Ed Fowler
Member
I have greatly enjoyed sharing what others have read without having to read each and every book. I thank those of you who have joined the discussion and hope it continues.
Custer's "Last Stand"
- Thread starter Naphtali
- Start date
DWalt
Member
So, let's talk about what guns Custer carried with him to the LBH. There are lots of differing opinions on that topic also. Should keep the thread going for a few more pages.
cmort666
Member
I've seen claims of one or more solid frame RIC style Webleys.
Huskerguy
Member
I am finding all of this interesting. My last name is Custer and all these years I have felt he was an idiot, no need to know more than that. I have not read a single book about him. A few articles and watched a documentary or two but that is about it. Custer Hall at Fort Hays State University in Hays,Ks is named after his wife. I found it humorous when I was working on my master's there that some youngin wrote a scathing article on the horror of naming any building after George Custer when in fact it was named after his wife. I have been asked a bazillion times if I am related to him to which I reply, not directly since he had no children. I had not heard of his possible relationship with an Indian woman and subsequent child. Maybe a long lost cousin there??
That being said, going to Little Big Horn next spring and the Cody Museum are on my bucket list next spring. Hope to finally get retired (third time) soon and maybe I will have time to read some of those books this winter.
I just figured, like most, that Custer was a bit on the egocentric side and didn't think the Indians could stand up to his troopers. He made a grave error that got him and others annihilated and that was that. No hero, just dead.
That being said, going to Little Big Horn next spring and the Cody Museum are on my bucket list next spring. Hope to finally get retired (third time) soon and maybe I will have time to read some of those books this winter.
I just figured, like most, that Custer was a bit on the egocentric side and didn't think the Indians could stand up to his troopers. He made a grave error that got him and others annihilated and that was that. No hero, just dead.
Gulfecho
Member
The Lakota and Cheyenne warriors did join the battle with a number of Henry and Spencer repeating rifles, which provided a higher rate of fire than the single-shot Springfield Model 1873 carbines carried by the cavalry troopers. But the Springfields — chosen in part by the Army Ordnance Board because a single-shot weapon would help conserve ammunition — were considered more accurate and had a greater range than the Henrys or Spencers. On the other hand, they were also prone to jamming, because the copper cartridges tended to expand in the breech as the rifle heated up during repeated use.
-Tony Long
amazingflapjack
US Veteran
It's interesting to note that, typically, when "white people prevail in a battle, it's a "Victory." But when Indians prevail, it's a "Massacre."
Custer reportedly carried an Adams Bulldog revolver and an Remington Rolling Block Rifle.
Custer's column stopped on a ridge overlooking the village. Custer ordered one troop to dismount and fire a volley into the village.
They and Custer did so. Years later a number of 45-70 and one Remington 44-77 case were recovered from that position.
Journals say Custer wore a buckskin coat on the Montana campaign.
The Indians say a column of troops led by an individual in a buckskin coat attempted to cross the LBH and invade the village. They said the guy in buckskin was hit and the troops gathered to get him back on his horse and then retreated back up a ridge. The column left Calhoun's troop on the ridge to cover their retreat.
Was that Custer?
The burial detail reported that Custer had a wound in his side and one to the side of his head with powder burns.
The Army's story was that Custer was not mutilated after the battle.
The troops on the burial details stories differed.
Custer's column stopped on a ridge overlooking the village. Custer ordered one troop to dismount and fire a volley into the village.
They and Custer did so. Years later a number of 45-70 and one Remington 44-77 case were recovered from that position.
Journals say Custer wore a buckskin coat on the Montana campaign.
The Indians say a column of troops led by an individual in a buckskin coat attempted to cross the LBH and invade the village. They said the guy in buckskin was hit and the troops gathered to get him back on his horse and then retreated back up a ridge. The column left Calhoun's troop on the ridge to cover their retreat.
Was that Custer?
The burial detail reported that Custer had a wound in his side and one to the side of his head with powder burns.
The Army's story was that Custer was not mutilated after the battle.
The troops on the burial details stories differed.
CATI1835
US Veteran
It is not possible to say one way or the other. None of Custer's men survived to say. The Indian accounts are not definitive either. The Indians did not know who they were fighting, so the death of a single trooper would not have had any special significance to them. They did not find out until days later that "Long Hair" had been killed.
Big Cholla
Member
The history of the base cause of the US Army's actions in the Wyoming and Montana areas has become a lot clearer to me with the publication of a great article in the Smithsonian Magazine's website. It clearly documents the duplicity of Pres. Grant in starting an unauthorized conflict with the Lakota over the ownership of the Blackhills area after substantial gold deposits were found. Here is the link; History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian
This article brought to my attention that the Lakota fought a legal battle over the illegal 'taking' of their reservation area called "The Blackhills" and were in fact awarded the sum of one billion dollars. The Tribe has refused to take the settlement, but would rather have the Blackhills returned to their ownership. .............
