Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Little Bighorn

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Also known as Custer's Last Stand or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, the Battle of Little Bighorn was a pivotal moment in the story of the American West. In 1876 General George Custer's US army faced a devastating defeat at the hands of the native Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne tribes. The native warriors fought defiantly to protect their ancestral lands after the US government reneged on a treaty promising them the Black Hills in South Dakota when gold was discovered there.Historian and author Angie Newell joins Dan to tell the story of the Battle of Little Bighorn; how legendary leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse came face to face with some of the most formidable generals in the US army in a bloody and dramatic battle on the Great Plains.Angie's new book is called 'All I See is Violence', a fictional retelling of the Battle of Little Bighorn. It follows the Cheyenne warrior, Little Wolf, as she fights to maintain her people’s land and heritage as General Custer leads a devastating campaign against the native tribes. Produced by Mariana Des Forges, James Hickmann and edited by Dougal PatmoreDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. If you have any interest in American history, or of course you are American, lucky enough to be American, you have definitely heard of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Between US government forces and the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes of the Great Plains, First Nations often refer to it as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, while most Americans know it simply as Custer's Last Stand. It was a savage encounter, ended in a notable victory for the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Today we're going to be talking all about that infamous battle. All through the 19th century, once Americans had won their

freedom from the British, they were driven by a semi-religious belief that they were destined to expand right across North America. Their nation would stretch as far as the land would take them, and as it turns out, some way beyond. It was an irritation that the early settlers who expanded westward discovered the land that they believed to be theirs was already inhabited by others, native tribes who'd called that land home, the land that was already inhabited by others. Native tribes who'd called that land home, the land that was to become the United States, for centuries. There were bouts of violence, there were periods of relative peace, there were bargains and treaties struck with local tribes. At one point there were something like 368 treaties signed between First Nations and the

United States. And those were treaties that recognised that each tribal group was an independent nation and held their own right to self-determination and self-rule. But land-hungry settlers won out. And particularly when the US government realised that beneath the land was some valuable resource, the decision was usually taken to seize it by force. And it wasn't just about that opportunistic seizing of land, of course. Many 19th century Americans believed in the inferiority of native peoples. In a letter dated December the 29th, 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote, this unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and civilise, have by their unexpected

desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination, and now await our decision on their fate. It sounds like something that Adolf Hitler would have said, rather than coming from the pen of the enlightened Jefferson. By the end of the 19th century, nearly all of those early treaties had been broken. Native tribes had had their land seized, people had been massacred, survivors had been tricked, they'd been forced off their land, they'd been displaced onto reservations, which are sort of parcels of land that are much smaller and often have no connection for the tribe. They're nowhere near their ancestral lands. Areas also without the resources that groups of people need to survive. These groups then became forced to rely on US government handouts.

And today these reservations still exist and they account for some of the poorest areas in the United States. In 1868, the US government and the Sioux Nation had signed one of these treaties in which the US recognized the Black Hills were part of the Great Sioux Reservation. They were set aside for the exclusive use by the Sioux people, but then gold was discovered in those hills. It didn't take long for American settlers to renege on that agreement. Prospectors arrived to mine the hills and they claimed the land for themselves. and they claimed the land for themselves. In 1876, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, two indigenous leaders from the Sioux and the Cheyenne, led a ferocious campaign to protect their land. The Americans responded. They sent in the military and native warriors came face to face

with some of the United States' most battle-hardened soldiers, men who'd made their name in the recent American Civil War. One of them, General Custer, while and his subordinates underestimated the fighting capacity of the Native tribes. And the Battle of the Little Bighorn ended in a devastating defeat for the US. It was one of the Native tribes' greatest victories, but it was also one of their

last. The defeat enraged white Americans and the US government increased its efforts to subdue the tribes. Within five years, almost all of the Sioux and Cheyenne would be confined to reservations. The Battle of the Little Bighorn remains a powerful, a harrowing symbol of Native American resistance and the US government's broken promises. It was a pivotal moment in the history of the American West. To tell me the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is historian and author Angie Newell, who's of the Canadian Lillie Q Nation, the Dene, and has just written a book called

