The Rest Is History - 12 Days: The Murder of Thomas Becket and the Wounded Knee Massacre

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Tom takes us through the murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, while Dominic looks at one of the United States' most tragic massacres: the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History, the 12 days of Christmas, or in our case the 13 days of Christmas, because we couldn't decide when to begin and end it. We have now, of course, reached the 29th of December, which is when you're probably listening to this. And Tom Holland, I think you may have chosen a subject very close to my heart, an event that happened on this day, on the 29th of December, many centuries ago, with which I have a very profound personal connection. Am I right?

You are right, Dominic. It is the murder of Thomas Beckett, which has been a great theme of poetry and drama over the years. T.S. Elliot's great play, of course, murder in the cathedral. Um, but there was another play, wasn't that?

It was an absolutely first class play. I think you'll find in which you played the archbishop. So, uh, perhaps you'd like to tell the listeners about this for the umpteenth time. How many times you tell this story? I think this is about the second time, Tom only.

I think it's at least the fourth. Uh, so the French playwright, Jean An the second time, Tom, only. I think it's at least the fourth. So the French playwright Jean Anouilh wrote a play called Beckett, or Beckett, as he would no doubt have called it. What would you have called it? Beckett. And he was writing, I can't remember, the 50s or the 60s, and he very much is writing in the sort of aftermath of the Second World War,

French resistance, and he casts Thomas Beckett. He has a lot of stuff about the Normans and the Saxons. The Normans are kind of sort of Nazi occupiers. And the Saxons are the French. Are sort of resistance, exactly. And Beckett ends up working, collaborating with the king, and then he refinds his sort of saxonness and when he finds god and he ends up being martyred so i was in a production of this um that went to the edinburgh

festival so i think we did two weeks of rehearsals was it only with it might have been a month of rehearsals in london beforehand they went very badly i think it's fair to say and about a week to go before we went to edinburgh the, who later ended up directing Paddington, he said, this isn't working at all. This is an absolute shambles. We desperately need to rescue this. And what we'll do is... I mean, he did what basically all student plays do when they're desperate.

He said, let's set it very explicitly in the Third Reich. Ah, yes. And have people dressed as Nazis and all this sort of thing. And I can remember bitterly opposing this, but I was completely outvoted by the rest of the cast, which made me feel very miserable. So we arrived in Edinburgh and we did it towards,

I think it's fair to say, quite small audiences. Was it received with critical plaudits? Well, the Scotsman reviewed it and gave it two stars out of five. And as regular listeners will know, they said teenage bishops and trainers did not exactly convey the majesty of the medieval church. And, you know, I could have played Paddington off the back of that, but it wasn't to me.

It should have been different. Yeah, but... Well, so I think that this is an entirely worthy subject, the murder of Thomas Beckett. Yeah, the murder of... Both for the role that it's played in your life yeah well but also as a key event in i think some critics would say he was he's been murdered twice once by henry the second knights and once by some some draw some some students from england but clearly not because because the director of Paddington, a wonderful film, obviously thought that your performance

was charismatic and powerful enough that you could play him at Beth. Yeah, and Paddington. Well, and Paddington. I'm assuming that. You're slightly extrapolating. I'm assuming that, yeah. I mean, it seems to be obvious

that he would have wanted me to play Paddington after I met Beth. Okay. But that offer has never explicitly been made. Dominic, have you talked enough about your... Probably not, actually. Is there anything else you'd like to... Do you want to talk about...

Shall we talk about Thomas Beckett? Talk about Thomas Beckett. Who is Thomas Beckett for those people who are still listening? Okay, so Thomas Beckett. We talked about him in the World Cup of Kings because, of course, his great opponent. That's our friend, opponent, um Henry II and Thomas Beckett is a Londoner so he grew up not far from Cornhill where we were for our Christmas Carol episode um

so he grew up on on cheap side I see him like Roe Winston or Danny Dyer I think I don't think he was like Danny Dyer but I yeah that's kind of nice Danny Dyer, but yeah, that's kind of a nice idea. And he was a kind of hung out with Henry II. Henry II felt he was very much his creature because he was, you know, relatively speaking of humble stock, makes him chancellor. And then Henry is having a massive run in with the Pope, with the church, and thinks it would be a tremendous wheeze to appoint Thomasomas to um become archbishop of canterbury on the assumption that thomas will continue to you know be a lad and do what henry wants so they're carousing and stuff together aren't they oh that kind of stuff yeah yeah yeah they're kind of massive lads together the moment he becomes archbishop thomas becomes this deeply saintly figure and he takes Henry on and relations between them get worse and worse.

