On June 25-26, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and
Arapaho warriors demonstrated that even underdog natives have a
fighting chance against the forces of an advanced and aggressive
power—at least if the advanced troops are led by a vain and
arrogant commander and hobbled by idiotic bureaucracy. Once widely
venerated as an American hero, George Armstrong Custer is now
largely regarded as a brutal enforcer of inhumane policies against
Native Americans, and man who paved the way to his own demise—while
taking a lot of other people with him.
James “Public Policy
Hooligan” Bovard notes
the historical significance of the date, and the lessons to be
drawn from it.
On this day in 1876, George S. Custer led his 7th Cavalry
regiment to their demise in Montana. The Battle of Little Big Horn
was one of the biggest defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the war
against the Indians. It is only in recent years that proper
attention has been paid to the role of atrocities by Custer and
other military leaders in stirring up the wrath of oppressed
Indians.
Custer was something of a protégé of General
Philip Sheridan, he of “the only good Indians I ever saw were
dead” fame. That was a quote Sheridan denied uttering, though his
prosecution of the Indian Wars lived up to its tone, and Custer was
a tool in that prosecution. Not surprisingly, such ham-handed
attacks on Native Americans provoked anger and led to
retaliation.
The Battle of Little Big Horn was lost by Custer and his
soldiers not just because he stirred a hornet’s nest and then stuck
his head (and those of his men) in, but because his troops were
denied the products of the industrial civilization they
represented. As Bovard puts it, “Custer’s men were wiped out in
part because the Army Quartermaster refused to permit them to carry
repeating rifles—which supposedly wasted ammo. The Indians didn’t
have a quartermaster, so they had repeating rifles, and the rest is
history.”
There is no arrogant, oppressive power so overwhelming that it
can’t be crippled by red tape.
It’s not as if Custer hadn’t had ample warning that his good
looks on horseback were insufficient defense against the wrath of
guerrilla forces. While leading his troops at the
Washita Massacre, during which he attacked and killed Cheyenne
Indians living peacefully on reservation land, he was almost cut
off when he discovered that the settlement he attacked was only one
of many.
Custer also went up, at great cost, Bovard points out, against
the Confederacy’s Col. John S. Mosby. Mosby very effectively used
irregular tactics against Union forces in a lesson from which
Custer apparently learned nothing.
Failing to learn from experience, whether it’s a matter of
response to tactics, or to avoid policies that invite
blowback, is as
much a problem now as it was then.
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