All I See is Violence, a fictional retelling of the Battle of Little Bighorn. It was a very bloody event, so some of the descriptions of violence in this episode are pretty visceral at times. Just a warning there. This is Custer's Last Stand. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Angie, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. First of all, tell me where the Great Plains are,

and then what was the situation on the Great Plains in the build-up to this battle? So we're looking at the middle of America, and we're, at this point in time, we're post-Civil War. So that's, you know, 1865-ish. We have, like, Reconstruction. And then this land isn't yet part of the United States. So we have, you know, the fledgling whole United States government under President Grant, Ulysses S. Grant, is pushing this idea of manifest destiny. So we're looking kind of at, you know, South Dakota, North Dakota. We're looking at that sort of that mass for people that aren't from North America.

Like this is like mass grassland with like rocky, beautiful, beautiful rock formations and pines. And, you know, at this point too, we have the buffalo herds. So these massive, massive herds, like these animals are huge. If you've ever seen a bison. I certainly have seen a bison, but I've never seen a bison on the Great Plains. Well, I think they're all gone. So leading up to this battle, we have a whole bunch of treaties between the American Indians and the United States government. And I don't know how familiar you are with North American treaties between the governments of Canada and the United States and the Indians.

I think honoured in the breach rather than the observance, I think is the expression, right? So they've broken every single treaty up until present day. And so when I started actually researching this, I thought, oh, maybe they broke like maybe 50%, but no, we've broken every single treaty. And when you say treaties, did the US government respect these American Indian groups as kind of sovereign counterparties? We've got groups, people will have heard the names, the Sioux, the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho. Is there just a deep-seated refusal to accept these people as capable of wielding power? Why did the Americans

keep going back on their word? What's driving that? So I think they actually have a profound respect for their power. And so what happens in regards to leading up to the Battle of Little Bighorn, so there's this kind of craggy mountain area in the CU territory called the Black Hills, and this is like profoundly spiritual. This is where like God resides in the cave. This is where you connect to your ancestors. But anyways, they find gold in the Black Hills. This is like around like 1868, you know, so this is about 10 years previous, the standoff at Little Bighorn. So Custard leaves this expedition given to him by General Sheridan. And Sheridan actually, he comes up with the idea of

the Indian problem, right? So we have a profound respect for these Plains Indians. We can't move them. They wield a lot of agency. And so they negotiate these treaties. And part of the problem was that we have the two big treaties which leads up to this is the Medicine Lodge Treaty. That's 1867 to 1868. And then we have the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. So the Fort Laramie Treaty, these are both to move the CU to reserves.

But the Fort Laramie Treaty allocates them hunting rights and same with the Medicine Lodge Treaty, to the Black Hills. So they kind of get to keep this Black Hills, the agency of having, you know, the hunting grounds, the spirituality, but they have to go back to their reserve. We hear this word reserve a lot, right? So what does that mean? Does that mean a reasonably big chunk of land, small chunk of land, reserved under the sovereignty of these indigenous groups? You're just stepped on a hornet's nest. Okay.

Reserves. So reserves. Reserves still exist today. And it's essentially, we didn't lose all this agency that's like contested land, right? Like this is like, no, this is our land. You didn't get to steal this. We negotiated this through the treaties. And so what's happening on these reservations at this point in time is they're making them fully dependent on the United States government for food, clothing, shelter. And there's huge amount of corruption within these agencies and the colonial agent that they sent to allocate these resources. You're selling them off. So people are starving. People are starving to death. People are getting grossly sick with colonial diseases like tuberculosis, like mass death and starvation in these reservations or

internment camps or prison camps, whatever you want to call them. And so these are fractions of the territory that the Cheyenne or the Arapaho would once have considered their homeland. A hundred percent. And it's not necessarily on their homeland. Like I'm part of the Lillikoo Nation and the Northwest Territories, the Dene, and we're the only group in North America that wasn't forcibly relocated. There's like kind of two reasons for that where I'm from. One, it's so cold that no one really wanted that land. They're like, what with minus 50? Like, yeah, you can keep it. And it's because we understood how to navigate that cold. Like you can't get us off of there. So these other groups were easier to displace.

