Hardin, Montana is over 1,800 miles from Washington, DC. That’s a fairly long way today, and back in 1876 it must have been quite an arduous journey. Yet near this remote location took place one of the best known battles of America’s Indian Wars.
In 1868, many Lakota Sioux leaders had agreed to the Fort Laramie Treaty that created a large reservation in the western half of present day South Dakota. The text of the treaty included the following mutual pledges:
From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall for ever cease. The government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it. The Indians desire peace, and they now pledge their honor to maintain it.
Apparently ignoring these words and the potential for his actions to provoke the Indians, LTC George Armstrong Custer led an expedition in 1874 to the Black Hills inside the boundary of the Great Sioux Reservation. Geologists who accompanied Custer discovered large deposits of gold. When word of the discovery got out, hordes of miners invaded the Black Hills in direct violation of the treaty of 1868. This enraged Indian leaders, including Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. When the Indians then refused to sell the territory to the United States, a military expedition was dispatched to help change their minds.
Custer led an advance force of that expedition, and on June 25th he and his Seventh Cavalry recklessly attacked a Lakota/Cheyenne encampment containing 1500-1800 well armed warriors along the bank of the Greasy Grass River. Custer and his force of 210 men were wiped out during a pitched battle with the Indians which history remembers as “Custer’s Last Stand”.
Custer had played an important role in the defeat of the Confederacy during the Civil War. When news of his death reached Washington on the eve of the nation’s centennial celebration of 1876, it must have had a sobering effect on all who heard it.
The battle was but a momentary victory for the Sioux and Cheyenne and their allies. The US Army rapidly invaded their lands with powerful, well-equipped forces. Most of the remaining “hostile” Indians surrendered within a year, and the Black Hills with their gold were seized by the United States without compensation. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were killed in separate incidents soon after.
It’s unlikely the Doctrines of Discovery and Manifest Destiny were on the minds of Custer and his men when they rode into battle that day, but those doctrines were the ultimate justification for what the United States did to the Indian tribes. For how could one nation displace, dispossess, kill, and/or imprison another without a firm belief that it was what God wanted them to do? What the US government and US Army did during the Indian Wars mimicked what the Bible urged God’s chosen people to do when they entered the promised land:
When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 NKJV
In part because he helped implement God’s commands to His chosen people (the citizens of the United States), Custer’s remains were recovered and interned with full military honors at the cemetery of the US Military Academy at West Point. And thanks to the efforts of his devoted wife Libby, his legend lives on to this day.
From Chapter 8 of No More Patriots
Copyright © 2015 by Howard T. Uhal
All Rights Reserved
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