In Our Time - Custer's Last Stand

Episode Date: May 19, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand.In 1876 a dispute between the American federal government and Native Americans over land rights led to an armed conflict now known as the Great Sioux War. An expeditionary federal force was sent out to coerce the Native Americans into reservations, and away from the gold reserves recently discovered in their traditional homelands.One of the officers in this expeditionary force was a Civil War hero, George Custer. While en route to his arranged rendezvous, Custer unexpectedly encountered a large group of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Disobeying orders, he decided to attack. Barely half an hour later, he and all 200 of his men lay dead. Custer's Last Stand has become one of the most famous and closely studied military engagements in American history.With:Kathleen BurkProfessor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College, LondonAdam SmithSenior Lecturer in American History at University College LondonSaul DavidProfessor of War Studies at the University of Buckingham.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, on the 10th of July 1876, the New York Daily Tribune printed a new poem by Walt Whitman. The poet was reacting to a story he'd read in the previous day's newspapers.

Federal soldiers had suffered a terrible defeat in the Midwest. ambushed by a larger force of Native Americans, more than 200 men led by George Custer had been killed. In his poem, Whitman paid tribute to the cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest, cruelest heroism, the fall of Custer and all his officers and men. This battle which took place on the Little Big Horn River in Dakota

was an important defeat in a continuing conflict between the US government and the Native American tribes. It remains one of the most celebrated military encounters in the nation's history, and today Custer's name is as well known as it was in the immediate aftermath of his death. But does the celebration of Custer tell anything like the whole story? With me to discuss Custer's last stand are Kathleen Burke, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London, Adam Smith, Senior Lecture in American History also of University of College London, and Saul David, Professor of War Studies at the University

of Buckingham. Kathleen Burke, this battle took place during a time of great change for America, For the purposes of this story, what were the most significant developments that were taking place in the last, say, quarter of the 19th century? Well, the context, of course, of the whole thing is massive increases in American population, so great land hunger, and an economic, strong economic developments, especially around the mid-century, that required resources. Now, the whole half century up to where we're really going to take off shows every 20 years nearly a doubling of American population. And by the 1820s, about a quarter of the population was in the Mississippi Valley region. Where are they going to go?

And what you have there really starting to be shown is there are two ways of handling Indians. You want their land, so you either. exterminate them, or you somehow get them elsewhere so you can take over the land. And those two alternating approaches was what the United States government did for most of the century, in fact. So first of all, you say, right, okay, they're human beings, we have treaties with them, we'll make new treaties and show them on the other side of the Mississippi River, where land was thought to be worthless, it was hot and summer, cold in winter, great sort of tumble weeds,

okay for the Indians, not okay for us. So the Indians are put across the Mississippi River, more or less coercion, and their land on the east of the Mississippi is then open for settlers. The problem is the Americans keep multiplying and moving out, and they start going across the Mississippi, and they discover the land isn't so bad after all. So then what are you going to do? So you decide that you're going to concentrate the Indians into smaller areas,

thereby releasing a lot of their land for white settlers. The Indians aren't the dead keen on this, of course, and this is all exacerbated when the railways start being built. And so by the 1850s, there's a great railways boom. There's a panic, a railways crash, and so all of a sudden you have not only the usual masses of people and the usual thrust against the Indians for their land, you have masses of people who no longer have jobs

because the economy has crashed and they're all going west as well. So by mid-century, you have a great plains area that's a tinderbox between white settlers and the soldiers and the Indians whose whole way of life and land is being taken from them. That's a terrific encapsulation.

If I could just start that in 1803, America had made the canniest land purchase in the history of the planet by buying, doubling its size with the Louisiana purchase from France, which meant that all the land and masses of land to the west of the Mississippi had come that way, and then conquest of Mexico, but the more states came that way. So a lot of empty territory to move into.

If I could just add briefly your point about the purchase in 1848, conquest from the Mexicans of the whole southwestern California, meant that his central area was no longer empty that you crossed, but now it was an area that you had to fill in if you're going to have a truly transcontinental United States. Adam Smith, did the status of the Native American, obviously did you, what would the status of American Indians change after the American Civil War, which ended in 1865?