We have Sheridan who comes up with the idea of the Indian problem, right? And so this is actually echoed by Adolf Hitler, the final solution. He got these ideas from Sheridan, General Sheridan. And we have General Sherman. They have this mentality of kill the Indian, save the man. But before that, they just flat out, it's a war of extermination, right? We have a problem, extermination and extinction. So we have three things trying to go on to get these Black Hills and all the, not just the Black Hills, but all this different territory, but they find

gold. Custer finds gold in the Black Hills 10 years previous to the standoff with Little Bighorn and all hell breaks loose because they're like, oh, it's gold there. And Custer has big financial problems in his personal life. So I'm sure he sees like at this point in time, gold's currency, right? Like gold is money. So if you find like a hunk of gold, like you can go trade and buy with that. You know, we don't have this sort of centralized banking system. So they find this gold and they're like, oh, we got to get out of this treaty. And so they're having real problems because Custer kind of calls it out in his own diaries, but different people kind of mentioning this. And this is kind of like obliterated from history when you start studying American Indian history. But what's going on with the treaties

and why they're having problems getting out of it is that a lot of white settlers married Indian women. They call them squamen. And so they're in on the treaty negotiation process. And they're like, no, they're not trying to give your best interest in mind. This isn't what's going on. Like, don't sign that. To me, that was really fascinating. Yeah. Studying the 18th century, you see a lot of people who at the time, it was said, you know, they would go over to the Indians. They would choose to leave behind a kind of white European colonial way of life and join a very different way of life.

And so, yeah, you get a bunch of mixing right at the beginning of the colonial period as well. So that's fascinating. A hundred percent. And we're a matrilineal society. So you more often than not see white men marrying with indigenous women. So what would happen if I were to get married, then that man would be taken into my family and my lodge and you would take my name. Like women have a lot of agency within the indigenous communities and they're a big part of, you know, the decision-making process going back to the treaty, so they find the gold.

Hester, he's in financial dire straits. So they're having problems with the squaw men, the white Indians, essentially. They're like, you know, how do we displace? They recognize that the Sioux and the Cheyenne are a powerful enemy. They're not going to be able to just go in there with their Gatling guns and get them out of there.

Like, they're too powerful. So both Sherman and Sheridan recognize this. So they started attacking the buffalo because that's sort of the Plains tribe's currency. The buffalo is everything. It's spiritual, it's food, it's medicine, it's, you know, it's shelter. That's what they're building their massive teepees out of.

They're using the fur for blankets. So they start driving like the buffalo trade. They get into the commercial buffalo hides, but they turn people who aren't tied to the buffalo in this sort of sustainable way loose on it. And like, oh, you can make all this money off the hides. So now we just got this huge waste because Sheridan and Sherman want these buffalo dead

because they know that will break the power of the CU or they hope it'll break the power of the CU and the Cheyenne. And so they go on this massive extinction campaign and it doesn't. These nations are adaptable. They're powerful. They're strong. They're like, well, I guess we'll have to eat something else. And they start kind of roaming. And so President Yosif Grant has this big peace policy with the Indians. This is like a big thing, right? We're post-civil war. We're kind of roaming. And so President Yosemite S. Grant has this big peace policy with the Indians.

This is like a big thing, right? We're post-civil war. We're kind of done with fighting. Like, let's settle this through these treaties. And then they're like, oh man, we shouldn't have made those treaties because it turns out there's some really amazing stuff on that land.

So now we've got to back out of this peace policy. So now they're starting to violate the treaty. They got to obliterate it. So they send out this like warning essentially to all the CU and the CODA who won't settle on Red Cloud Agency, which is a reservation and Spotted Tails Agency, which is another reservation that's been allocated by the American government for them. They're not allowed to roam anymore. They have to conform to a colonial lifestyle, right? So we're at this point in time. Yeah. You kind of still see this today. People hear that our indigenous view the wilderness as something that needs to be destroyed, conquered, and

civilized. And so in indigenous languages all across North America, there actually isn't a word for like this wilderness. The closest word we have is home. And so we live completely self-sustaining within our environments, right? We take what we need. We live off the land. We kind of, we're kind of nomadicism. So, you know, one area doesn't get like heavily polluted, but there's other nations too that built great cities.

