As America prepares to celebrate our 250th birthday, the Battle of the Little Bighorn will mark its 150th anniversary. The battle is, arguably, a seismic event from which the nation has yet to recover. A significant victory for Native Americans, the conflagration was humiliating for the U.S. Cavalry. It remains its only defeat on the home front (short of the smaller Battle of Rosebud, 10 days earlier, which the army described as a victory but was in fact a retreat, with soldiers driven off by Cheyenne and Shoshone forces led by Crazy Horse). Although Native Americans won the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the greasy grass (a term used by the local indigenous population to describe the lush grasses along the Bighorn River), the battle marked the beginning of their final days of living free on the frontier. It was only a matter of time before the holdouts were rounded up and sent to reservations.
Curiously, despite the cavalry’s loss, the battle became a place where America lives. Forever branded as “Custer’s Last Stand,” it endures as the ultimate “hill to die on,” a home address of the American Dreamtime where the nation went down swinging—but not for long. Although defiance has been a coin of the realm since the country’s inception, it would take the Battle of the Little Bighorn to enshrine it as a creed followed by outlaws, killers, devotees of David Koresh at the 1993 siege in Waco (aka, “We ain’t comin’ out,” they said), Cliven Bundy and his mounted pals at Malheur, the current President, and his January 6 crowd, every Travis Bickle wannabe who has said “You talkin’ to me?,” and every driver who has ever been pulled over and said “But officer, how come the other guy didn’t get a ticket?”
Let’s face it: charging up hills with guns is a thing that we do, even if the hill is in your head, and you have no weapon.
Nearly every dive bar in America features the famous painting of Custer’s Last Stand, in which the 36-year-old Custer is brandishing a gun and firing away, along with his soldiers, clutching the reins of their frightened steeds, encircled by rampaging Indians on bedecked war ponies, wielding tomahawks and rifles, moving in for the kill. Amid the frothing siege, Custer takes on all comers, holding his ground defiantly, and when it was all over, the bloody location became known as Last Stand Hill. It’s a national shrine. What happened there is the subject of hundreds of books (and I count two of mine among them—Mustang, which has a chapter on the Bighorn and the horses that served there, and Blood Brothers, which has a chapter on the Bighorn), thousands of articles, dozens of movies, a zillion conferences, and endless theories about what really happened and how exactly Custer was killed.