Well, the American Civil War was a battle to consolidate the nation, essentially on the eastern half of the North American continent. And after the surrender of the Confederates at Appomattox in Virginia in 1865. In a sense, the nation moved west. And then the story of the remainder of the 19th century is the battle to consolidate the nation in the western half as well, as Kathy says, to complete what 19th century Americans

called their manifest destiny to conquer and subdue the North American continent. And the Great Plains were the missing link in that manifest destiny. And the civil war was important then because it generated that sense of, it consolidated that sense of national purpose. and also because the Civil War was a battle-hardening experience. And General Custer, who's the centre of our story today,

but also General Sheridan, General Sherman, who were leading Union generals of the Civil War, went west. And they took with them their experience of destructive warfare. Sheridan was the general who led the Shenandoah campaign in Virginia in 1864, and he'd devastated the Shenandoah Valley to such an extent that he'd, famously said that a crow wanting to fly across the valley would have to carry his own provender with it. General Sherman had led this devastating march through Georgia and they took those ideas with them west. Sherman articulated what many white 19th century Americans thought when he

talked about Indians as being enemies to our race and our civilization. But William T. Sherman, what was his middle name? The T. St. of Tacumsa. I love it. And I love that fact about Sherman. His father had named him after a Native American warrior, the great Shawnee Chief, Ticomsa, who had fought with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812 and died, I think, in the Battle of the Thames in 1813. So I love it because it brilliantly encapsulates the complexity

of white 19th century Americans' attitudes to Native Americans. On the one hand, the presumption that they were doomed to ultimate extinction. On the other hand, this admiration mixed with fear for their warrior abilities. And it hadn't helped that case that some of the bigger tribes had allied themselves with the south, with the losing side in the civil war. Indeed. That was a major diplomatic tactical error on the part of the Cherokees in particular, and that led relatively quickly after the American Civil War to some very savage wars in the southern part of the plains. At the same time as this is happening, as Kathy said, the railroads are being built, the transcontinental railroads.

That's another way to unite the nation, doesn't it? Indeed. We are one nation. We can go from coast to coast, faster than anybody ever before. That's competed in 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad. And what that also brings with it is the destruction of the great buffalo herds. In the 1850s, there are millions of buffaloes ranging across the Great Plains. In the decade between 1875, in 1885, the buffaloes are essentially extinct.

And for most of these Plains Indians, the buffaloes are their land. livelihood. They're for everything. They're for meat, therefore skins, therefore help with their weapons. Fuel even. And there are extraordinary photographs of railroad trains going west with people literally hanging out of the windows of carriages firing randomly into great herds of buffaloes. And the railroad companies encourage this. So the coming of the railroads is directly connected to the destruction of the great buffalo Just stay with one moment with the buffalo because that was centrally important to the economy

and the livelihood of the plains Indians. Hunting the buffalo was everything about their survival, wasn't it? And these gangs on the railways and shooting for fun with gatling guns mowing down buffaloes as well as shooting and for profit for meat and all the other things, as you said, destroyed the herds in very short order.

Yes. And therefore destroyed a way of life. That's right. And by the 18, by the early mid-1870s, the were still buffalo herds roaming in the northern plains, and that enabled the portion of the Lakota Sioux tribe who had not signed up to agree to move onto the Great Sioux Reservation in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. That enabled that resistant third of the, roughly a third probably of the Lakota Sioux

to try to maintain into the mid-1870s their traditional ways of life. Getting out where our battle is in 1876, so coming into the 1870s, where were the Native Americans concentrated? And can you give us any idea of the numbers? Maybe that first, but where were they concentrate? We're talking about displacement on a massive scale of entire

peoples. They will go across the river to the west, i.e. someone where they've been as they would say from Time Amem Memorial are uprooted from, heard it across the river, told, well, you'll live here now. And because we think it's a wild and terrible place, not fit for us, but you can get on with it. And that is