You can still see like some archeological things of them, you know, in the American Southwest, they had multi-story buildings, like four-story buildings built into cliffs. Yeah, the Pueblo civilization, extraordinary. Very, very extraordinary. And also the Cherokee, right? The Cherokee were incredibly powerful. And so, you know, this is the rise of industrialization also. So we have the introduction of some new systems of warfare with the main thing being the Gatling gun. So we have the introduction of some new systems of warfare with the main thing being the Gatling gun. So this is the predecessor to the machine gun. And so the American Indians have limited access to even like a self-repeating rifle. So they're kind of like, you know,

with the old school, like musket style, they developed some really scary weapons, you know, just on their own, the gunstock club, right? So it looks like a rifle, but they got like a giant blade on the end and they ride on their horses. And to them, it's like a great honor to like get close to your enemy and kill them. So like, this is brutal warfare. But then the American army now is showing up with these Gatling guns, and that's a game changer. This is Dan Snow's history. There's more on this topic coming up. Making research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. let's talk about that the american army and pushing into well i mean the value of the little big horn i guess so situate me where are we now as custer advances into indian territory so custer he's originally not supposed to be on the campaign

because him and President Grant, they're enemies. Like, they don't like each other. Custer, you know, in his private life, he fancies himself almost like an actor. Like, he has great, like, jealousy and admiration for people acting on the stage. You can see that in his pictures. Like, he kind of looks like a peacock, right?

Like, he's got his blonde curls out. He's got his chest out. He's got his uniform on. He's got his uniform on. He has to really push to get onto this campaign. So they're calling all the CU onto the reservation. Sheridan and Sherman both have profound respect for Custard and they kind of overrule President Grant's decision and they get Custard out onto the plane.

So this is in the spring of 1876. We have like this God versus God war. We're sending in, you know, our prize fighter, General Custer to try to forcibly relocate them because the, you know, we have this profound spirituality that's emerging. And we see this with Sitting Bull, who is a Lakota Sioux and then we

have Crazy Horse and they're both medicine men so what that means is they have like a profound like intuitive nature. Yes let me talk about these two because these that the two that are often cited as the main protagonists and you mentioned earlier that Crazy Horse has got European heritage which I didn't know at all so Sitting Bull and and Crazy Horse, would we call them chiefs? But as you say, they've made that themselves through their charisma, right? And their leadership skills. For sure. They've attracted followers.

And so they're saying, no, like, stand your ground. This is our land. Don't let them take this from us. They've taken it illegally. They've broken these two treaties. They have these like series of spirit dreams, these two chiefs showing like what's going to happen. And if they stand their ground, they're going to win.

And so we have this big Sundance as the lead up to the Battle of Little Bighorn. And, you know, Sitting Bull has this profound vision that they're just going to annihilate the army that they've sent to destroy them. And so what happens is they, with the Sundance, the men warriors, they would erect a tree, kind of like a maple, and then they would have strips of hide to like a bone pierced under the flesh.

And then they would have to pull away once they're ready and it would rip the flesh. Wow. When I read that, I was i was like whoa that is intense so sitting bowl takes like a whole bunch of these whole bodies covered in these and so i guess the pain like forces your brain to enter like a different frequency that makes you more adapt to you know have these visions i think you see this within like, if you've ever seen or read the book, The Da Vinci Code,

and they have like that crazy, like Catholic extremist who's like whipping himself on the back. Like what's that? The hair shirt. Yeah, yeah. It's sort of a similar thing, right? Like it elevates you to like see the world from like reality from a different angle.

