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Custer's Last Stand and American Indian myths
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21-01-2012 5:46pm#1Thought I might start a thread on the experiences of the American Indians – or Native Americans. I got the idea from a mention on another thread. I’m no expert on the subject but have an interest in their history so I'm exploring it also. The image of the Indian as bad guy to the good cowboy owes much to Hollywoord. Certainly my generation of Irish kids grew up with images of the ‘bad’ Indians and the ‘good’ cowboys and the cavalry charge which always settled events on the 'right' side at the end of the film. But historians claim that this portrayal of Indians as 'savage baddies' goes back further than Hollywood and reached its height with the defeat of Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 – just as Americans were celebrating their first century of independence.
The Indian leader Sitting Bull was maybe in many ways the Great Hugh O’Neill of his time and people. He had resisted the ‘offers’ of going on to reservations and led his people, the Lakota Sioux tribe, away from accepting the white man’s ‘civilisation’ and they continued to hunt buffalo and attempted to cling onto their old way of life. Some Indian tribes had gone onto reservations. The issue came to a head over the Black Hills in what was then the Dakota Territory. The Lakota Sioux and the Cheyenne used the hills for hunting and food. The Federal government wanted the hill territory – Custer and a sizable cavalry were sent to get rid of the ‘hostile’ Indians [those who refused to conform to US law]. When gold was discovered the issue became central to policy that the Indians must be removed, wiped out if necessary.
Sitting Bull photo
It’s a convoluted subject – and modern American historians are digging deeply into archival material to establish what actually happened. Wiping away the mythology that was created in the press at the time is a fascinating subject itself - [the mythology was helped greatly by Custer himself and his wife who wrote extensively about his experiences, always making himself the hero].
I have a number of books on the subject Nathaniel Philbrick’s Last Stand is excellent so is Michael Elliots’s Custerology: the Enduring legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer.
Here is a link to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC on Native Americans. Well worth a visit. I spend some time there a few years ago.“Custer is controversial for the same reasons he was so successful in his own time,” historian Michael Elliott said. “He was an outsized personality who used the tools around him to shape himself into a public figure that embodies many of the things that make us uncomfortable about American history — the way that Americans sometimes rush into a military action, the way that America has treated American Indians... These are questions that are really raw and nagging and we haven’t resolved them. And until we do we’re going to keep returning to Custer and the controversies that surround him.”
http://www.nmai.si.edu/
Any contributions to the subject welcome. Digging out archival material would also be very helpful. I know that newspapers of the time were full of stories of Custer [some written by him]. He had a flamboyant personality and is said to have loved the theatrics of battle. His final defeat at Bighorn was depicted as 'heroic' with images of him and his men surrounded by 'savages' as he went down to his death. It's said that this image hung in every bar in the United States for decades and became the iconic image of 'good' vs. 'bad' Indian 'savage'.
CDfm - it's time to put on that buckskin - :pac:
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Who was the first American Indian to visit Ireland , here is Chief White Cloud who visited Dublin in 1843.Ireland and the American Indians
By Juliana Adelman
Every once in a while the historian experiences a series of coincidences which makes her take a second look at something and maybe file it under ‘interesting lead to pursue in future’. While reading through the minute books of the Dublin Zoological Society I came across a tantilizing reference to the visitation of a tribe of American Indians to the gardens in the 1840s. I assumed it was another example of the distasteful nineteenth-century practice of human displays: public exhibitions of ‘savages’ from all continents were popular attractions and sometimes they were placed alongside animal exhibits. Soon after, I came across an article on the visiting Indians in a Dublin newspaper. The coverage surprised me. There was certainly an element of condescension and titilation, but the Indians were treated as a mixture of visiting foreign dignitaries and actors. Far from the seedy sideshow in native flesh that I had imagined. The tribe was described as making a visit to the zoological gardens, rather than being on display there, and all the gate receipts for the day were donated to them. Hmmm, so much for a historian’s assumptions.
I didn’t think much more of it until a few months later I was reading William Cronon’s book Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the great west (heartily recommended). Cronon referred repeatedly to George Catlin’s doomed campaigns to save both American Indian tribes and buffalo habitats in the west. Catlin, one of America’s early environmental campaigners, documented the demise of the buffalo in the face of expanding American cattle grazing. Catlin sounded familiar. A quick search in the National Library’s online catalogue revealed the presence of one of Catlin’s pamphlets advertising his American Indian show in London. The penny dropped.