happening. So there's obviously, to put mildly upset and disruption. But where were they and how many of them were there? In about 1870 years. Yeah, I mean, there's a demographic catastrophe, which is that again, as the railroads moved west, disease comes with white settlers. There's a big cholera epidemic around 1850,

and then again after the American Civil War. And so the numbers of, in the northern plains, the number of Native Americans who were still... Northern Plains being what, farthest? Being what is current day North and South Dakota and Wyoming and Montana. So that area to the north and to the west of Kansas and to the east of Washington and Oregon,

which were by that stage already more heavily populated to the east of the Rocky Mountains. And the numbers of Lakota Sioux who were still... wanting to cling to traditional ways of life has been estimated in the, perhaps as many as in the tens of thousands, the low tens of thousands. So, and they're there, they're being pushed into reservations,

which at that stage are still quite generous in size, the reservation, but they are still reservations, and they're penned down, they can't move out unless they're allowed to move out by the American cavalry or forces, and if they're out at the wrong time of season, they're herded back in again. And that seems to be the going notion more or less. Right.

Saul David, let's now turn to Custer. Can you tell us something about his early life? Well, his antecedents are a little murky. There's a suggestion his grandfather was a Hessian officer who fought on the British side in the American War of Independence. Although other authorities doubt that, what we are pretty sure about is that he was of German heritage of some sort and that his four bears possibly came to America as early as the 17th century.

He came from a relatively modest background himself. His father was a blacksmith in a small town of New Rumley in Ohio. And for him to have got to West Point, where you would have trained to become an officer in the American army in the 19th century, would have been a relatively unusual thing. So how did it happen? Well, we know that from a relatively young age, he was fascinated by all things military.

His father apparently used to dress him up in some extraordinary gaudy velveteen suit, a little bit like a mock uniform, and take him to watch the soldier, the local soldiers, drilling, at which point the tiny custer with his small toy carbine would practice the drill himself. You could argue that in some ways he was destined to join the army, but that he became an officer was quite unusual. So how did this happen? Well, apparently it was the patronage of a local congressman.

Now, what's interesting about this congressman is he was a Republican, and yet Custer's family were well-known Democrats, you find it hard to believe that there would have been this patronage for someone who was a political opponent. The suggestion is, and I find this quite compelling, and it sort of fits with Custer's character, is that at the age of 17,

by which time he was a school teacher but wanted to join the army, he fell in love with a local girl whose father was pretty influential and who persuaded the congressman, who was possibly his son, gain him a cadetship at West Point to get him out of the area, basically, to move him away from the daughter. And I find that a lovely idea, not least because Custer later had a reputation

for being a bit of a ladies' man at the same time, and you could say almost paradoxically, having an incredibly intense relationship with his wife, Libby. I'm intrigued. This is a self-indulgence, please. He's got the middle name Armstrong, which is a border name in this country. Is there anything border about him, anything Anglos got up there within the Armstrong? Well, it's interesting. Once he rises to world fame, as it were, after the Civil War, and I'll come on to with Civil War exploits in a moment, there is some suggestion,

and he is contacted from someone in Scotland who feels that there is a family link. And Custer takes this seriously. I think this is in the 1870s. He writes a letter to Libby explaining what's going on and thinks that there may well be a Scottish connection. So we're pretty sure about the German one, possibly also Scottish. That's as much as I can hope.

All right. Can you tell us about his exploits in the, briefly in the American Civil War? Well, just to set the scene, he has what you would describe as a pretty catastrophic time at West Point in the sense that he finishes last in his class. He accumulates more demerits or skins, as they're known, at West Point, than any other student in history at that time, over 700. And he comes with an ace of being thrown out of West Point a number of times.

He comes to the end of his time there. What is that, principally, stupidity or? Idleness and an unwillingness to buckle down to authority, which again follows pretty much a pattern through the rest of his career. And as soon as he's commissioned, his first duty is guard duty. He's still actually out West Point, but he is now a commissioned officer, a young second lieutenant. He fails to break up a fist fight between two cadets.

is court-martialed as a result of that for dereliction of duty. And his career would possibly have ended even before it had started if it hadn't been for the fluke of the Civil War having already broken out. He's a young second lieutenant at the beginning of the Civil War and he ends it four years later as a major general. This is a meteoric rise in military terms. And he achieves it because he is the sort of, he joins the right arm of the military, which is the cavalry.