This article brought to my attention that the Lakota fought a legal battle over the illegal 'taking' of their reservation area called "The Blackhills" and were in fact awarded the sum of one billion dollars. The Tribe has refused to take the settlement, but would rather have the Blackhills returned to their ownership. .............
Absalom
SWCA Member, Absent Comrade
This seems to be the prevailing theory. Guns & Ammo did an article about this last year. Sounds plausible. As the officer in command, he would have been busy with things other than taking potshots at Indians himself, up until the last moment, so the absence of attributable casings makes sense.
Custer's Last Gun: Webley RIC Revolver - Guns & Ammo
cmort666
Member
Was it a settlement or a judgment? Did it actually proceed to a judicial decision or did the government just propose a settlement on which they passed?
I've seen people quite rightfully decline laughable "settlements" from city governments (Chicago in particular) and win VASTLY larger judgments.
What were the Black Hills worth in today's dollars? What are they worth today? If they're worth $70,000,000,000 today, that may have been a VERY wise move on their part.
cmort666
Member
As I've noted previously, when I went to the old Beverly Theater in Chicago to see "Enter the Dragon" on opening day, the security guard they hired to control the huge crowds was carrying an RIC.
It's not just the Black Hills that was taken. Take a look at the Ft Laramie Treaty of 1868. It established all of what is now South Dakota west of them Missouri river along with a big chunk of what is now the south west corner of north Dakota as the Great Sioux Reservation (over 25 million acres in total).
It also included almost all of the western half of Nebraska and the north easter corner of Colorado as the Article 11 Hunting Grounds, and the north east corner of Wyoming and the south east corner of Montana as the Article 16 unceded Indian Territory. These were areas where the Sioux would be allowed to hunt until the buffalo were gone.
The treaty also provided for an Indian Agency, grist mill, and schools to be located on the Great Sioux Reservation. In addition it provided for land allotments to be made to individual Indians; and provide clothing, blankets, and rations of food to be distributed to all Dakota and Lakota members living within the bounds of the Great Sioux Reservation.
In exchange for this "smaller" Indian territory the US government was supposed to remove all the forts in the powder river basin and prevent any white settlement in these areas.
Red Cloud signed the treaty after the forts were removed along the Bozeman as an act of good faith by the government and the tribal chiefs who already resided in the Great Sioux Reservation also signed the treaty. However 3/4ths of the males in the various bands of the Sioux did not sign the treaty and failed to abide by the proposed provisions and continued to live in the unceded territory (where they could hunt but not live under the treaty provisions).
To be fair, it can be argued that the Sioux as whole never agreed to the treaty, and this prompted the government to build more forts and create more Indian Agencies as part of a larger effort to confine the Sioux to the designated Great Sioux Reservation.
In the early 1870s, the government allowed Northern Pacific Railroad survey crews into the Unceded lands in WY, and that prompted complaints - and attacks from natives. The government response was more forts and more troops to protect whites and railway survey crews.
The government also violated the agreement in 1874 with the Custer Expedition into the Black Hills, which the government admitted was illegal but justified on the basis of needing to assess the mineral wealth in the area.
It's often said but not true that the 1874 expedition was the first to discover gold in the area, as prospectors had already made that discovery, but the 1874 expedition made it big news and prompted a god rush with the result that by 1875 the Black Hills was flooded with miners after the government failed/refused to clear them out.
In 1875 the government tried to resolve the issue by buying the Black Hills from the Sioux, but that was universally rejected by the various bands of the Sioux. Since the Sioux refused to negotiate another treaty, rather then uphold the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty the government instituted a policy that declared the unceded lands off-limits and sought to force all Dakota and Lakota living in the unceded areas between the Black Hills and Bighorn Mountains within the confines of the Great Sioux Reservation.
In December 1875, the government plan became official policy. The people living in winter camps in the unceded territory were ordered to report to their agencies by January 31, 1876, or they would be regarded as hostile and the army would drive them in.
Some of the bands living in the area, refused to vacate by 31 January, and others living on the standing Rock reservation were given permission to hunt in the powder river basin due to food shortages in the sever winter of 1875-76. However they too were declared hostile after 31 January.
The government waited for warmer weather to drive them back to the reservation and kicked things off in June 1876 - and that's what launched the campaign against the Indians encamped on the Little Big Horn.
In 1877, partly in retaliation for LBH, the government moved to annex the Black Hills from the Great Sioux Reservation under the 1876 Treaty created by the 1876 Act. Per the 1868 treaty any changes to the treaty had to be ratified with the signatures from 3/4 of the Sioux adult males. They got something like 48 signatures, which was a fair bit short of required number. Congress ratified the 1876 Act anyway in February 1877 and the Act and Treaty also removed the rights to hunt in the Article 11 and Article 16 lands.