And Thomas ends up going into exile. And it's a terrible business. And by 1170, negotiations between Henry II, the Pope, Thomas, the King of France, all the kind of various people who are embroiled in this, what's become a massive international scandal. They've patched together, I guess, what is the kind of medieval equivalent of a Brexit deal in that it's just about looks as though, you know, it's kind of okay, but there are all kinds of problems with it

and hostages to fortune. So this is in 1170. And 1st of December, Thomas lands back in England at Sandwich. And he travels along the road to Canterbury. And he's greeted ecstatically by the people of Kent, who all kind of hail him as the friend of widows and the patron of orphans and all this kind of stuff. And one chronicler compares him to Christ entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. So this doesn't obviously improve the mood.

Yeah, Henry must be delighted by this. It doesn't improve the... Well, Henry's not delighted, but also there are other people. There's a guy called Ranulf de Brock, who's a local landowner, who's been given a castle called Saltwood, which traditionally belongs to the Archbishops of Canterbury.

Doesn't that end up being owned by Alan Clark? It does. Yes, it does. And Jane Clark, his wife, still lives there to this day. It's where David Davis went all around the battlements while drunk. Really? So, yeah, it has a very checkered history. But Roger, Ralph de Broglie is obviously not pleased at having Beckett back.

And he's busy stirring up trouble with Henry, who's just over the channel in Normandy. And there are various other people who are also furious with Thomas, chief of whom are three bishops. So the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London, and the Bishop of Salisbury. Oh, Salisbury. Yeah, I'm afraid the Bishop of Salisbury doesn't come out of this well.

Oh, dear. So they have been in York, and they have crowned Henry's son, who's also called Henry, as king. Henry the Young King. Henry the Young King. I think he's about 15 or something. So he's kind of a teenager. And Thomas is livid about this because only the Archbishop of Canterbury can crown kings of England. That's the rule. Archbishop of York can't muzzle in. So he's furious about this. He demands an apology. They refuse to apologise. So Thomas excommunicates them. And he's done this even before he lands in England. The three bishops come down. They have a big bust up with Thomas.

They then go storming off. They take ship. They cross to Normandy. They come to Henry and they say that the bust up hasn't just it's not been about the argument about who should do the crowning, the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Archbishop of York. It's been because Thomas is questioning whether Henry has the right to be crowned as king. So Henry feels that the entire legitimacy of his dynasty is being questioned.

Yeah. Even though this is a bare face. Are they making this up? They're basically making it up. What, snakes? The Bishop of Salisbury, what a snake. Yeah, and do you know what the uncle of the Bishop of Salisbury says when he hears this?

The only way to deal with such a man is to hang him on a gibbet. He's not wrong. Yeah, if it had been true, but it wasn't true. Oh, he's talking about Beckett. I thought he was talking about the Bishop of Salisbury. No, he's talking about Beckett. Oh, that's poor. So there's this kind of rhubarb rhubarb, which you'd know as an actor.

Of course. From all the kind of the aristocrats and people at Henry's court. And we have various reports as to what Henry then said. Does he say, who will rid me of this turbulent priest? Well, he either says, what miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my realm, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lowborn clerk? Oh, that's strong. That's good.

