The Mysteries of History (June 25 Edition)
Custer's Last Stand; Korean War
1876 — Battle of Greasy Grass / Little Bighorn (“Custer’s Last Stand”)
public domain image from wikimedia commons
The battle in southern Montana, fought just before the Nation’s Centennial (on this date in 1876), was called the Battle of Greasy Grass by the victors. The vanquished gave it the name the Battle of Little Bighorn. It is commonly known as “Custer’s Last Stand.”
In any case, it may be considered a pyrrhic victory for the Natives, as the U.S. Army got revenge on the Indians in 1890 in their massacre of unarmed men, women, and children at Wounded Knee.
At the battle, Custer exhibited extreme hubris, thinking he had caught the Indians napping and pressed ahead to fight rather than wait for reinforcements. The Indians, though, were not napping. Crazy Horse’s group of around 3,000 quickly wiped out the now-short-haired Custer (his nicknames were “Longhair” and “Old Hardbutt” [because of his ability to ride horseback for hours upon hours without resting his backside]) and his entire team of 200.
The following is what I wrote about “Custer’s Last Stand” in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 1: 1620-1913:
“We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages. Then ‘long hair’ came in the same way. They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same things to us had we not defended our selves and fought to the last.”—Crazy Horse, Sioux
“If I were an Indian, I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation.”—George Armstrong Custer “I could whip all the Indians in the northwest with the Seventh Cavalry.”—George Armstrong Custer, June 25th, 1876
“It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die! Strong hearts, brave hearts, to the front! Weak hearts and cowards to the rear.”—Crazy Horse, Sioux, June 25th, 1876
“It’s Clobberin’ Time!”—Marvel™ Comics character “The Thing”
“Hundreds of books have been written about this battle by people who weren’t there. I was there, but all I remember is one big cloud of dust.”—Good Fox, Sioux
“When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.”
—Frederick Douglass
The economy wasn’t the only problem this year, though. The situation began to go from bad to worse for westward expansionists. Sitting Bull, who was at an encampment along the Greasy Grass River (or, as the Euro-Americans called it, the Little Bighorn) along with Crazy Horse, was at odds with the whites. The Hunkpapa Lakota tribe considered the Black Hills (which they call “Paha Sapa”) sacred, and resisted white encroachment in the area when gold—sound familiar?—was discovered there.
The Sioux knew there was gold on their land, and had tried to keep it secret. Crazy Horse’s father Worm had attended a large Indian council where the warriors agreed that any of their number who divulged to the whites the presence of gold in the Black Hills was to be killed as punishment.
Based on his earlier experiences, Sitting Bull was skeptical regarding treaties made with the whites. He had said, “Tell them at Washington, if they have one man who speaks the truth, to send him to me, and I will listen to what he has to say.”
In spite of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty acknowledging Sioux ownership of the Black Hills in perpetuity, the government soon confiscated it. The Homestake Mine alone has extracted over a billion dollars worth of gold from the Black Hills. Meanwhile, many if not most of the Sioux live below the poverty line.
“Woman killer,” as some Indians called George Armstrong Custer, bit off more than he could chew in southeastern Montana when he pursued a large encampment of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho there. Custer, who had cut his hair short for the campaign had, some conjecture, intended to win another quick victory in the Indian wars and then hightail it back to Washington and cast his hat into the ring in a bid for the Presidency.
Custer had told his Indian scout Bloody Knife (as the Crow and Shoshoni were traditional enemies of the Sioux, it was not difficult for the U.S. Army to attract these as allies in their campaign against the Sioux) that this would be his last Indian campaign (in fact, all involved knew that this would be the last big Indian fight on the plains) and that if he was successful he would become the “Great White Father” in Washington.
As it turned out (as we will examine), the 1876 election was a very contentious one. The Democratic front-runner, New York Governor Samuel Tilden, was not popular with all in the party, as they regarded his reform impulses as dangerous. Custer, on the other hand, was a horse of a different color. Ambrose’s “Crazy Horse and Custer” says:
To men desperate for a candidate, Custer must have seemed ideal. The Democrats were scheduled to hold their convention in St. Louis in late June; by then, Custer should have found and whipped the hostiles. News of his victory could have swept the convention like wildfire if handled properly and led to a stampede for Custer.
Did Bennett or someone else suggest this possibility to Custer? Despite direct orders to the contrary from Sheridan, Custer was bringing Mark Kellogg, a newspaper reporter, with him on the expedition. Perhaps Custer hoped that Kellogg could get a report of the battle with the Sioux to the Democrats and to the country before June 27, the opening day of the convention.