So anyways, they have this, the CU version of the hair shirt and Sitting angle so anyways they have this the cu version of the hair shirt and um sitting bull rips away and he's like oh like i feel custard coming and we're just gonna destroy them so now this really gets them fired up right like now there's no way they're going to the reservation like they've been guaranteed victory they got crazy horse who yeah i mean he got his name for a reason. Like this man will run directly towards the enemy firing at him. And he, for whatever reason, he hasn't been shot by a bullet. And so that was sort of like his power, right? Like Russian roulette.

I guess it's a really important point is that he had proved himself. He'd become a leader through acts of bravery on the battlefield, as you say. And I guess the same is true on the other side. These are two very veteran groups coming together because the 7th Cavalry, which Custer is leading, they were veterans of the American Civil War, and they'd served years on the frontier, right? They were very used to this kind of, they would all have been men of violence. Oh, a hundred percent. Like Custer was, when you're kind of researching Custer, they make him out to like a buffoon, but he's not. Like this man is very strategical. He's won some huge battle. He was at Gettysburg. Like he knows what he's doing. And he has a profound respect for the Indians. And when he gets out onto the plains, he dresses up like an Indian. And so they get out into the

plains where post-sun dance, we have some big people here, right? We have Custard, we have Prook, we have General Terry. Like these are seasoned veterans of the American Civil War. They're leading like a classic hammer and anvil operation, which they used against the Southern guerrillas in the American Civil War. So they know the CU are going to try to scatter. They got like a really solid plan. They got Custard's leaving the 7th Cavalry, three. They got like a really solid plan. They got Custer's leaving the

7th Cavalry, three Gatling guns, and 150 wagons. Like this isn't a small group coming after the CU. This is massive. Plus we have General Crook and General Terry with their foot soldiers. So they were all marching and we don't have actual numbers how many Sioux and Cheyenne we have. It's really varied. One account is like 1,000, another account is like 10,000, so it's probably somewhere in the middle, I would guess. And just to be clear, they are advancing because the American Indians, the Sioux and the other groups refused to report to these reservations. They are still roaming free. And that's now,

following this deadline, they are now outlaws. Exactly. That's exactly what's going on. They've now broken, you know, the American government broke their law with the violation of the treaty, but now they made it the law that they're breaking the law. So we got this real, like, weird conundrum going on. So yeah, the American Indians are in violation of the treaty, whatever new treaty that they made to replace the old treaty that benefits the American government. So they're marching against them and they've been instructed to shoot to kill. This is a war of extermination at this point. Like we're not taking any prisoners. Like, you know, it doesn't matter men, women, children. These people are in violation of this. We told them to get on to this section of land we allocated to them. They won't do it, even though this is their home. Now they're going to have to die. They come against the medicine men sitting bull and crazy horse. Leading up to this, we have the Battle of the Rosebud with General Crook.

About 10 days prior to the standoff at Little Bighorn, Custer isn't with Crook, as I mentioned. General Terry and General Crook are leading foot soldiers at a slower pace through the south. And we have General Custer who's going to come up on them. This is a strategic battle that General Crook comes up against the Lakota Sioux and the Cheyenne. And the Sioux and Cheyenne, they hand it to him. General Crook's forced to retreat. So this is a decisive battle that's won by the CU. The CU, they erect some like death lodges. They make teepees. They dismember the Crow Indians fighting with General Crook. They find all these bodies. Cutster comes across, you know, a few days later in these lodges. And he's like, oh, whoa,

what's going on here? And so this kind of spooks everybody. So Custer has about 21 Indian scouts as well. And they're spooked. They're like, no, like this isn't good. Like we shouldn't press ahead. But, you know, Custer, he's trained in battle. He's worried about what's happened to General Croke. Like this is previous to any sort of like real communication. Like you can't just like hop on your satellite phone. We're in the 19th century. So at best you have like a runner who might find them. And so he's, you know, weighing out his decisions.

They can see the beginnings of a massive encampment up to the north of them, which is where we have Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. We'll have this victory against General Crook and he decides to strip his column and he's going to lead 250 men on their horseback up into this encampment and then the Gatling guns and the wagons are going to slowly come up behind them. So he makes a decision right there to split his men with the idea that General Crook and General Terry are going to come to his aid from behind. And so it's, as you say, like a clever, well, it sounded clever, coordinated pincer attack. What happens next? So they start pressing forward.