I like that. A man who has eaten my bread, who came to my court poor, and I have raised him high. Now he draws up his heel to kick me in the teeth. He has shamed my kin, shamed my realm. The grief goes to my heart and no one has avenged me. That's also strong and good. Good lines. How many cowardly, useless drones have I nourished that not even a single one is willing to avenge me

of the wrongs i have suffered so those are the three reports from contemporaries so he never says who will rid me of this turbulent priest nope uh 18th century well that's a revelation to me that so in this entire podcast series going going back to when we started 2020, this is the most exciting thing I've learned. Yeah. It's overturned my previous convictions. That's what this podcast is all about, isn't it? Yeah, it's pushed back against the herd mentality

that had taken root in my mind. But two of those statements kind of point out why Henry is particularly furious, and that is that he's a massive snob. Yeah. Because what he's harping on. A low born. Exactly.

So he's harping on the fact that it's not just that Thomas is opposing him. It's the fact that he's low born, that he dares to stand up to me, the king. Henry II is Virginia Woolf. That is what is driving him. Yes. Well, it's all in Kent as well, isn't it? So that basically is what's pissing Henry off. And he's having one of his rages.

And he's prone to rages. You know, he'll kind of pull his clothes off and eat straw and spit and scream and jibber and punch the wall. That's very unbecoming behavior from a Plantagenet warlord. Well, John does it as well, doesn't he? I mean, all the Plantagenets are giving to kind of chewing straw and hitting walls with fists. So anyway, that's basically what Henry's doing.

And most people, when he gets in a mood like this, they know better than to take him seriously. But there are four knights who are of obscure background who don't know henry well who are not versed in in his character who are keen to make a mark for themselves so reginald fitz earths william de tracy richard britto and hugh de morville anyway so these four knights um get on their horses go galloping um to the channel get on their horses, go galloping to the channel, get on ship, cross over, where they rendezvous in Saltwood Castle,

hang out with Ranulf de Broc. Right. And they then head on to Canterbury and they arrive there in the afternoon. And Ranulf de Broc brings all his men-at-arms with him and they seal off the city, essentially so that Thomas won't be able to escape. The knights go bursting into

the Archbishop's Hall where Thomas is kind of hanging out. They confront him. Thomas very much holds his own, sends them packing. They're not thrilled by that. They go out. They then try to break back in. But by this point, it's all been locked up.

So they traipse through an orchard. They climb up a ladder. They break in that way. But by this point, Thomas has gone to Vespers. Yeah. And he walks into the cathedral. And the various monks bar the doors behind them because they're worried about what's going to happen. And Thomas says, no, open.

You know, this is the Church of God. It must be open to all comers. So he orders the bolts to be slid open, doors to be opened so that he knows what he's doing. He's courting martyrdom. And the lights come in. Beckett could easily have fled. I mean, he could easily have hidden. It's very dark by this point.

You know, shadows are lengthening. Yeah. But he doesn't. He stands his ground and he gets kind of brutally murdered. And we've already talked about this, about how there is one blow that is so brutal that it slices through the crown of his skull. So like the top of an egg being sliced off with a knife. And the sword comes down with such force that it sends sparks flying in the air. And so his brains start to seep out across the floor. And one of the other knights then takes his sword and scrapes all the brains out of the skull. This is a very, this is meant to be a festive podcast, Tom.

It kind of is. I mean, it's one of the great feast days, the Master of Beckett, that then gets forgotten with the Reformation, obviously. Have you seen the version of this in The Blackadder? No. The medieval first series of what becomes Blackadder. I must have done. So in that, Edmund Rowan Atkinson

is made Archbishop of Canterbury, and knights attack him. But he and Baldrick and Percy, his mates disguise themselves as nuns. Well, that doesn't happen with Thomas. He very bravely accepts his martyrdom. Yeah.

And, you know, the guy who is Hugh de Morville, I think it is, is scraping the brains out with his sword. And he shouts, he keeps yelling out, he won't be getting up again. he won't be getting up again.

He won't be getting up again. No. As he kind of spatters the brains all over the floor. So that's the martyrdom of Thomas. They go galloping off into the night. Henry, of course, has brought the news and he goes, oh, I wasn't sure about, I mean, he pretends to be terribly upset.