This meant that the "Great Sioux Reservation" was now reduced to what is now western SD, excluding the western third that contained the Black Hills, and a small bit of what is now North Dakota.
At this point, statehood became an issue for the whites living in the Dakota Territory and it became evident that with with 43,000 square miles of Indian land closed to any settlement or development, statehood was not going to happen.
As a result, in 1888 and 1889, federal commissions were sent once more to various Sioux agencies in attempts to get Indian approval of the Sioux Bill which called for the break-up of the Great Sioux Reservation into a four smaller reservations (Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne and Standing Rock) and six smaller land areas, forfeiture of nine million acres of land, allotment of lands to individual families, and opening of non-allotted land to homesteading.
The various bands of the Sioux were naturally not impressed or in favor of this, so the commission sent people to put a great deal of pressure on tribal measure to sign the new Treaty of 1889 and eventually they coerced just over half to sign it.
The Sioux Bill in conjunction with the Dawes Act of 1877 finally opened the area to white settlement, which lead to statehood for SD and ND in 1889. This however required the Indian land allotments (basically 160 to 320 acres per family) to be made and Sitting Bull, among others refused to cooperate and accept an allotment.
This led to an effort to arrest Sitting Bull by Indian Police from the Standing Rock Agency on December 15, 1889. The plan was to arrest him and take him to Ft. Yates. This didn't go as smoothly as planned and resulted in the death of Sitting Bull, eight others in his hand and six Indian agents. His band then scattered. This event along with a the fears caused by the "Ghost Dance" religious movement occurring in 1889-1890 led to the military campaign to round the Sioux back up and this resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.
The Indian allotments were not completed until 1906 and the reservations continued to be whittled away until the land allotments in the Dakotas were completed in 1915 and reorganization of the reservation system in the 1930s resulted in the current reservations with a mix of reservation and allotted indian and white owned lands in SD.
It's complicated stuff but it's all connected and created a continuous chain of events, events that were probably far worse for the Sioux in the long run as a result of their victory at Little Big Horn - a truly Pyrrhic victory.
It's nice thought that the Lakota and Dakota would get the Black Hills back, but that needed to be done in 1875-1877. It's a bit late now. There are far more non-indians living in the Black Hills than there are Sioux anywhere, so getting any kind of political traction to remove all the non-indians won't ever happen.
If the non indians were forced to leave, they'd either take all the development and infrastructure with them or level it to the ground, so any "value" would be based on the cash value of the land. The infrastructure costs to re-develop would be staggering and beyond what the various tribes could afford. So it would again be something of a Pyrrhic victory.
When I was kid, Henry Big Eagle, the tribal chairman at the time would come over for dinner on Sundays and visit. He stated very clearly in 1972 when AIM was a big deal that the last thing the Sioux should do is sue the government or accept money from the government. He was sad that the old ways were gone for forever, be felt that many of the Sioux, just like the non-whites in the area, were now primarily farmers and ranchers and yet were very independent and self reliant. He felt that the way forward was to expand that self reliance and independence. He also felt that as soon as the Sioux nation started suing or accepting settlements, it would make the Sioux dependent again on the government, that the Sioux would lose their pride and their self sufficiency. He was voted out of office that same year due to efforts by more militant people like Dennis Banks and Russell Means.
When I look back on what's happened since 1972 I very clearly see that Henry was absolutely right in his prediction.
----
In that regard, if any proposed settlement for the Black Hills is rejected on the basis that there is an actual belief that the Sioux will get the Black Hills back, then it is a very unwise decision.
If on the other hand any settlement is rejected with an under standing that a great deal of money that is not accepted with a great deal of wisdom and forethought will do far more harm then good, then it's maybe not such a bad decision.
There is also the other side of the coin when it comes to "ownership" of the Black Hills, and this does not go over well with Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Sioux.
The claim is that the Black Hills always belonged to the Sioux and that's just not the case. The Sioux in fact originated farther east in what is now Minnesota and Wisconsin, where they were not regarded as very good neighbors by other indian tribes, since they tended to war with the other tribes on a regular basis.
The word "Sioux" derives from the word Nadouessioux, first recored by Jean Nicolet in 1640 and said to be further derived from an Ojibwe name for the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota bands meaning "little snakes".
Thus the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota tend to frown on the use of the term "Sioux".
The Dakota, Lakota and Nakota bands didn't migrate to South Dakota until around 1700 and that was due in part to being driven out of their original lands by their unhappy neighbors, and arguably pressure from other bands pressing west due to increasing numbers of whites settling on the east coast and pressing the natives west.
