"How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won" Part 3 of 3
Jun 25, 2017 14:23:14 #
"How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won" Part 3 of 3
The fighting was intense, bloody, at times hand to hand. Men died by knife and club as well as by gunfire. The Cheyenne Brave Bear saw an officer riding a sorrel horse shoot two Indians with his revolver before he was killed himself. Brave Bear managed to seize the horse. At almost the same moment, Yellow Nose wrenched a cavalry guidon from a soldier who had been using it as a weapon. Eagle Elk, in the thick of the fighting at Calhoun Hill, saw many men killed or horribly wounded; an Indian was “shot through the jaw and was all bloody.”
Calhoun Hill was swarming with men, Indian and white. “At this place the soldiers stood in line and made a very good fight,” said Red Hawk. But the soldiers were completely exposed. Many of the men in the skirmish line died where they knelt; when their line collapsed back up the hill, the entire position was rapidly lost. It was at this moment that the Indians won the battle.
In the minutes before, the soldiers had held a single, roughly continuous line along the half-mile backbone from Calhoun Hill to Custer Hill. Men had been killed and wounded, but the force had remained largely intact. The Indians heavily outnumbered the whites, but nothing like a rout had begun. What changed everything, according to the Indians, was a sudden and unexpected charge up over the backbone by a large force of Indians on horseback. The central and controlling part Crazy Horse played in this assault was witnessed and later reported by many of his friends and relatives, including He Dog, Red Feather and Flying Hawk.
Recall that as Reno’s men were retreating across the river and up the bluffs on the far side, Crazy Horse had headed back toward the center of camp. He had time to reach the mouth of Muskrat Creek and Medicine Tail Coulee by 4:15, just as the small detachment of soldiers observed by Gall had turned back from the river toward higher ground. Flying Hawk said he had followed Crazy Horse down the river past the center of camp. “We came to a ravine,” Flying Hawk later recalled, “then we followed up the gulch to a place in the rear of the soldiers that were making the stand on the hill.” From his half-protected vantage at the head of the ravine, Flying Hawk said, Crazy Horse “shot them as fast as he could load his gun.”
This was one style of Sioux fighting. Another was the brave run. Typically the change from one to the other was preceded by no long discussion; a warrior simply perceived that the moment was right. He might shout: “I am going!” Or he might yell “Hokahey!” or give the war trill or clench an eagle bone whistle between his teeth and blow the piercing scree sound. Red Feather said Crazy Horse’s moment came when the two sides were keeping low and popping up to shoot at each other - a standoff moment.
“There was a great deal of noise and confusion,” said Waterman, an Arapaho warrior. “The air was heavy with powder smoke, and the Indians were all yelling.” Out of this chaos, said Red Feather, Crazy Horse “came up on horseback” blowing his eagle bone whistle and riding between the length of the two lines of fighters. “Crazy Horse...was the bravest man I ever saw,” said Waterman. “He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him but he was never hit.”
After firing their rifles at Crazy Horse, the soldiers had to reload. It was then that the Indians rose up and charged. Among the soldiers, panic ensued; those gathered around Calhoun Hill were suddenly cut off from those stretching along the backbone toward Custer Hill, leaving each bunch vulnerable to the Indians charging them on foot and horseback.
The soldiers’ way of fighting was to try to keep an enemy at bay, to kill him from a distance. The instinct of Sioux fighters was the opposite - to charge in and engage the enemy with a quirt, bow or naked hand. There is no terror in battle to equal physical contact - shouting, hot breath, the grip of a hand from a man close enough to smell. The charge of Crazy Horse brought the Indians in among the soldiers, whom they clubbed and stabbed to death.
Those soldiers still alive at the southern end of the backbone now made a run for it, grabbing horses if they could, running if they couldn’t. “All were going toward the high ground at end of ridge,” the Brulé Foolish Elk said. The skirmish lines were gone. Men crowded in on each other for safety. Iron Hawk said the Indians followed close behind the fleeing soldiers. “By this time the Indians were taking the guns and cartridges of the dead soldiers and putting these to use,” said Red Hawk. The boom of the Springfield carbines was coming from Indian and white fighters alike. But the killing was mostly one-sided.
In the rush of the Calhoun Hill survivors to rejoin the rest of the command, the soldiers fell in no more pattern than scattered corn. In the depression in which the body of Capt. Myles Keogh was found lay the bodies of some 20 men crowded tight around him. But the Indians describe no real fight there, just a rush without letup along the backbone, killing all the way; the line of bodies continued along the backbone. “We circled all round them,” Two Moons said, “swirling like water round a stone.”