The generals, the captains, the majors are all experienced, but the actual soldiers aren't. These are like fresh immigrants, essentially, right? We have like German farmers, we have Irish immigrants making the predominant of the group. And they're a little bit scared. We're finding these death lodges, all these dismembered bodies, like they mutilated the bodies of the dead for spiritual reasons. Say like you're murdered by a CU in battle, then they would cut off your arms so you can't use your arms in the afterlife. So they're finding these mutilated bodies. As I mentioned, like the gunstock clubs, like these are a pretty violent way to die. So now everyone's a little bit spooked.

It's smoking hot. Like if you've ever been to the middle of the United States in the middle of summer, like it's 40 degrees heat and they're in woolen army uniforms. So they're, we're smoking hot. The horses are tired. Custer is like hot on the trail. He thinks he can get them to scatter, you know, using hammer and anvil. He can get the Indians to scatter and lead them towards General Terry and General Crook. And this is going to be like a huge decisive victory for Custer. And because he's had so many decisive victories, like he's pretty sure of himself. And so they get a little bit closer. They send their Indian scouts up ahead. His beloved bloody knife is with him. So this is Custer's like pet Indian scout. The Indian scouts go up and they come back and they're like, I don't know.

There's a lot of Indians there. Like, I don't think this is a good idea. Like, maybe we should just wait for the rest of our resources to show up. The Gatling guns, the foot soldiers, the wagons, you know, the wagons that are full of ammunition, food, like all the necessities. And Custer's like, oh, if we do that, like the Indians for sure would have known they would have seen the scouts and they're going to scatter. So now he's like, well, geez, like this is what I've been sent to do. If we wait another two weeks for the rest of the column to show up, these Indians are going to scatter. We're never going to find them. We should just go in now. We're all skilled leaders and we'll just like smoke them down. This is weighed out and they decide that this will be a decisive victory for them and they go into it. So Custer split his men

between Benteen and Reno. Benteen also is a veteran of the American Civil War and he hates Custer, like hates him. And Major Reno is a drunkard. We now split up our 7th Calvary and they're going to split and they're going to like round around and then smoke them down. This is the big plan. And so they get in there and the Siu and Cheyenne are ready for them. And so they kind of like plop out of the trees and they think the Siu and Cheyenne are running, but they're not. They're kicking up dust clouds with their ponies. And so they're kicking up these dust clouds.

They can cover their men that are women that are coming in with the guns. They start opening fire and they end up in pitch battle. And so that's not a typical way that the Indians fight. They don't typically fight in like a pitch battle. And so this forces them to dismount. It splits them up even further. Benteen straight up retreats. He's like, oh no, not today, Custer. I'm not dying this way. So now Custer doesn't have, he has one side totally open because Benteen's like ran off into the forest with his men and they're hiding Major Reno essentially ends up retreating as well and quite soon like a couple hours in the fight he's like nope nope like this isn't gonna happen

and so the accounts that we have post uh battle a little bighorn like they're like no we held our ground and then like you know as they start getting interrogated further and further, it's like, no, no, you retreated and you hid in the bushes. So that's how people that survived that skirmish got out of there. They literally hid in the trees. And so now the only group left fighting is Custer and his like 250 men. He's got a couple brothers in there, all his brothers. He's got a nephew. He's got a brother-in-law. He's got all his favorite captains. And so they're all fighting. They've been forced to dismount.

This is sort of a hilly area. They're literally running from hill to hill fighting the CU. And the CU are enclosing in on them. And so each mound they run to, they lose more men. And it's just terrifying. They're fighting at close quarters, or is it still at pistol shot range? What's the... They're still at pistol shot range, and it's getting, with each mound, it's getting closer and closer. And so we got Crazy Horse

leading the way, and Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse is leading the charge, pushing them from mound to mound. Wow. And you can still see today, can't you, the trail of memorials, fallen rocks. I think it is where the men fell. It's kind of a, you know, a bloody trail of retreat, isn't it? Wow. I wouldn't even call it a retreat for Custer. I think that's a trail of trying to survive. Yeah, survive. We got the other two that retreated and hid in the bushes and they're going to make it through to tell the story, but they couldn't see anything because they were hiding in the bushes. So we got Custer, you know, going from mound to mound.