In that regard, the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota appropriated the Black Hills form the tribes that had lived in the area prior to their arrival - the Crow, the Cheyenne and the Pawnee, as well as the Arikara that were an offshoot of the Pawnee separating about 200 years before the Sioux arrived.
The Crow, Cheyenne and Nakota held up pretty well to the Sioux invasion while the primarily agricultural Arikara mostly got massacred. This was doubly unfortunate as the Arikara were not direct competitors with the Sioux and there was no need for conflict.
I spent a summer in high school on an archaeological dig at an Arikara village where the Sioux had killed over 600 men women and children and dumped their bodies in the village's fortification ditch. Seeing women and children's skulls crushed by Sioux tomahawks has, at least for me, put another face on the Sioux getting displaced by white settlers, miners and cavalry 150 years later. In my less charitable moments, I look at it from the "karma is a real bitch" perspective.
At a minimum it pretty well vacated any belief I had that the Sioux have ever had a legitimate claim to the Black Hills. They conquered them, and they then lost them to someone else. It really is as simple as that.
The claim is that the Black Hills always belonged to the Sioux and that's just not the case. The Sioux in fact originated farther east in what is now Minnesota and Wisconsin, where they were not regarded as very good neighbors by other indian tribes, since they tended to war with the other tribes on a regular basis.
The word "Sioux" derives from the word Nadouessioux, first recored by Jean Nicolet in 1640 and said to be further derived from an Ojibwe name for the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota bands meaning "little snakes".
Thus the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota tend to frown on the use of the term "Sioux".
The Dakota, Lakota and Nakota bands didn't migrate to South Dakota until around 1700 and that was due in part to being driven out of their original lands by their unhappy neighbors, and arguably pressure from other bands pressing west due to increasing numbers of whites settling on the east coast and pressing the natives west.
In that regard, the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota appropriated the Black Hills form the tribes that had lived in the area prior to their arrival - the Crow, the Cheyenne and the Pawnee, as well as the Arikara that were an offshoot of the Pawnee separating about 200 years before the Sioux arrived.
The Crow, Cheyenne and Nakota held up pretty well to the Sioux invasion while the primarily agricultural Arikara mostly got massacred. This was doubly unfortunate as the Arikara were not direct competitors with the Sioux and there was no need for conflict.
I spent a summer in high school on an archaeological dig at an Arikara village where the Sioux had killed over 600 men women and children and dumped their bodies in the village's fortification ditch. Seeing women and children's skulls crushed by Sioux tomahawks has, at least for me, put another face on the Sioux getting displaced by white settlers, miners and cavalry 150 years later. In my less charitable moments, I look at it from the "karma is a real bitch" perspective.
At a minimum it pretty well vacated any belief I had that the Sioux have ever had a legitimate claim to the Black Hills. They conquered them, and they then lost them to someone else. It really is as simple as that.
DWalt
Member
Anyone remember this oldie from 1960?
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Bt18kMmWs[/ame]
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Bt18kMmWs[/ame]
BLACKHAWKNJ
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Major Reno was accused of being drunk, however much of that is based on a statement that "There wasn't enough liquor in the unit to get him drunk." Supposedly Reno was such an imbiber that it would have taken a lot for him to become inebriated, and no liquor had been taken on the campaign-on July 4, one officer lamented that they had "nothing but coffee to celebrate the memory of George Washington."
My grandmother was born in 1898 and lived for a number of years in the 1910 timeframe at Rosebud, Montana on the Cheyenne reservation. She was a "little redheaded girl" at the time and the tribal members were fond of her. She knew quite a number of older men - most would have been mid-50's or older - who fought Custer. She told me they occasionally told her stories of it. Apparently, they were not much impressed with Custer's military acumen. She moved with her family to Cody, WY in about 1915, and her Dad and a partner of his bought Pahaska Teepee at the east entrance to Yellowstone in about 1918. She knew Buffalo Bill and his wife before he died. She didn't care for him at all but she did like his wife quite a lot. Point of all this is that we're not very far removed from these events, and it was still possible when I was a kid to talk to people who had actually participated in them or had at least known people who had. It's a shame they're all gone now. The ones I knew were wonderous folks!
edw794
Member
Dr. DeWolf, the regimental surgeon, had the only Springfield rifle and crawled from Trooper to Trooper on Reno hill to clear jammed carbines with his ramrod.
this is incorrect. dr. james dewolf was killed while attempting to ascend the bluffs along with reno's troops during reno's retreat or "charge" across the river from the timber.
this is incorrect. dr. james dewolf was killed while attempting to ascend the bluffs along with reno's troops during reno's retreat or "charge" across the river from the timber.
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