Another group of the dead, ten or more, was left on the slope rising up to Custer Hill. Between this group and the hill, a distance of about 200 yards, no bodies were found. The mounted soldiers had dashed ahead, leaving the men on foot to fend for themselves. Perhaps the ten who died on the slope were all that remained of the foot soldiers; perhaps no bodies were found on that stretch of ground because organized firing from Custer Hill held the Indians at bay while soldiers ran up the slope. Whatever the cause, Indian accounts mostly agree that there was a pause in the fighting - a moment of positioning, closing in, creeping up.
The pause was brief; it offered no time for the soldiers to count survivors. By now, half of Custer’s men were dead, Indians were pressing in from all sides, the horses were wounded, dead or had run off. There was nowhere to hide. “When the horses got to the top of the ridge the gray ones and bays became mingled, and the soldiers with them were all in confusion,” said Foolish Elk. Then he added what no white soldier lived to tell: “The Indians were so numerous that the soldiers could not go any further, and they knew that they had to die.”
The Indians surrounding the soldiers on Custer Hill were now joined by others from every section of the field, from downriver where they had been chasing horses, from along the ridge where they had stripped the dead of guns and ammunition, from upriver, where Reno’s men could hear the beginning of the last heavy volley a few minutes past 5. “There were great numbers of us,” said Eagle Bear, an Oglala, “some on horseback, others on foot. Back and forth in front of Custer we passed, firing all of the time.”
Kill Eagle, a Blackfeet Sioux, said the firing came in waves. His interviewer noted that he clapped “the palms of his hands together very fast for several minutes” to demonstrate the intensity of the firing at its height, then clapped slower, then faster, then slower, then stopped.
In the fight’s final stage, the soldiers killed or wounded very few Indians. As Brave Bear later recalled: “I think Custer saw he was caught in [a] bad place and would like to have gotten out of it if he could, but he was hemmed in all around and could do nothing only to die then.”
Exactly when custer died is unknown; his body was found in a pile of soldiers near the top of Custer Hill surrounded by others within a circle of dead horses. It is probable he fell during the Indians’ second, brief and final charge. Before it began, Low Dog, an Oglala, had called to his followers: “This is a good day to die: follow me.” The Indians raced up together, a solid mass, close enough to whip each other’s horses with their quirts so no man would linger. “Then every chief rushed his horse on the white soldiers, and all our warriors did the same,” said Crow King.
In their terror some soldiers threw down their guns, put their hands in the air and begged to be taken prisoner. But the Sioux took only women as prisoners. Red Horse said they “did not take a single soldier, but killed all of them.”
The last 40 or more of the soldiers on foot, with only a few on horseback, dashed downhill toward the river. One of the mounted men wore buckskins; Indians said he fought with a big knife. “His men were all covered with white dust,” said Two Moons. These soldiers were met by Indians coming up from the river, including Black Elk. He noted that the soldiers were moving oddly. “They were making their arms go as though they were running, but they were only walking.” They were likely wounded - hobbling, lurching, throwing themselves forward in the hope of escape.
The Indians hunted them all down. The Oglala Brings Plenty and Iron Hawk killed two soldiers running up a creek bed and figured they were the last white men to die. Others said the last man dashed away on a fast horse upriver toward Reno Hill, and then inexplicably shot himself in the head with his own revolver. Still another last man, it was reported, was killed by the sons of the noted Santee warrior chief Red Top. Two Moons said no, the last man alive had braids on his shirt (i.e., a sergeant) and rode one of the remaining horses in the final rush for the river. He eluded his pursuers by rounding a hill and making his way back upriver. But just as Two Moons thought this man might escape, a Sioux shot and killed him. Of course none of these “last men” was the last to die. That distinction went to an unknown soldier lying wounded on the field.
Soon the hill was swarming with Indians - warriors putting a final bullet into enemies, and women and boys who had climbed the long slopes from the village. They joined the warriors who had dismounted to empty the pockets of the dead soldiers and strip them of their clothes. It was a scene of horror. Many of the bodies were mutilated, but in later years Indians did not like to talk about that. Some said they had seen it but did not know who had done it.