There was enough reality in the proposition, one could suppose, for Custer to believe his nomination possible. If nominated, could he have won? That is anyone’s guess, American politics being as they are, but it may be instructive to recall that the Democrats were able to throw the election of 1876 into the House of Representatives, even when running so faceless a candidate as Tilden and despite widespread republican fraud at the ballot boxes. And it might also be said that as President, Custer probably would not have been much worse than the men who did hold the job for the remainder of the nineteenth century.
The country would have survived. U.S. Grant had almost inadvertently saved Custer’s life. Grant, no sup porter of Custer—especially after Custer had accused Grant’s son of being a drunkard—had attempted to prevent Custer from leaving Washington for his final escapade.
Custer’s Indian scouts also tried to save him (or, perhaps, themselves). They warned the would-be “Great Father” that the superior numbers of the Sioux made victory for the army impossible. Bloody Knife told Custer that there were more Sioux up ahead than the Cavalry had bullets. Custer estimated there were at most 1,500 Sioux. In actuality, there may have been as many as 3,000 Sioux and their mostly Cheyenne allies.
Never accused of being a genius, but always brave and aggressive, Custer didn’t listen. Instead of heeding the warning, the man who had graduated last in his class at West Point (and been court-martialed soon after graduation, at the same time his fellow graduates were being called to Washington and being bestowed commissions at the start of the Civil War), was killed along with his men at the battle known as the Little Bighorn on June 25th.
Bearing in mind the Presidential implications of the battle, Ambrose goes on to write regarding Custer’s decision to proceed directly with the attack rather than allow his men and horses time to rest:
He called his officers to him and ordered a night march. This was another inexplicable decision; it further weakened the striking power of an already exhausted 7th Cavalry. Why all the haste? Perhaps the opening date of the Democratic Convention, only three days away, had something to do with it. Kellogg would need time to write his dispatch, take it to the Far West, and get the news on the telegraph to St. Louis. It was already the night of June 24–25; Custer needed to fight his battle soon if he wanted to stampede the Democratic Convention. Whatever his reasons, Custer was pushing hard now, the smell of battle in his nostrils.
Not only was the military outnumbered—there were at least fifteen hun dred to two thousand Indians, and Custer’s men numbered seven hun dred—they were also outgeneraled. Custer thought the Sioux would flee for sure, so when he saw they were still in camp, he said “We’ve caught them nap ping! We’ve got them!”
Not so, though. The Sioux knew Custer and the 7th Cavalry were near, and were anxiously waiting for them to attack. Sitting Bull had had a vision, wherein the whites attacked the Sioux encampment and tumbled head over heels, upside down, into the Sioux camp. The happy campers could hardly wait for the vision to become reality. Custer did what the Indians expected and wanted, but the opposite was not the case. Instead of fleeing, the Sioux and their allies launched a counterattack.
And the Sioux were no pushovers. Ambrose again, describing them:
…men of brave hearts and strong bodies, warriors any commander would be proud to lead, the mightiest armed force, man for man, if equally armed, this continent has ever seen.
Custer wasn’t the first to underestimate the Sioux. Captain William Fetter man had said earlier: “With eighty men, I can ride through the entire Sioux nation.” With precisely that number, he and his men were slaughtered by a contingent of the Sioux after being lured into an ambush by Crazy Horse in 1865. Fetterman and another captain had hoped to kill Red Cloud. Instead, the two homicidal maniacs engaged in mutual assisted suicide—they shot each other in the head as their position was about to be overrun.
“The Fetterman Massacre,” (named for Lt. Col. William Judd Fetterman) may have been seen by the Sioux as revenge for the Sand Creek Massacre at the end of November of the previous year (1864). The Indians called it The Battle of the Hundred Slain. It was the worst defeat the Army had suffered in warfare with the Indians.
Crazy Horse and Custer had met once before on the field of battle, on the banks of the Yellowstone River in 1873 (one year after Congress designated Yellowstone a National Park, the first area in the world to become such). One of them may have killed the other then had not some of the survivors of Black Kettle’s Cheyennes been there. Crazy Horse was attempting to lure Custer into an ambush and had many warriors hiding in the woods. The Cheyenne, though, once they saw the hated Custer, could not control their emotions and rushed forward to attack. The ambush failed; instead, a skirmish ensued, in which both sides inflicted relatively minor damage on the other and then dispersed.
Both sides thought that they had chased the other off. The reason the whites left the territory, though, was due to the (economic) Panic of 1873, which caused a postponement in the furtherance of the building of the rail road. The military was along as guards for the railroad construction gang, so when construction stopped, their presence in the area was no longer required.
Custer, for his part, thought that Indians were cowards, and that they would always flee when attacked, regardless of the numbers they had. This misconception was to prove deadly to Custer and his men.
Probably out of a desire to retain all the glory for himself and his regiment, Custer had turned down an offer of more men from another outfit. It is impossible to say whether these additional men would have made the differ ence in the battle, but they might have.