I don't think he is particularly. He's probably slightly relieved that Thomas has gone. I think he is relieved. I think he is relieved. But he also knows that this is open to terrible kind of. Well, yes, because immediately Thomas's relics start to perform miracles. Yeah. And it spontaneously becomes this great place of pilgrimage.

And in the end, Henry submits to um you know the public humiliation of walking barefoot through canterbury and being birched by monks and things simply so that he can kind of buy into the charisma of the martyred archbishop um and so it remains you know the great center of pilgrimage for centuries and centuries it's it's where the Canterbury Pilgrims go in Chaucer's poem. And for obvious reasons, Henry VIII hates it. Yeah. Absolutely hates it. And so it becomes a particular object of the fury of his reformers.

So I was going to ask a question about Thomas Becket. Do you think that you can draw a little line between, a faint line between Thomas Becket and people like Thomas Cromwell centuries later? Lowborn, risen up, king's sort of pal and minister. Both Londoners. Yeah, becoming involved with the church, all that stuff. Except that Thomas Cromwell is the great servant of the king.

Exactly. So in some ways, was Henry II, do you think, expecting that Thomas Beckett would behave? Would be a Cromwell, yes. Would be a Cromwell, yeah, exactly. Or a Woolsey, I think, more likely. Yeah, yeah. Yes, I think so.

And Beckett's refusal to do that was... Well, that's certainly what I tried to work into my performance. And it's a shame that the Scotsman never recognised that. But you weren't in Murder in the Cathedral. No, I wasn't. Which is a great play, I think. I've never seen that or read it. Very powerful. no I wasn't which is a great play I've never seen that or read it very powerful

great lines on how tempting it is to be a martyr right now is my way clear now is the meaning plain temptation shall not come in this kind again

the last temptation is the greatest treason to do the right deed for the wrong reason I can imagine you saying that yeah I can in your trainers we've had poetry before,

William McGonagall, and now we've had T.S. Eliot. Yeah. We've hit both the... The poetry vein. We have. Right, let's take a break and then we'll come back

with some Native Americans. See you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news

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if you want ad free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com that's therestisentertainment dot com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History with our celebration

of the 29th of December and it's a rather morbid celebration because we've already had the murder of Thomas Beckett, a rather brutal assassination in the heart of Canterbury Cathedral. And now, Dominic, you've got more. I've got a shocking story, a really brutal story.

So it's the massacre at Wounded Knee on the 29th of December, 1890. So we did a podcast earlier in the year. On the Wild West, didn't we? The Wild West that was enormously enjoyable. I loved doing that. It's such an interesting subject. And we haven't really done much American,

sort of Western history. And we haven't done any kind of native american history at all really have we so this is the most famous incident probably apart from the last battle of the little bighorn um probably the single most famous incident in the the sorry history of the interaction between in you know european americans and it's given its its name to the title of d brown's famous revisionist work on exactly very much in the west very much and i also thought this was a good story tom because it's kind of a gift to you because it's it's partly about the influence of christianity isn't it i know yes it is so let's set the scene a bit so we are in the kind of Great Plains of the United States.

Specifically, we are in South Dakota, what we know as South Dakota. The U.S. Army has been campaigning basically for years, for decades, to subdue the Plains Indians. The arrival of the railroads has done tremendous damage to the kind of ecosystem on which the Indians rely. So they relied, of course, on the bison and so on that's largely gone um quite deliberately right i mean yes because we talked about that in the wild west episode exactly the deliberate extermination of the bison their world has fallen apart and and their world has fallen apart deliberately because white settlers have taken it upon themselves deliberately to destroy that world.

Often union generals, generals who've been involved in the Civil War play a big part in that. Washington politicians as well. So by this point, so let's pick up in the sort of late 1880s, the Lakota Sioux. So the Sioux, probably the most, one of the most famous. Victors of Bighorn. Indian groups. They are on reservations by and large. And they're finding that really tough.