But soldiers going over the field in the days following the battle recorded detailed descriptions of the mutilations, and drawings made by Red Horse leave no room for doubt that they took place. Red Horse provided one of the earliest Indian accounts of the battle and, a few years later, made an extraordinary series of more than 40 large drawings of the fighting and of the dead on the field. Many pages were devoted to fallen Indians, each lying in his distinctive dress and headgear. Additional pages showed the dead soldiers, some naked, some half-stripped. Each page depicting the white dead showed severed arms, hands, legs, heads. These mutilations reflected the Indians’ belief that an individual was condemned to have the body he brought with him to the afterlife.
Acts of revenge were integral to the Indians’ notion of justice, and they had long memories. The Cheyenne White Necklace, then in her middle 50s and wife of Wolf Chief, had carried in her heart bitter memories of the death of a niece killed in a massacre whites committed at Sand Creek in 1864. “When they found her there, her head was cut off,” she said later. Coming up the hill just after the fighting had ended, White Necklace came upon the naked body of a dead soldier. She had a hand ax in her belt. “I jumped off my horse and did the same to him,” she recalled.
Most Indians claimed that no one really knew who the leader of the soldiers was until long after the battle. Others said no, there was talk of Custer the very first day. The Oglala Little Killer, 24 years old at the time, remembered that warriors sang Custer’s name during the dancing in the big camp that night. Nobody knew which body was Custer’s, Little Killer said, but they knew he was there. Sixty years later, in 1937, he remembered a song:
"Long Hair, Long Hair,
I was short of guns,
and you brought us many.
Long Hair, Long Hair,
I was short of horses,
and you brought us many."
As late as the 1920s, elderly Cheyennes said that two southern Cheyenne women had come upon the body of Custer. He had been shot in the head and in the side. They recognized Custer from the Battle of the Washita in 1868, and had seen him up close the following spring when he had come to make peace with Stone Forehead and smoked with the chiefs in the lodge of the Arrow Keeper. There Custer had promised never again to fight the Cheyennes, and Stone Forehead, to hold him to his promise, had emptied the ashes from the pipe onto Custer’s boots while the general, all unknowing, sat directly beneath the Sacred Arrows that pledged him to tell the truth.
It was said that these two women were relatives of Mo-nah-se-tah, a Cheyenne girl whose father Custer’s men had killed at the Washita. Many believed that Mo-nah-se-tah had been Custer’s lover for a time. No matter how brief, this would have been considered a marriage according to Indian custom. On the hill at the Little Bighorn, it was told, the two southern Cheyenne women stopped some Sioux men who were going to cut up Custer’s body. “He is a relative of ours,” they said. The Sioux men went away.
Every Cheyenne woman routinely carried a sewing awl in a leather sheath decorated with beads or porcupine quills. The awl was used daily, for sewing clothing or lodge covers, and perhaps most frequently for keeping moccasins in repair. Now the southern Cheyenne women took their awls and pushed them deep into the ears of the man they believed to be Custer. He had not listened to Stone Forehead, they said. He had broken his promise not to fight the Cheyenne anymore. Now, they said, his hearing would be improved."
- http://www.smithsonianmag.com/
https://youtu.be/VKDkM_z3ZH8
"The Custer Battlefield Archeological Survey of 1984"
Battle summary begins at 45:00
The fighting was intense, bloody, at times hand to hand. Men died by knife and club as well as by gunfire. The Cheyenne Brave Bear saw an officer riding a sorrel horse shoot two Indians with his revolver before he was killed himself. Brave Bear managed to seize the horse. At almost the same moment, Yellow Nose wrenched a cavalry guidon from a soldier who had been using it as a weapon. Eagle Elk, in the thick of the fighting at Calhoun Hill, saw many men killed or horribly wounded; an Indian was “shot through the jaw and was all bloody.”
Calhoun Hill was swarming with men, Indian and white. “At this place the soldiers stood in line and made a very good fight,” said Red Hawk. But the soldiers were completely exposed. Many of the men in the skirmish line died where they knelt; when their line collapsed back up the hill, the entire position was rapidly lost. It was at this moment that the Indians won the battle.
In the minutes before, the soldiers had held a single, roughly continuous line along the half-mile backbone from Calhoun Hill to Custer Hill. Men had been killed and wounded, but the force had remained largely intact. The Indians heavily outnumbered the whites, but nothing like a rout had begun. What changed everything, according to the Indians, was a sudden and unexpected charge up over the backbone by a large force of Indians on horseback. The central and controlling part Crazy Horse played in this assault was witnessed and later reported by many of his friends and relatives, including He Dog, Red Feather and Flying Hawk.
