Custer’s Last Stand

The most famous Indian battle in American history was a final flourish to the Indians’ hopelessly valiant war dance. The battle itself was simply the result of the actions of one vain, headstrong—some have suggested mad—soldier,rift platinum George Armstrong Custer. The Indian victory at the Little Bighorn merely hastened the inevitable: the brutal end of Indian resistance and extinction for their singular way of life.

While the white men wearing blue and gray uniforms fought one another to the death, there were about 300,000 American Indians left in the West. They had been pushed and pressed inward from both coasts by the War of 1812, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California and Colorado gold rushes, and all the other reasons that whites had for stripping the Indians of their hunting lands. The “permanent Indian frontier” pledged by Andrew Jackson tera gold during the removals earlier in the century had long been breached by private and public enterprises, as had every treaty in the sad history of the Indians. When the Civil War ended, the politicians, prospectors, farmers, railroad builders, and cattlemen were ready to take up where they had left off when the war interrupted.

The most powerful and numerous of the surviving tribes were the Sioux, divided into several smaller groupings: the Santee Sioux rift gold of western Minnesota, who had tried to accept white ways; the Teton Sioux, those extraordinary horse warriors of the Great Plains, led by the Oglala chief Red Cloud; the Hunkpapa, who would produce Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse; and the Tetons’ allies, the Cheyenne of Wyoming and Colorado. Farther south were other tribes: the Arapaho of Colorado; the Comanche of Texas; the Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo of New Mexico.