So that basically the US government is encouraging them to become agriculturalists, to plant crops, to become basically farmers. And not to get hunting buffalo. And that's not really part of their culture. They're completely unsuited to it. They are being encouraged by federal agents, agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to wear Western clothes, you know, to dress in sort of suits and trousers and stuff,

to speak English, crucially to abandon their traditional religion and to embrace Christianity. So their sort of mental and imaginative world is collapsing and they're being forced to adopt all these sort of new and strange things. But at the same time, there's a series of harsh winters and droughts and things. They don't have much food. They're reliant on government rations, which are being sort of stripped back because the government is cutting them so they're in a terrible state basically

and then at the beginning of 1890 this this this cultish movement sweeps through the reservations of the plains the ghost dance the ghost dance that's an absolutely fascinating thing it's the it has been around for a while but it is revived by a kind of indian prophet almost who's a man called wavoka now his father had been a ghost dancer and had taught his son about it his son has been raised among people who have by ranchers who have exposed him and his friends to christianity so a kind of messianic religion is is is in his mind it's in the ether after Jesus will come again and exactly and now the story goes that it's a there's a there's an eclipse on New Year's Day 1889 I think it is and he falls asleep or has uh goes into a kind of trance

and God tells him that the if the Indians do this ritual dance, this circular dance and follow these instructions, then in two years time, God will return the earth to the state that it was in before the Americans, the white settlers arrived. And the buffalo will come back. That's what I always find so tragic. The buffalo will return and the white settlers themselves

will be buried under 30 feet of soil and that the Indians ancestors will rise from the dead. And that's that's why it's the ghost dance right? Right exactly. Now you can see why where Christianity may have seeped into this you know the idea of being risen from the dead the idea of the second coming all of this sort of stuff and among the Lakota Sioux this becomes an incredibly powerful message people want to hear it of course they do because their lives are so terrible so they start wearing these white shirts called ghost shirts where they put on they painted them with kind of or decorated them with sacred symbols and they are told or tell themselves that these symbols

will protect them against american army bullets so the movement spreads and spreads and spreads throughout 1889 1890 and the federal agents are very put out by this they don't understand it they're worried about it they think it has potential to become a kind of insurgency. And basically by November 1890, the US Army is being sent into the plains and told, stop the ghost dance. You know, round them up and get them to stop it. So the first instance of this, they try to round up a load of Sioux

who are living near the Standing Rock Agency with Sitting Bull, the great chief who had famously been involved, been one of the people who had led the Indians at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 when Custer and the 7th Cavalry had been

defeated. Well, so I think it's December the 15th, they're rounded up, there's a sort of bit of a struggle some of the Sioux are killed and one of them is Sitting Bull and there's a terrible story about that that Sitting Bull had been with Buffalo Bill

on the Wild West show and so the horse had been trained to dance to the sound of rifle fire and so when Sitting Bull gets shot he falls and he's bleeding into the dust and his horse starts rifle fire. And so when Sitting Bull gets shot, he falls and he's bleeding into the dust, and his horse starts to dance. Oh, that's a terrible

story, Tom. It's a terrible story. This is such a depressing episode of Apple Podcasts. I know, it's just kind of blood everywhere. So there's that, and that, when that news of this reaches the other Sioux and the other reservations, they are absolutely horrified by this. Some of them start kind other reservations, they are absolutely horrified by this.

Some of them start kind of gathering. They're prepared for what they see as a showdown with the US Army. And do you think it's in an apocalyptic mood? I think so, absolutely. They must know that they can't, you know, by conventional standards, they haven't got a hope. Absolutely. I think they absolutely.

So some of them perhaps are caught up with kind of religious hysteria almost and think they can win. But I suspect most of them, as you say, there is an apocalyptic, not quite suicidal, but there is definitely an apocalyptic sense, which is, of course, built into the cult. So there's a guy called Red Cloud who is trying to do a deal with the Americans. And he's on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

And some of the Indians are trying to get to the Pine Ridge Reservation where they can unite with Red Cloud and so on. And one of the groups who are trying to get to Pine Ridge are a group of mini-konju Lakota Sioux. And they are led by a guy called Bigfoot. So his real name is Sitanka but the Americans name is Bigfoot. And Bigfoot gets about 350 of these guys and he says

I say guys, men, women and children says let's get to Pine Ridge, unite with Red Cloud and hopefully it'll be okay. Off they go. The Americans hear that they're moving and get in a flap about it, and they send the 7th Cavalry, so basically the very

part of the army that has been beaten at Little Bighorn to intercept them. And on the 29th of December, they basically, the American 7th Cavalry round up these people, and they'd say, we're going to confiscate all your weapons. So they get, they basically 7th Cavalry, round up these people and they'd say, we're going to confiscate all your weapons.