If you're his character dashing, incredibly brave, willing to take extraordinary risks. It is the sort of arm of the military that can put you to the attention of your superiors, and that is exactly what happens. He's said to be, in the notes that I've read, every major battle in the Civil War, even Gettysburg and shining in all of them.

Is this, are we talking, what are we talking here? I think he's the sort of person who always looked like he was doing impressive things. He didn't always. I mean, I think the 80 men he lost in a mad cap charge during one of these battles against a vastly superior conference, force would have preferred to have served under another commander, frankly. But having said that, there were times, particularly at Gettysburg, where he famously stopped

a confederate charge by Jeb Stewart, the famous confederate commander, that possibly turned the battle, and this is the pivotal battle of the whole war. So you could say he genuinely made a difference. And certainly his mentor, Sheridan, that Adams already referred to, felt that he had played one of the most prominent parts of the whole civil war. Let's get to our mootan now, please, Kathleen. He was involved in a critical incident that took place two years before this battle. The American, they decided to move in on the Indians yet again in a more concentrated way.

And as I understand it, in about 1874, Costa was sent out to the Black Hills, to Dakota. And let's use that as a starting point. Why is you sent out? What did you find? What did you do? The Black Hills is the religious center. of the Sioux Nation. It's also obviously part of the great, what's called the Great Sioux Reservation, and General Sherman decided to protect the railways, people, and settlers, they needed a fort in the midst of the reservation, and they selected the Black Hills. They sent Custer out to try to find a source for it, a place for it, but they also sent him

out to see if there was gold. That is to say, since about 1859, there had been rumors that there was gold in them, thar hills. And he investigated, and he said, yes, that it went from the grassroots right down into the earth. And so he came back. He was sent out in the spring of 1874. He spent the spring and the summer wandering around, surveying, deciding where the fort was going to be.

In September, he got back to Ford Abraham Lincoln, and he telegraphed that there was indeed gold, which meant that by October, the great gold rush to the Black Hills was already in place. Now, as I understand, two significant things came of that. One was that the Sioux had had almost their final redoubt invaded. If a fort was going to be put there, it was no longer their reservation. Secondly, the fact that gold had been, you say, rather exaggeratedly declared to be there,

meant that there was a real gold rush. It was a time of depression. Around 15,000 white settlers were there in a flash, very hard to move. all over the territory. And that changed the balance of the game. Would you agree with that, Adam Smith? Yeah. I mean, every time there was a gold strike, this was a disaster for, spelled disaster for the Native Americans. It had happened several times previously in the preceding 15 years. And the pressure on the federal government after the 1874 Custer Expedition to open the Black Hills to white settlement was in the end overwhelming. and what the Secretary of the Interior in the end did was to create the circumstances which would legitimise the use of federal force by demanding...

They fabricated a reason to go to war. Essentially, by demanding that all of the Native American peoples, including those who had not signed up to the treaties, the great leader sitting bull, should come to the reservations, come to their agencies by the 31st of January 1876. in the middle of winter. When that didn't happen, they were declared to be hostiles, and the Secretary of Interior turned over, turned them over to the Secretary of War to be dealt with, and that then launched the Great Sioux War. Can we just take this on very carefully, sold out? Did they

not turn up, Adam touched on winter, and as what we know, they had, they hungered in winter, a lot of appellantians, they didn't guard hunting as much, they retreated and so on. Was it to do with that, or was it a political decision on their part? We're not going there for this negotiation. The reason that the Indians didn't turn up, yeah. They wouldn't have turned up, even if it had been summer, as was proven a couple of months later, when the expedition was eventually launched in the spring and summer of 1876,

the Sitting Bull and the Cheyenne and Sue had absolutely no intention of coming in. So that was an arbitrary date, frankly. It was a date that they were unlikely to be able to fulfill. If they had all fulfilled it, the federal government would have been perfectly happy. I just think it was a date they chose. And they assumed once it isn't complied with, which they almost certainly knew it wouldn't be,

