Custer And Courage

Articles

Custer And Courage

By Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
Dec. 29, 2005

The stories of General George Armstrong Custer have been told in many ways by many people.

Working backwards from today, there have been battlefield “crime scene investigators” who searched and dug and metal-detected all over the banks of the Greasy Grass, the name the Oglala Sioux had for the “Little Big Horn.” And their investigations shed some new light on the famous battle, Custer’s Last Stand.

http://www.cr.nps.gov/mwac/libi/

http://www.emill.com/connorconsulting/crm.html

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WWbighorn.htm

Still there is no absolute verifiable conclusion. As Two Moons said, no white man lived to tell what really happened. However, an Indian scout, “Curly,” was supposedly the only person to escape, having donned, near the end of the battle, a Sioux blanket as disguise and running along with the Sioux warriors, pretending to be one of them. He told a story of Custer’s being one of the last to die and there were stories that Custer was not scalped out of respect for his bravery. Other stories say Custer died earlier in the fight.

Various analysts, including famous contemporaries such as Phil Sheridan, concluded Custer had made many tactical errors. He believed scouting reports from various sources. Custer’s opponents are still claiming that “Custer lied, soldiers died.” However, it is clear his scouting reports said that the Indians had WMD—oh, sorry!—claimed that the Indians numbered only 800, while in fact the number was more like 4000, the largest number of Indians ever assembled on the North American continent.

The Indians also had repeating Winchester rifles, while Custer’s men had only Springfield rifles. And Custer’s most serious mistake was in thinking the Indians planned to flee rather than fight. He had no way to know that Totanka Yotanka, Sitting Bull, had had a vision wherein soldiers fell into camp upside down, signifying death, and he had told the Sioux and the rest that they would have a great victory if they fought.

Traditional histories, including Ramer’s “History of Montana,” have given accounts that more or less agreed, concerning the movements of the various elements of Custer’s command and the attacking Indian tribes and their leadership.

These events around June 25, 1876, and the days after have played a major role in American movies and novels, also. Much of this has become the stuff of mythology, to be sure. Will Henry wrote one of the more entertaining novels, “No Survivors,” and it blends pure fabrication with historical reports quite well. I note here that the protagonist of the novel, John Buell Clayton, supposedly a southerner and ex-Confederate officer who was befriended by Tashunka Witko, Crazy Horse, and who later ended up fighting beside Custer, fits remarkably with a story told by Two Moons of a large man in a buckskin shirt riding among Custer’s men on a sorrel horse, encouraging them to keep fighting.

Tashunka Witko, the battle chief of the Sioux and the man who probably planned the Indian’s tactics at Little Big Horn, was later killed and apparently never related his version of what happened.

Custer’s enemies, both then and now, are thus free to tell the story any way they like with no one to contradict them definitively.

It is currently fashionable, in modern academia, to deconstruct and otherwise rewrite history, apparently on the theory that minorities can do no wrong while white men can do no right. Thus the current fad of attacking Custer, much as it is the current fad to attack George W. Bush.

I do note that Custer had many admirers as well as detractors. I also note that many military historians credit Custer, who commanded the Union Cavalry, along with the clever tactics and heroics of Joshua Chamberlain, with the defeat of the Confederates at Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War. Custer’s extended skirmish with Stuart’s cavalry delayed their arrival as reinforcements for Lee’s army. It may be said with some fairness that, without Custer’s heroics at Gettysburg, the Civil War might have ended quite differently. Who knows? We might all be speaking “suthren” and eating grits now without Custer.

So, folks, take everything you read about Custer with a large grain of salt. In fact, you may need a whole salt shaker to digest those mouthfuls of grits. I like mine with butter and red pepper.

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About the author Brooks A. Mick: Physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre.

Email: brooks15@cox.net

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