Recall that as Reno’s men were retreating across the river and up the bluffs on the far side, Crazy Horse had headed back toward the center of camp. He had time to reach the mouth of Muskrat Creek and Medicine Tail Coulee by 4:15, just as the small detachment of soldiers observed by Gall had turned back from the river toward higher ground. Flying Hawk said he had followed Crazy Horse down the river past the center of camp. “We came to a ravine,” Flying Hawk later recalled, “then we followed up the gulch to a place in the rear of the soldiers that were making the stand on the hill.” From his half-protected vantage at the head of the ravine, Flying Hawk said, Crazy Horse “shot them as fast as he could load his gun.”
This was one style of Sioux fighting. Another was the brave run. Typically the change from one to the other was preceded by no long discussion; a warrior simply perceived that the moment was right. He might shout: “I am going!” Or he might yell “Hokahey!” or give the war trill or clench an eagle bone whistle between his teeth and blow the piercing scree sound. Red Feather said Crazy Horse’s moment came when the two sides were keeping low and popping up to shoot at each other - a standoff moment.
“There was a great deal of noise and confusion,” said Waterman, an Arapaho warrior. “The air was heavy with powder smoke, and the Indians were all yelling.” Out of this chaos, said Red Feather, Crazy Horse “came up on horseback” blowing his eagle bone whistle and riding between the length of the two lines of fighters. “Crazy Horse...was the bravest man I ever saw,” said Waterman. “He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him but he was never hit.”
After firing their rifles at Crazy Horse, the soldiers had to reload. It was then that the Indians rose up and charged. Among the soldiers, panic ensued; those gathered around Calhoun Hill were suddenly cut off from those stretching along the backbone toward Custer Hill, leaving each bunch vulnerable to the Indians charging them on foot and horseback.
The soldiers’ way of fighting was to try to keep an enemy at bay, to kill him from a distance. The instinct of Sioux fighters was the opposite - to charge in and engage the enemy with a quirt, bow or naked hand. There is no terror in battle to equal physical contact - shouting, hot breath, the grip of a hand from a man close enough to smell. The charge of Crazy Horse brought the Indians in among the soldiers, whom they clubbed and stabbed to death.
Those soldiers still alive at the southern end of the backbone now made a run for it, grabbing horses if they could, running if they couldn’t. “All were going toward the high ground at end of ridge,” the Brulé Foolish Elk said. The skirmish lines were gone. Men crowded in on each other for safety. Iron Hawk said the Indians followed close behind the fleeing soldiers. “By this time the Indians were taking the guns and cartridges of the dead soldiers and putting these to use,” said Red Hawk. The boom of the Springfield carbines was coming from Indian and white fighters alike. But the killing was mostly one-sided.
In the rush of the Calhoun Hill survivors to rejoin the rest of the command, the soldiers fell in no more pattern than scattered corn. In the depression in which the body of Capt. Myles Keogh was found lay the bodies of some 20 men crowded tight around him. But the Indians describe no real fight there, just a rush without letup along the backbone, killing all the way; the line of bodies continued along the backbone. “We circled all round them,” Two Moons said, “swirling like water round a stone.”
Another group of the dead, ten or more, was left on the slope rising up to Custer Hill. Between this group and the hill, a distance of about 200 yards, no bodies were found. The mounted soldiers had dashed ahead, leaving the men on foot to fend for themselves. Perhaps the ten who died on the slope were all that remained of the foot soldiers; perhaps no bodies were found on that stretch of ground because organized firing from Custer Hill held the Indians at bay while soldiers ran up the slope. Whatever the cause, Indian accounts mostly agree that there was a pause in the fighting - a moment of positioning, closing in, creeping up.
The pause was brief; it offered no time for the soldiers to count survivors. By now, half of Custer’s men were dead, Indians were pressing in from all sides, the horses were wounded, dead or had run off. There was nowhere to hide. “When the horses got to the top of the ridge the gray ones and bays became mingled, and the soldiers with them were all in confusion,” said Foolish Elk. Then he added what no white soldier lived to tell: “The Indians were so numerous that the soldiers could not go any further, and they knew that they had to die.”
The Indians surrounding the soldiers on Custer Hill were now joined by others from every section of the field, from downriver where they had been chasing horses, from along the ridge where they had stripped the dead of guns and ammunition, from upriver, where Reno’s men could hear the beginning of the last heavy volley a few minutes past 5. “There were great numbers of us,” said Eagle Bear, an Oglala, “some on horseback, others on foot. Back and forth in front of Custer we passed, firing all of the time.”