then they launched the campaign as military campaigns were always launched in the spring. What was the plan that they formulated then? Well, they had received relatively vague scouting reports that this major band of Sue were in the vicinity of the low, Missouri River. The plan was therefore to send three columns converging on this rough area from different directions, one from the south and a general crook of about 1100 men, one from the east, which was the column that Custer eventually joined and was later led by Terry, although the original

plan was for Custer to lead that column, and one from the west, which would be led by another commander, Colonel Gibbon, of about 450 men. Custer's column was about 1,200. So in total, you're talking about 2,700 US soldiers. Can you tell us a bit about the enemy they faced? Is there a sense, or am I mythologising it too much, that this trains are speeding across America, the gatling guns being invented, the Industrial Revolution is enormous,

America is now overtaking Europe and its production of steel, for instance, and that sort of thing, and we have these tribes on horsebacks with arrows leading a life deeply from the Is it one of the reasons for the power of this incident because of the clash of across thousands of years of two different sorts of civilizations? Well, that's obviously partly it. The Indians have a romantic image now, of course.

They didn't have particularly romantic image for a lot of people then. What the Americans thought would be very good for the Indians were if they would be Americans. And they were seen as savages held back by their tribal culture, the idea that they worked together as a community, they wouldn't settle down and farm, because this was seen as unmanly by the warriors.

Of course, farming was women's work. And you had a clash between a civilization that thought the best thing you could be would be a god-faring Christian farmer and a culture that thought the best thing you could be would be a warrior on a horse, shooting buffalo, roaming in the plains, moving with the seasons, communing with the great spirit. And there was someone had to win and someone had to live. lose and the ones of the Gatling guns and the more people won. Can you just tell us about the, in rather more detail about the Indians whom Custer faced

and who their chiefs were and what was going on at that as we go towards that particular battle? Well, there's two large groups, one, the Great Sioux and then the Cheyans. The Sioux is essentially what was called the Lakota Sioux languages. It's really seven tribes that come together in this great confederation. The two most famous leaders, Sitting Bull, who was seen as the leader of the Sioux Nation by most of the Americans, which was wrong, because there is no Sioux Nation as such. There are tribes and families and war bans, but not a nation. But he was seen as the leader, and indeed, at one point it was called Sitting Bull's War. The other leader who was almost as important, younger and lordly and fearless, was Crazy Horse.

and the Cheyans were both Northern Cheyans and Southern Cheyans. The Sioux were in the Dakotas, particularly in Montana and Wyoming, as Adam is described. And essentially what you had was the Americans wiping out by a range war in 1874, 75, all the opposition of the Cheyans and other tribes in the South. So by the time we have the Great Sioux War, the whole U.S. effort can focus on the northern part of the Great Plains. The South, that's fine, that's gone. And so up there you have a combination of the Great Sioux, these seven tribes more or less, and the Cheyennes.

But it's the Sioux that have come out as the head. And they're all fighting for their way of life. They know it's civilization. They know it's not just the buffalo, which is disappearing in front of their eyes. They know this is, they win or lose. It's either there by the Whiteman. Can we take this on a bit further, then, in the event, that plan that you just outlined, that went wrong.

Can you say how it went wrong and why it went wrong? Well, it goes wrong, first of all, it goes wrong for Custer because he's called back to Washington to testify at a congressional hearing, which is looking into corruption in the War Department. And Custer, being a Democrat and the government of the time, President Ulysses S. Grant's Republican government, he wanted to score a few political points. there are some suggestions that he had ambitions to be president himself

and that this campaign, if he made enough of a success of it, would make that possible. And during the hearings, he was highly critical of a former war secretary, Belknap, who was a close personal friend of Grant's and also Grant's brother. And as a result of this testimony, which, by the way, was inaccurate. In fact, it was downright false. Grant was so in sense that he insisted that Custard would, not be allowed to accompany this expedition. So for a brief time, Custer was absolutely off the game.