Opposites in some ways, Crazy Horse and Custer also had many things in common: both were teetotalers (Custer had not always been, but had been for many years); had younger brothers who were even more given to derring-do than they were (Tom Custer won the Congressional Medal of Honor); were known among their people as excellent hunters; and had even shared the same nickname earlier in life (“Curly”).
Not only were the professional soldiers heavily outnumbered, the 7th Cavalry were tired, while the Indians were rested. Significant, too, is the fact that many of the soldiers were basically mercenaries—several were recent immigrants to whom service in the Army was “just a job,” whereas the Indians were fighting for retention of their way of life, for revenge, and were also protecting their women, children, and old folks—for they knew from experience what would doubtless happen to these if they proved unable to drive the army away.
The 7th Cavalry never had much of a chance. After a fierce and chaotic thirty to fifty-five minute bloodbath, over two hundred fifty U.S. soldiers lie dead. Among them were George Custer and two of his younger brothers, Tom and Boston. The only soul in Custer’s column to survive was a horse named Comanche.
Up until this point, Custer had been viewed as “lucky,” and was known for being in the right place at the right time. In the Civil War, where he came to fame, he had had twelve horses killed from under him. On an earlier occasion chasing the Indians around the plains, he had once gotten lost on that great treeless expanse after accidentally shooting his horse while on a solitary buffalo hunt, but was then found by his own men. This was indeed “lucky” for him, as he otherwise may have been found by the Indians, or found by his men only after he had died—which would have been a likely scenario for someone who had put himself in that situation.
The following passages from “Crazy Horse and Custer” by Stephen Ambrose provide insight into Custer’s personality and his previous experiences in the Civil War, which doubtless played a role in his actions at the Little Bighorn:
Custer rode to the top of his profession over the backs of his fallen soldiers. As a General, Custer had one basic instinct, to charge the enemy wherever he might be, no matter how strong his position or numbers. Throughout his military career he indulged that instinct whenever he faced opposition. Neither a thinker nor a planner, Custer scorned maneuvering, reconnaissance, and all other subtleties of warfare. He was a good, if often reckless, small-unit combat commander, no more and no less. But his charges, although by no means always successful, made him a favorite of the national press and one of the superstars of the day. … Of all the division commanders in the war…Custer was the most famous.
He almost certainly suffered the highest losses. At Gettysburg in July 1863, where he wounded, and missing. He personally led the 1st Michigan Cavalry regiment, about 400 strong, in a saber charge against an entire enemy division. The charge did halt a Confederate advance, although that probably could have been done with less blood shed by placing his men in a defensive position and throwing up breastworks. As Custer did the job, however, he lost 86 men in a few brief moments. But he also drew attention to himself and received high praise from his superiors for his boldness and willingness to seize the initiative. The previous Army of the Potomac commander, General Hooker, had supposedly once complained that his cavalry would not fight and that he had never seen a dead cavalryman. Custer gave him plenty to look at. …
Heavy casualties were almost a point of pride with the Union generals, something to brag about, as they proved that the general had not shirked his duty, that he was willing, nay anxious, to get out there and fight. One hundred killed, three hundred wounded, two hundred missing, for no conceivable military advantage, but what did it matter, as long as a superior officer saw the charge or the newspapers reported on it? The reality behind the figures escapes us today, but it was there—farm boys without an arm or a leg, dragging out their existence, unable to work or support themselves or their families, men whose minds as well as their bodies were permanently scarred, young wives who never saw their husbands again, teen-age boys whose lives were cut short. The Union cause was about as just as men are ever likely to find in any war, certainly more noble and inspiring than most, but the price the North paid for victory was far higher than it should have been. And clearly, Custer was one of the leading spendthrifts.
At least one man had understood the danger of Custer’s death-defying antics. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had said to Custer’s wife Lib bie: “So this is the young woman whose husband goes into a charge with a whoop and a shout. Well, I’m told he won’t do so any more.” Libbie replied that the President was mistaken, that her husband would, on the contrary, continue in his same style. Lincoln then responded, “Oh, then you want to be a widow, I see.”
At the Little Bighorn, on June 25th, Custer’s luck ran out, and his wife became a widow. Within a year, Crazy Horse would also be dead.
Custer’s last mistake, or “Custer’s death ride” as one contemporary German painting (“Custer’s Todesritt”) named it, manifestly put a damper on any feel ings of invincibility Euro-American military aggressors may have had. News of the massacre didn’t reach the East, via Western Union telegraph, until July 4th, the very day the country was celebrating its Centennial.