So they basically herd them into a clearing. They surround the clearing with cavalry. They position guns facing them because the Americans, of course, are frightened themselves. They don't understand the ghost dance. They don't understand the Indians. So it's all sort of set up. The 7th Cavalry start searching them for weapons.

And at this point, a man called Sitz Strait starts to dance the ghost dance. Now you can sort of, it's an act of, why is he doing it? An act of defiance because he himself is frightened. An act of defiance, but also perhaps an attempt to invoke the second coming. Yeah, maybe, maybe. And he says to the others, he's saying to the others,

don't worry, you know, our white shirts mean that we can't be hurt by the Americans' bullets. So this dance becomes more and more kind of frenzied, sort of whirling dance. And the American soldiers become more and more anxious. You know, you can almost trigger happy, sense their fingers tensing on the triggers. And basically it's at this point that one of the Indians,

who's a guy called Black Coyote, is told to give up his gun. He is deaf, so he doesn't understand or hear. And something then happens. It's not clear his a gun goes off maybe it's his gun um the seventh cavalry who are so trigger happy and nervous they you can imagine the scene they start shooting suddenly all hell is breaking loose everybody is shooting probably within moments most of the casualties happen at first, and they are enormous casualties. So the Americans just start blasting away. Accounts of what happened are they conflict,

and there are sort of debates about what happened. But we do know that about 146 of the Indians were later buried in a mass grave, but probably about 300 of them were killed in total and about half of them were women and children so it's a genuine massacre what it's that classic thing that you get with if ever you read about massacres in history that it starts by accident and then it becomes the kind of addictive frenzy and everybody starts shooting and once they've started they can't stop until everybody's dead um the officers lose control everybody's kind of you know pouring bullets into these defenseless people um at least

about 25 of the american soldiers themselves were killed probably by their own side because i mean they're in a circle so they're almost firing on each other so it's this horrendous scene um and what happens at first is the bureau of indian affairs says it's basically a battle we were attacked by indians and we were defending ourselves but very soon it comes out that it was a massacre and it becomes this terrible sort of stain um well because also i mean it it draws the line under direct combat doesn't it yeah it Yeah, it does. It's the last, it's always the final chapter of every book. But also, I mean, if you were writing a script of the tragedy of the Native Americans in the United States,

you couldn't have written a more moving or upsetting climax to it, really. Exactly right. It's the perfect, in a way, it's kind of microcosm, or it's kind of metaphor for that. Yeah, kind of blood seeping out into the snow. For the wider story. Exactly, very miserable. The guy who was the commanding officer of Grogor for Scythe,

there's an investigation into him. He's temporarily stripped of his command. But, you know, the investigation finds that he was innocent and he's restored to his post. So, you know, that in a way is not surprising that's exactly always going to happen because in a way i don't want to be too strident about this but what's undoubtedly true is that in the 19th century i think white sort of european americans didn't really admit to themselves the extent of what was happening to the indians is it's still not it's it we talked about this in the wild west podcast

you know the great american sin is is perceived as being slavery isn't it and um the arguments about the african americans sort of place in the united states their history in the united states they're incredibly resonant and contested and all of this. And what happened to the Native Americans, it feels like a smaller story, doesn't it? It doesn't get discussed as much. It doesn't get, there aren't such high profile campaigns. It's not, but it should be. But because there aren't as many.