He got back, mainly thanks to his mentor Sheridan, who insisted that he was the best Indian fighter in the country, and they needed him. But Grant would only relent insofar as if he was going to accompany the column marching in from the east, he would not command it. General Terry, the area commander, would actually be put in overall command. Can I just hold you for a moment? Because one thing that's quite clear from the accounts that I've out of view of three is the internal jealousies between these men, their competition for glory. Grant had been completely fazed in the victory march, which was to his glory, when Custer one way and another and got to the front of it and on a horse waving his hat, as I understand it, taking all the applause. They were at each other's

throats. I think Grant had never forgiven Custer for accepting the present of the table on which the actual surrender was signed by General Lee. It was given to him by Sheridan with a little note to Custer's wife saying, you know, you have made this victory possible as much as any other man in the army. And this in some ways was a bit of a slur on Grant, who after all was commander-in-chief and felt that he should have been given the chief credit. So, yes, there was certainly jealousy. There was professional jealousy, but there was also political partisanship,

and this should be remembered. So back to the thing. The three columns set off, and then things started to go. go wrong quite soon. They start to go wrong chiefly because the southern column under Crook arrives on the scene too early. In fact, it arrives on the scene at a place where they weren't really expecting the Indians to be. There is an, what military historians or military men call an encounter battle, which is a battle that neither side has really planned. And as a result of that battle, although Crook doesn't lose it, in fact, he suffers fewer casualties than the Indians. He is so shaken

by the experience that he withdraws back down the direction he's come, in other words, down to the south, and takes no more part in the campaign. And worse than that, he makes no attempt to communicate what has happened to either Terry or given the other two column commanders. That seems curious, doesn't it? Because these men had been through the American Civil War, and they'd faced odds before. What do you run away for? We don't really know.

I mean, some strange things happen in battle, but what is absolutely clear, and also we can see that Custer's second in command when we actually get onto the battle. of Little Bighorn, reacts in a very strange way to the combat against these pretty fearsome warriors. It's the noise, it's the whole experience of fighting Indians that a lot of them simply aren't used to,

and certainly not in the numbers in which they were focused up in. Okay, Adam Smith, on June 22nd, Custer was sent out on his mission. What were his orders? What did they tell him to do? Well, he was sent out in command of the 7th Cavalry by General Terry to identify the position of the Indians. So the orders were, there's some debate about exactly what Terry then said verbally to Custer. And Custer certainly went away believing that he'd been given free reign to attack the Indian village should he encounter it. But the orders were phrased in such a way that Terry could later claim,

as he did at the military court of inquiry a couple of years later, that Custer exceeded. the stated orders he'd been given. I think Terry was very clever in the issuing of these orders. He couldn't lose out either way. The orders were actually quite specific, but he was also dealing with a man who rarely followed orders. He must have known that Custer,

as soon as he had a sniff of the Indian village, would go for it. The orders actually said, you must follow the Rosebud Creek down to a point way beyond where they think the Indian Trail moves towards the village in the Little Bighorn. And only when you've reached the mountain, mountains at the bottom, which was actually 20 miles further on,

then Custer actually turned towards Little Bighorn. Would he then be allowed to turn west and then come up from below, from the south? Meanwhile, Terry is leading the rest of the column, which is around about 1,000 men strong, given that it's been supported by Gibbon, down from the North, down the Big Horn River and from the Big Horn to the Little Bighorn. And they would both arrive roughly at the same time on the 26th of June. Now, we know, of course, that the battle was fought on the 25th. So the question is, why did Custer disobey these orders?

And what's your answer to that? Adam. Well, Custer was the kind of rock star hero of the West. He was a glory seeker, and he wanted to use this opportunity to sort out the Native American problem himself without the encumbrance of General Terry or anybody else. And as, as Saul said, Terry must have known that that would be the way that Custer would respond. On a more mundane level, it was also known that Indian tribes, when they knew there were soldiers nearby, would get their women and children away. He was also afraid that the camp would just disappear and he would lose his opportunity to be a star. And he feared that their scouts had seen his soldiers. So he had to move faster. He'd lose all opportunities. Yeah, it was the fear of Native American troops disappearing rather than the fear of being outnumbered. That was the thing that haunted federal troops.

