THE INDIANS WON AT THE LITTLE BIGHORN
The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the death of Lt. Col. George A. Custer have been amply, perhaps excessively, examined. Most of the analysis centers on speculation as to what happened, with copious minutiae regarding individual and unit actions, movements, motivations, wheres, hows and whys. How could a U.S. Cavalry regiment have been so badly beaten? Instead of focusing on the graveyards, however, we might be better served by an abstract approach.
The battle came during the Reconstruction era, as the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant struggled to incorporate the former Confederate States back into the United States, and the processes that were at work in the South—racism, bigotry and capital’s exploitation of labor and natural resources—were also operating out West. American Indians were perhaps more susceptible due to the great underlying social and cultural differences. The Indian functioned in tune with ecological, environmental and geographical sequences, affected more by the vagaries of nature. Being continually squeezed into a smaller space by American settlers only exacerbated the problem. As author John Stephens Gray observed a century later in Centennial Campaign, “One cannot live by the chase in another’s fenced corn patch.”
In contrast,
