Custer’s Last Stand

Custer’s Last Stand

The White Race is being pushed into its last stand. Whether it will end in a feeble whimper or a heroic confrontation remains to be seen. General Phillip H. Sheridan is credited with the observation that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” In July of 1874 he sent Lt. Col. George A. Custer on a special mission to wage war against the Plains Indians who had been raising havoc with the White settlers moving West. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. Emigration to the West was on the increase as the railroad spanned the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1869. Railroad surveyors were trespassing on lands the Indians considered theirs. The number of battles between the U.S. Calvary and the western Indian tribes had been sporadic but accelerating ever since the Civil War. As the White Man pressed westward the conflict gained momentum, and the friction and hatred between the Red Man and the White Man increased. One of the most hated by the Indian tribes was the colorful and dashing Col. George A. Custer himself, whom they called Yellow Hair. They did not forget his no-holds barred attack on Chief Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River Nov. 27, 1868. In this charge through the Cheyenne’s camp, Custer’s men killed 103 Indians, including Chief Black Kettle himself.

The culmination of this sporadic, but unfocused warfare came to a climax on June 25, 1876, at the Battle of the little Big Horn in Montana. In this encounter a conglomerate of approximately 5000 Indians, mostly Sioux and Cheyenne, led Custer’s contingent of cavalry in to a trap. As at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E., and at the Alamo in 1836, the White Man made a gallant stand and fought to the last man. All 225 cavalrymen, including Custer himself, were massacred. The news of the massacre hit the nation’s capitol like a thunderclap when it was publicly announced on July 4, 1876, as the nation was celebrating its first Centennial. It led to the galvanization of public opinion and the White Man’s determination to settle the “Indian question” once and for all. The U.S. Army went about it in earnest and the back of the Indian resistance was broken at Wounded Knee on Dec. 29, 1890. In this short-lived skirmish, in which the 7th Cavalry again participated, the White Man lost o ...

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