won” it.
It is, therefore, with these Sioux and Cheyenne warriors that we should begin. Who were these Indians? Were they the “demonic red devils” of frontier lore? The “bloodthirsty savages” of early Westerns? The noble, Nature-embracing conservationists so beloved through the 1960s and 70s? Speaking personally, the most enduring image that I carried of the Native American from my childhood days was that of the noble warrior, one tear slowly trickling down his cheek, who looked down at the garbage-strewn mess that we had made of his beautiful land. The image, of course, came from a ubiquitous television commercial in the 1970’s, but was emblematic of a fundamental change in the way that the Indian Wars were viewed from the vantage point of a century.
At the height of the conflict, however, the nation was almost as deeply divided on the “Indian question” as it had been on the “slavery question” over the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of the same activists who had so tirelessly championed the cause of removing the institution of slavery turned, in the years following the Civil War, to advocating the cause of the American Indian. Their portrait of the “noble savage,” at one with Nature, nomadic and peaceable, ever mindful of the connection between man and the Earth, and victimized by the ever-increasing reach of white “civilization,” was matched by equally vociferous demands for pacification, protection, and even extermination coming from the settlements in the West. More than one commentator has noted wryly that the farther East one traveled – and thus, the farther away from the Indian territories – the more this depiction of the “noble savage” held sway. Out West, the victims of depredations were too fresh to be painted over by a few speeches or petitions, and vengeance was the call of the day.
And where was the Army in all of this? Square in the middle between the two camps. Officers such as Major Wynkoop went so far as to turn in his blue uniform and become an Indian agent to attempt to better the lot of his Native charges. Other officers, Custer notably among them, admired the Indian way of life, going so far as to privately admit that he himself would be labeled a “hostile” if he were compelled to live on a government reservation, especially under the often deplorable conditions set by a penurious Congress and a number of dishonest Indian Bureau agents.
Conversely, much of the army held the view attributed (mistakenly) to General Philip Sheridan, who was said to have commented “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” In point of fact, Sheridan never said this at all. Upon being introduced to a chief who greeted him by saying, “Me good Indian!” Sheridan brusquely replied, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” So there is a misquoting, but the sense of the position is still clear.
Most of the officers held a pragmatic, duty-oriented view not unlike that of Custer himself. If the Indians were on the reservations, where they belonged according to the treaties they had signed, they should be well cared for, and the Army constantly recommended the cession of these administrative posts to Army officers who could handle the logistics involved to make sure that all were housed, clothed, and fed. If the Indians left the reservations and became “hostile,” then the Army accepted its duty to attack, round up, and “chastise” the recalcitrant tribesmen.
But what was it all about? Was the Indian the bloodthirsty murderer or the noble lover of Mother Earth? Like his white enemy, the Indian was all of the above, and none of it. To the eyes of white civilization, there is really only one term that truly describes the Native Americans, and it is a term ill-used today, its true meaning having been lost along the way of the years. The word is ALIEN. Nowadays, the word conjures up images of extraterrestrial beings, or immigrants from a foreign land. The original definition, however, was strange; different; unlike anything known to the speaker.
The culture and experiences of the Native Americans were alien to the “civilized” whites. Whites looked upon the Indians as foolish children, poor backward tots who only needed to be taught the “proper” way to live in order to become functioning members of society – white society, that is. Many tribes used vast tracts of land because they were hunters and gatherers by nature. Their culture was built around the chase, the hunt, winning honor through single exploits of courage, and living as nomads. Whites, seeing the Indians wander to and fro across the land, decided that they must be backward. Didn’t they know they should wear pants? Plow their fields? Put a fence up to determine their own land from their neighbor’s?
To the Indians, it was the white man who was backward and crazy. “One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk,” said Sitting Bull. The concept of having a plot of land or even a haunch of beef that was not for the use of others as well as yourself was completely inconceivable to the Native American culture. When an Indian was hungry and far from home, he walked into the nearest camp, sat down at a fire, and helped himself to some meat, even if he did not speak the same dialect. When an Indian fought, he fought alone, on his own terms. Every man was free to choose whether he would ride with a war party or stay home, and there was no stigma attached to refusing to battle. Contrast this with the discipline, regimented style of fighting embraced by the Army.
It was a clash of cultures that was bound to produce conflict, and just as firmly bound to end with only one culture surviving.
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