So let's get to this battle. He decides to go for them, Kathleen Burke. He, as I understand, marches overnight, and he's got how many men, how many men have they got, do we know, and then we'll get to the battle. Well, Sol's better on the numbers than I am. I think it's about 450, or 215 soldiers, I think. He goes in, but he divides his force. The actual 7th Cavalry is about 700 strong. They've had pretty good reports that the Indian nation, or at least the tribes that they're opposing, are in the strength of about 3,000 warriors. And as Adam says, he doesn't for a minute think his 750 aren't a match for these 3,000. That's not the issue at all. The issue is, am I going to get there in time before it disperses?

What is then completely inexplicable, or at least from a military standpoint, is inexplicable? It's explicable, if you understand Custer's mindset, is why he then broke up his own Seventh Cavary into three, some would even argue, four separate pieces. I should have thought because he wanted to do the same sort of prong surrounding that the Sheridan's larger, military plan had engaged that he, I think there's also not only his go for glory, but there's still a certain underestimation of the power of the Indians. They see them, I sometimes think they forget they've got guns. They think them as bows and arrows, and they think that they cannot stand against the might of the army.

They don't know how many are there. They don't know there's 2,000 warriors. They don't know the camp is three miles long. They see part of it. So I think it was stupidity trumped by surprise. And also the Indians had some of the Indians that were better equipped than the white Americans. They had Winchester repeating rifles, for instance,

which the Custer's men did not have. I mean, it's one of the great ironies that this, you know, one of the most powerful industrial nations in the world is sending its soldiers out with single-shot Springfield carbines when the Indians, through trade, have managed to acquire weapons which are technologically superior. So what we know of this, how do we know anything of this battle if everybody is wiped out? It's all evidence from seeking bull in this programme.

That's part of the reason why we're having this programme is because the last stand itself, in which Custer and his portion of the Seventh Caval who was entirely wiped out, and it's such a mystery. And most of them scalped. Scalped and dismembered in horrible ways. But the whole force was not wiped out, as Saul says. The other two bits or three or three bits. Custer divided his...

his forces one portion under... Yeah, but even so, how did evidence for this battle that we're talking about with Costa come out? They're all dead, so it must have come from the Indians. Well, we have archaeological evidence as well. I mean, there is Native American oral history tradition, which is not in... which is, as is the nature of oral history, is not completely conclusive. But there have been two great phases of archaeological surveys of the battlefield in the 19th.

and then again in the 1980s, which have again led to much dispute about precisely what happened. I mean, there are two big ways of explaining it. One is the way in which Custer was apotheosized at the time as the great last stand, that after much of his force being overwhelmed by Indians, he formed a corral with a number of his men and fought off for a certain amount of time until eventually he was overrun. Alternatively, there is the theory that Custer's 210 men

were wiped out literally in minutes, or as one of the Native American sources says, in the time it took a hungry man to eat a meal, that there was in fact, therefore, no last stand as such, but that when the weight of Native American forces came towards Custer's, those companies under Custer's command,

they were just overwhelmed in moments. What effect, which I do, what effect did this have when the news got through. We've heard Walt Whitman's poem at the beginning of this program. The news, it happened on the day celebration of American Independence. It was on the

centenary day of American Independence. Sorry, even more significant. So there you have a centenary of American Intervenorne, all sorts of joy, and this comes through. And it just transformed things. It was seen as a horrible, a horrible defeat of American civilization. It was

seen as something that could not be countenanced. not necessarily that it was going to, they'd lost the class of civilizations, but it did mean that Sheridan and the other members of the war department, the US Army, decided this was it. It had to be stopped,

and they went out to extinguish, essentially extinguish the tribes. It's just this tremendous irony that there's this celebration going on in Philadelphia celebrating a century of technological progress and civilization. And then 200 men are wiped out by people who they regard as Stone Age. We haven't mentioned sitting bull or crazy horse enough. Can you just give us some brief idea of their significance at this point? Well, I mean, I love the idea, or at least you can't help but be impressed by the idea that it's always talked about as Custer's last stand. Of course, it was actually Sitting Bull's last stand, the Sioux and the Cheyenne's last stand. Because as Kathy says, there was an absolute determination to deal with this problem. In other words, by winning that victory, they bring.