On a summer visit to Washington DC I took the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian Institution’s American Indian museum. There, in the midst of an impressive series of galleries, were George Catlin’s paintings of Indians. Among them were some of the very same people who had visited Dublin. The above image is of Chief White Cloud who was certainly on parts of the tour, but I cannot find confirmation of his being in Dublin. The paintings are worth a visit to the museum on their own. They are beautiful formal portraits, their subjects posed in the style of any nineteenth-century gentleman or woman. I am sure they are stylized, but they are clearly paintings of individual people executed by someone who knew them.
Catlin visited Ireland in May of 1843, where he delivered a series of lectures in the Rotunda (yes, same as the hospital). Admission was a relatively pricy 2s/1s and the lectures included ‘tableux vivants’ of the Indians themselves, dressed in costume and performing traditional dances and songs. They seem to have spent time in Britain both before and after their tour of Ireland. In December of 1843, the Indians were introduced to Queen Victoria. The Indians met with a very enthusiastic reception most places that they went and, according to Catlin, very much enjoyed their adventure (particularly the discovery of champagne).
Catlin was certainly no saint and his European tour with the American Indians did no harm to his career as a writer and painter. His book on this tour is well worth a read, even just for the section on Dublin. Catlin’s principle book on the ‘manners and customs’ of the Indians whom he travelled amongst reads something like a natural history. Catlin’s view of the Indians, while more sympathetic than most, leaned towards the ‘noble savage’. Although he called the Indians his friends, he referred to them in the contemporary paternalistic language as savages and simpletons.
http://puesoccurrences.com/2010/11/04/ireland-and-the-american-indians/0 -
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I always love that Choctaw story.
There were a lot of Irish at the Little Big Horn , around 15% of Custers force were Irish .
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indian wars : little bighorn part 1
indian wars : little bighorn part 2
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George Armstrong Custer
Custer had to adjust to his new experiences on the frontier – and his relationship with the army was frequently testy . He had been a great hero of the Civil War – on the Union northern side - but the Indians presented a very different enemy from the Confederate Army. The army discovered that what they were now fighting was essentially what later would be known as guerilla warfare. They soon learned that confronting the Indians did not work because they would soon disperse and hide – and engage in surprise attacks. What the army then concentrated on what trying to surround an Indian village and attack without allowing the Indians escape.
Some of the background to all this was the fact that in the Dakota Territory in April of 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie granted the Sioux nation ownership of the Black Hills, which were considered sacred grounds for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. The discovery of gold by Custer and other agents of the US Government sent specifically to explore resources altered all that and imperial expansion was soon underway with white settlers pouring into the region. Typical of this expansion was the use of force to conquer, control and if the natives got in the way then they were simply to be wiped out.The European imperialists were doing precisely the same thing in India, Africa.
The mistake for the Cavalry at Little Bighorn was that Sitting Bull had gathered a huge amount of Indian warriors around him in the summer of 1876 – many coming off the reservations - and this was not known by the army.Nathaniel Philbrick The Last Stand:
America was not the only place in the world where Western and indigenous peoples were coming into conflict in the late nineteenth century. Little Bighorn-like battles had been or were about to be fought in India, the Middle East, and Africa – most spectacularly at Isandlwana in 1879, when twenty-four thousand Zulus annihilated a British force of more than thirteen hundred men.
Here’s a description from Michael Elliot in CusterologyCuster’s main concern was not being outnumbered but eluded. Conventional army wisdom held that the principal asset of Plains Indians was their mobility, their ability to disperse instantly into smaller groups that could travel more quickly and easier than army columns burdened by clumsy supply trains and the difficulty of find forage for their horses. From the moment on June 23rd when the Seventh Cavalry left its camp on the Yellowstone [river] for Custer’s final march – first south along the Rosebud then south on to Little Bighorn – every decision that its leader made was driven by this fear of evasion.0 -
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFPymoqJTbM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNTvDvNlaVI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GtpSQelnBk
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