And he was a furious warrior when you start reading what accounts you can get. So I pieced it together through the CU oral stories and some Cheyenne and, you know, what little I could get from Custer's center runner telling Benteen and Reno to get like in there now. So from what that sergeant could share. And this man was like incredibly courageous to keep on fighting up against those odds. Like I'm sure like the terror. Just terrifying. And in the end, that group that he he's leading not a single one of them survive

not a single one makes it through and so the indigenous warriors so warriors are kind of picked from a very young age at this point and they're trained and both men and women and like these people have incredible shots like there's you know tales from deadwood which is a colonial town that got going in the cheyenne CU territory. There's tales of, you know, indigenous people showing up and what they would do, this is like a real big thrill for everyone, they would throw a penny up in the sky and they could shoot the penny out of the sky with their rifles. Like, so their shots are clean and they can shoot from horseback. And so how the CU and the Cheyenne are kind of shooting from a horse is they would wrap themselves under the horse's neck

and fire. And so the horse would protect them from enemy bullets. So like this is a fierce group he's up against. And by the end of the day, that group's been wiped out. The other two groups, they survived. Did they manage to withdraw having hidden in the woods? Yeah, they withdraw. They hide in the woods for like a couple of days. They're not moving. And so the Indians, after they defeat Custer, so Custer has been a huge nemesis of them going on a decade here. We have the Battle of Weshida. What happened there was they came up upon a group of Cheyenne in the middle of the night. It was real dirty what the American army did. And they did this quite a bit where they would just like murder sleeping villages and then they would rape the women and they would take, you know, they would

kill the men and they would take the women and children, essentially hostages. So it was Shida. They had Monasita, who's a really beautiful chief's daughter, who essentially gets passed around an American camp, you know, and she allegedly gave Custard one or two children. They know all about this, the CU and the Cheyenne, and they're gunning for Custard. They see him and his brother and they're like, oh, this is it. What effect did this extraordinary victory have? Because presumably it just mobilized white Americans, the Republic, to send even more troops to the area and come up with a final solution to the problem of the American Indians. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. It was hugely embarrassing for them,

for the American government. They're trying to portray the Indians as like ignorant savages, and here they've been outsmarted. These are West Point graduates of the American military industrial complex that have been bested by a group of savages, you know, and to make matters worse, like half of them are women. So, you know, they just took it to them any way they could and they divided the Indians. They pit them against each other, right? And so they made all these promises to one group

to go up against another group of Indians and they don't fulfill any of their promises. So they're really manipulative. It was brutal, very, very brutal. And the problem is, is that we still have the ramifications of that today. So they enacted, you know, the American boarding school. And in Canada, we have the Canadian residential school. So what this is, they started taking all the Indigenous children because they couldn't flat out kill us. So they get us onto reservations, which are, as I mentioned, their internment camps. And then they forcibly take all the children and they place them into boarding schools away from their parents to culturally assimilate them. It's a genocide. So Crazy Horse ends up getting stabbed in the back on the reserve a year later. Sitting Bull kind of manages to like bounce around

for the next little while, but he ends up getting murdered at Wounded Knee when he tries to have like a CU like revival. We go into the 1970s and the American Indian movement. So we have another push of, hey, what's going on here? Like this still isn't right. We still haven't sorted this out. Like what's happening essentially. And that doesn't get sorted either, right? Like most of the activists from that end up murdered. So this is still going on today. And so the Black Hills is still contested. And so they've gone through massive litigation through the Supreme Court in the United States. And they're like, okay, well, we'll give you money for it. And the CEO are like, no, we don't want the money. We want the Black Hills. And so this is still ongoing. Angie, thank you for coming and speaking so passionately about it. Tell everyone

what your book's called. It's called All I See is Violence, and it's available January 16th. Go get it, everybody. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you.