(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange recently took a break from a fishing trip to visit a tragic battlefield.
(LANGE) As a kid I got my hair cut at an old-fashioned barber shop in Albany, New York. On the wall hung a color print called "Custer’s Last Stand" – a dramatic scene of chaos and death. At its center, surrounded by dead horses and cavalrymen and advancing savages, stood the heroic figure of George Custer, long hair flying and pistols blazing away hopelessly.
Seventy years later, gazing across the valley of the Little Bighorn, I notice there’s no place to hide! You can see twenty miles in any direction. Several hundred soldiers with single-shot rifles setting out to corral several thousand Indians riding good horses and armed with repeating rifles was military planning at its most hubristic. No, thanks! One look at Colonel Custer, and I’d have volunteered to take a message – to St. Louis, if possible.
The end of the Civil War opened up the West for settlement. When news came of gold in the Black Hills, prospectors flocked into Indian territory, followed by settlers who set to work extirpating the buffalo and fencing native land. The natives responded just as you and I would. The Grant Administration, under pressure from various interests, forced the Indians onto smaller and less useful tracts of land.
The Indians were hunters, not farmers. Reservation restrictions prevented them from following the herds. Their leaders were under the same pressure President Grant was, from their own people. In the spring of 1876 thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne left the reservations. The army set out to trap them in a pincers movement near the Wyoming-Montana border. They had no idea what numbers they were up against.
Two columns of troopers converged at the Rosebud River, north of the Indian camps on the Little Bighorn. The column approaching from the south in Wyoming ran into a large force of Indians on the upper Rosebud and was defeated. While it paused to regroup, Custer, ever eager to engage, began an attack alone on the main village of Indians on the Little Bighorn
There are no precise accounts of the ensuing hours, but the first group to engage found the Indians "in force and not running away" – something new. Thousands of mounted warriors surrounded and swarmed them. Only a few soldiers escaped by building breastworks and holding out till infantry reinforcements finally arrived. The rest were all killed.
I stood at the obelisk atop "Last Stand Hill," looking at the scattered headstones marking where the soldiers’ bodies were found; Custer’s was faced in black. They died all over the hillside. Sitting Bull’s warriors won, but the battle was the last hurrah of the tribes; General Sheridan used it as a pretext for mounting overwhelming incursions into Indian Territory.
At the visitors’ center a ranger described the battle and its sad aftermath. At the end he said, "What did all that death and sadness accomplish? Nothing. Everybody lost. What have we ever accomplished by killing each other like this?"
This is Willem Lange in Crow Agency, Montana, and I gotta get back to work.
(TAG) You can find more commentaries by Willem Lange on line at VPR-dot-net.