bring on their own downfall much quicker than it would otherwise have happened. Sitting Bull's interesting, because by the end of 1876, pretty much all the major chiefs have come into the reservations. In other words, the Americans have got what they wanted, apart from Sitting Bull, who goes over to Canada and he remains there until 1881. And only then does he come back, as he says, the last of his nation to actually hand in his gun and turn himself over to the American authorities. You were very strong there, Kathleen, when you were.

that the Americans decide, the white Americans decided to get rid of this lot. And it was a straightforward as that, well, I think so. I mean, they didn't go out and say the only good Indian is a dead Indian, although Sheridan had already said that, apparently. Well, he denied it afterwards. They went out and they decided either these Indians were going to go on the reservations and stay there and do essentially what they were told,

give up their tribal culture, become white Americans, become civilized, or they were going to be wiped out. That was their choice. And there was not going to be any more fluffing around and being kind and all this sort of stuff. They hadn't been all that kind, frankly, indeedly not. There were even a lot of Americans, especially the Quakers, who thought they'd been treated rather badly. The Quakers

come through tops again, as they do, about two or three hundred years of American history. Yeah, it didn't work very well, did it? In fact, no, there was a decision that this was it. The Indian question, the Indian problem had to be solved, and what Custer's last stand or sitting bull

stand had shown, what would happen if they didn't. So, Let's dwell on the consequences a little bit more. I mean, a lovely aftermath of this is that, or horrible in the same way, is that in the mid-1880s, sitting bull by then, as Saul says, who's come into the reservation, is signed up by the great Indian fighter Buffalo Bill. And tours in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in number of eastern US cities, He's restaging the Custer's last stand

with Sitting Bull there on the stage in front of a paying audience. And so what's brilliant about this is that it reminds us that the romanticisation of the West was going on even as it was happening and even with the participants themselves playing a role in that. Custer was already famous after the American Civil War, as you've said. And he accrued even more fame now, partly because of books written by his widow who made sure that his name was kept alive and burnished.

Yes, absolutely. A biography came out race shortly after his death, in which she contributed to very heavily, in which everyone was blamed apart from Custer. What was actually happening in official circles is that Custer was blamed. He was blamed by Terry. He was also blamed by Sheridan, who finally had turned on him after many years of promoting him.

Custer's reputation immediately after the news came out when skyrocketed. His wife had the advantage simply because the Americans needed a hero. They were shocked by what had happened. But also there was this sense that America was beginning to, it was almost dealing with the internal problem of finally settling America. Now it was going to take on the rest of the world. And a Custer-like figure was seen as the kind of perfect metaphor

for this brash upstart nation. that, you know, would go out against any odds. Some of a blacksmith taking on a whole indigenous population and that sort of thing. Absolutely. And once America had dealt with its internal problems, or the American government had, it would then look to compete against the great powers of the world. In terms of contemporary scholarship, Kathleen, what's the opinion now? Of custody? Of custody, yeah.

Well, that he was fain glorious and thoughtless and keen to have an effect. to death or glory boy, essentially, that he still stands for something, but he stands as much for thick-headed stupidity as for military prowess, I think. I mean, he's got long curls and a lovely beard and a dashing hat, and he's always shown having a saber and so forth. He's a romantic modelist, just he's a romantic model

that wasn't quite up to it. Well, I think Custer's reputation has risen and fallen over the years. It was at a low point in the 1960s when he was seen as the personification of the ugly American in the context of the Vietnam War. Now I think Custer's back up again in the scholarship and

his other officers in the 7th Cavalry who failed to come to his aid are now given more of the blame than used to be the case. Kathleen is shaking ahead violently but that's all we've got time for. Kathleen Berg, Adam Smith and Saul David,

thank you very much. Next week we'll be talking about the Greek historian Xenophon, friend of Socrates, historian and warrior. Thank you for listening.