I mean, and we know why there aren't as many because it will been wiped out yeah um but i'm kind of thinking there are certain you know certain kind of parallels between the two stories the two um periods that we've looked at um and one is that there's a there's a kind of sense of delayed acknowledgement of guilt on on the part of henry ii and he kind of says yeah okay it's it's a terrible thing whatever and then it's delayed acknowledgement of guilt on the part of Henry II. And he kind of says, yeah, okay, it's a terrible thing, whatever. And then it's only gradually that he comes to realise how potent an episode it's been

and how he wants to get on the right side of it. And you could say that a kind of slightly similar process has happened with Wounded Knee, that it's taken time for white people, I guess, the apparatus of the United States government, however you want to put it, to fully acknowledge the scale of what happened. And to recognize that there is a kind of power in that martyrdom. Because there's a reason why it's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, why that's such an evocative name and why that book had such an impact to the degree that I think it'd be very difficult ever again

to portray, you know, cowboys and Indians where the Indians are the baddies. I just don't think you could ever do that again. It's also post Dancers of the Wolves though, isn't it, Tom? Don't you think Dancers of the Wolves? But I think Dancers of the Wolves was so influenced by Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Yeah. I think, you know, there's kind of, with both of them, I think there was a kind of sense of delayed shock.

And with both of them, there's a sense that there is a kind of, dare I say, sacral power to be had in Malmsteen. In 1973, when Indians wanted to, Indian activists wanted to protest against their treatment, they occupy the site of Wounded Knee. It's Wounded Knee that they choose. The protest against the, I mean, it's during the Nixon years. It's not specifically against Nixon. It's against the sort of the American government more generally.

And their neglect. I mean, that's the site they choose for absolutely understandable reasons. Yeah. I suppose I would buy that a bit more about its power if it had led to if recognition of since d brown's book had led to any kind of real change in the in the plight of american indians they're still the sort of forgotten victims aren't they don't you think i'd maybe maybe but i think i think they have i think that their sufferings have a much higher prominence now than they did no i did in the 50s let's say and i think i think that um if you if you think

about maybe the resentment that's generated as well as the kind of sympathy perhaps then you get also i mean maybe i'm stretching things here but you get the sense of what was at stake when henry viii destroyed beckett's tomb the power of a martyr can be very dangerous yeah to those who feel menaced by it this is absolutely heroic work tom to link this well no no podcast in history has ever tried to draw a power a link between the death of thomas do you think do you think that there's a kind of parallel there i think there's a kind of i mean mean, very distant echo, but... The memory of martyrdom, I suppose so. The power of martyrdom. Both rank as martyrs. Yes, I suppose so.

I mean, there's a slight echo in the Wounded Knee Massacre as well of the Massacre of the Innocents, which we talked about earlier. I mean, there's that, you know, the spectacle of large numbers of innocent people being slaughtered. Yeah. Well, American history has these massacres. So My Lai, or whatever, I can't remember how to pronounce it, people being slaughtered yeah well american history has these massacres so me lay me lie or whatever i can't remember how to pronounce it uh the massacre of vietnamese um it's during the

vietnam war is the other great famous massacre in uh american history um and again i mean that's there are some people i mean i don't i doubt many listeners of this podcast to this podcast but there will be some people who kind of roll their eyes at mention of this and say, oh, God's sake, you know, shut up, don't be so woke. What woke Tosh, to quote people about the victory of Athelstan in the rest of history World Cup. I mean, I don't think it is

woke Tosh, but there you go. And since I'm the arbiter. Yeah, you can decide. I have decided. It's not. Right. We're just wittering. We're just scrambling now we are we are we are we are um but i i think also it it um there's a particular quality to um to tragedy in the depth of winter a sacral quality tom maybe um it's it's it's a conjunction of red and white it's the blood and the snow there is something something. It's the blood and snow. Well, I think isn't that also

because the Indian story is usually perceived in popular culture. The Cowboys and Indians story is perceived as having played out in the heat of the desert or the heat of the plains. And the fact that the end,

the final chapter is in the snow makes it feel all the more kind of tragic. The ice. Yeah. Anyway, on that cheery note, we will bid you farewell. We'll be back tomorrow

with December the 30th. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.