Besides “Yellow Hair,” the Lakota people had also termed Custer “Long Hair,” “Hard Backsides” (because he chased them over long distances without stopping to rest), and “The Chief of Thieves.” The trail the whites took to the badlands was called by the Indians “The Thieves’ Trail.” Custer, who was noted for his bravery but not for his sensibleness, had been earlier in his career suspended from command for a year without pay for abandoning his command (returning home to spend time with his wife), shooting deserters with out first at least going through the motions of according them a trial, and for being otherwise inhumane to the men under his command.
Not all of the soldiers were killed at the Little Bighorn—some stayed out of the action, as much as they could, opting not to come to Custer’s rescue, and perhaps realizing it would have been futile, anyway. All 210 in Custer’s battalion fired their lost shots there, though. Approximately 40 on the Sioux side lost their lives that day.
In order to save face, the Army later claimed that the Indians possessed superior fire power. But this was bunk. Custer saw to it that his men had the best available equipment, and made sure that they were in fighting trim. And as for the Indians, most of their weapons were old flintlocks, condemned muskets, muzzle loaders, and smooth bores. Sitting Bull’s gun, in fact, was a forty year-old Hawken rifle.
The news of the one-sided affair stunned the nation. McMurtry writes in “The Colonel and Little Missie”:
The death, in June 1876, of General George Armstrong Custer and some 250 men of the famed Seventh Cavalry was a shock to the nation comparable in some ways to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The scale may have been much smaller but the shock was still tremendous: like 9/11 the massacre at the Little Bighorn was completely unexpected. In fact, in his report for 1875, the commissioner for Indian Affairs stated that it was no longer probable that even five hundred belligerent warriors could ever again be mustered for a fight.
And so, what a comeuppance it turned out to be. The Euro-Americans would have their revenge, though. They went on the rampage for the next fourteen years, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. This year’s Indian victory was a short-lived one, and ultimately Pyrrhic in the extreme. The whites have been extracting revenge for “Custer’s Last Stand” ever since, continuing down to the present.
Questions: Have you heard the song Comanche (The Brave Horse) by Johnny Horton? Why did Custer have his normally long hair cut before this military campaign?
1950 — Korean War Begins
public domain image from wikimedia commons
Seventy-five years ago today, North Korean soldiers marched into South Korea, setting off a war that would involve other Nations (in particular the U.S. and China), last three years, and cost approximately three million lives, about half of these being civilians.
The two halves of Korea had been separated following the end of World War 2 in 1945. Prior to that, Korea had “belonged” to Japan. Forces in the South surrendered to American forces, and forces in the North capitulated to Russian forces, with those surrendered-to Nations exercising control over them after Japan was stripped of its former possession. But it was China, not Russia, who supplied troops to support the North and they have been the “sponsors” of North Korea ever since.
The following is what I wrote about the Korean War in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 2: 1914-2006:
The Korean War began on June 25th, when troops from the Northern, communist half of that divided nation invaded the Southern portion. Five days later, President Harry Truman authorized military intervention to help protect pro-U.S. South Korea. Albert and Alice’s firstborn son David A Kollenborn [my maternal uncle’s middle name did not stand for anything, thus there is no period (“.”) after it] would serve there during that conflict [, as would my paternal uncles Bill and Carlton “Cat” Shannon].
Actually, the confrontation is not considered to have been a war, but a “police action,” or simply a “conflict.” Whatever you call the involvement the two sides had with each other, it was not officially terminated until 1991, or 38 years after fighting had ceased in 1953. It was not until then that North Korea and South Korea finally signed a treaty of reconciliation and nonaggression.
Of course, many would consider the activities in Korea a war, regardless of its official designation. Up to this point, this was the most intense burst of heat the Cold War had given off. And it was considered a very high-stakes game, too. The Americans feared a “domino effect” if they lost South Korea to the communist camp. They were afraid that one “conversion” to communism would lead to another, then another, until they were outnumbered and out gunned by the opposition.
On the other hand, they didn’t want to “pull out all the stops” out of fear of triggering World War III, or, as many people referred to the potential event, a “thermonuclear Armageddon.”
The Korean conflict coincided with, and foreshadowed, another Asian conflict the U.S. would involve itself in. France, which had lost many colonies since World War II, such as Algeria, wanted its old colonies of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia back. Knowing the United States was also intensely interested in keeping communism in check, they asked for help from the U.S. in fighting communist rebels in Vietnam. America responded by sending “military advisers” and supplies, and contributed millions of dollars to the cause.
This was just the beginning of American involvement in the quagmire there, though. America would remain entangled in one way or another with the problems in Vietnam from Truman’s Presidency at this time and on through Eisenhower’s, Kennedy’s, Johnson’s (and how!), and finally end in Nixon’s era.
Questions: Why is the Korean War, which took place between World War 2 and the Vietnam War, a relatively obscure and “forgotten” war?