Kill Eagle, a Blackfeet Sioux, said the firing came in waves. His interviewer noted that he clapped “the palms of his hands together very fast for several minutes” to demonstrate the intensity of the firing at its height, then clapped slower, then faster, then slower, then stopped.
In the fight’s final stage, the soldiers killed or wounded very few Indians. As Brave Bear later recalled: “I think Custer saw he was caught in [a] bad place and would like to have gotten out of it if he could, but he was hemmed in all around and could do nothing only to die then.”
Exactly when custer died is unknown; his body was found in a pile of soldiers near the top of Custer Hill surrounded by others within a circle of dead horses. It is probable he fell during the Indians’ second, brief and final charge. Before it began, Low Dog, an Oglala, had called to his followers: “This is a good day to die: follow me.” The Indians raced up together, a solid mass, close enough to whip each other’s horses with their quirts so no man would linger. “Then every chief rushed his horse on the white soldiers, and all our warriors did the same,” said Crow King.
In their terror some soldiers threw down their guns, put their hands in the air and begged to be taken prisoner. But the Sioux took only women as prisoners. Red Horse said they “did not take a single soldier, but killed all of them.”
The last 40 or more of the soldiers on foot, with only a few on horseback, dashed downhill toward the river. One of the mounted men wore buckskins; Indians said he fought with a big knife. “His men were all covered with white dust,” said Two Moons. These soldiers were met by Indians coming up from the river, including Black Elk. He noted that the soldiers were moving oddly. “They were making their arms go as though they were running, but they were only walking.” They were likely wounded - hobbling, lurching, throwing themselves forward in the hope of escape.
The Indians hunted them all down. The Oglala Brings Plenty and Iron Hawk killed two soldiers running up a creek bed and figured they were the last white men to die. Others said the last man dashed away on a fast horse upriver toward Reno Hill, and then inexplicably shot himself in the head with his own revolver. Still another last man, it was reported, was killed by the sons of the noted Santee warrior chief Red Top. Two Moons said no, the last man alive had braids on his shirt (i.e., a sergeant) and rode one of the remaining horses in the final rush for the river. He eluded his pursuers by rounding a hill and making his way back upriver. But just as Two Moons thought this man might escape, a Sioux shot and killed him. Of course none of these “last men” was the last to die. That distinction went to an unknown soldier lying wounded on the field.
Soon the hill was swarming with Indians - warriors putting a final bullet into enemies, and women and boys who had climbed the long slopes from the village. They joined the warriors who had dismounted to empty the pockets of the dead soldiers and strip them of their clothes. It was a scene of horror. Many of the bodies were mutilated, but in later years Indians did not like to talk about that. Some said they had seen it but did not know who had done it.
But soldiers going over the field in the days following the battle recorded detailed descriptions of the mutilations, and drawings made by Red Horse leave no room for doubt that they took place. Red Horse provided one of the earliest Indian accounts of the battle and, a few years later, made an extraordinary series of more than 40 large drawings of the fighting and of the dead on the field. Many pages were devoted to fallen Indians, each lying in his distinctive dress and headgear. Additional pages showed the dead soldiers, some naked, some half-stripped. Each page depicting the white dead showed severed arms, hands, legs, heads. These mutilations reflected the Indians’ belief that an individual was condemned to have the body he brought with him to the afterlife.
Acts of revenge were integral to the Indians’ notion of justice, and they had long memories. The Cheyenne White Necklace, then in her middle 50s and wife of Wolf Chief, had carried in her heart bitter memories of the death of a niece killed in a massacre whites committed at Sand Creek in 1864. “When they found her there, her head was cut off,” she said later. Coming up the hill just after the fighting had ended, White Necklace came upon the naked body of a dead soldier. She had a hand ax in her belt. “I jumped off my horse and did the same to him,” she recalled.
Most Indians claimed that no one really knew who the leader of the soldiers was until long after the battle. Others said no, there was talk of Custer the very first day. The Oglala Little Killer, 24 years old at the time, remembered that warriors sang Custer’s name during the dancing in the big camp that night. Nobody knew which body was Custer’s, Little Killer said, but they knew he was there. Sixty years later, in 1937, he remembered a song:
"Long Hair, Long Hair,
I was short of guns,
and you brought us many.
Long Hair, Long Hair,
I was short of horses,
and you brought us many."
As late as the 1920s, elderly Cheyennes said that two southern Cheyenne women had come upon the body of Custer. He had been shot in the head and in the side. They recognized Custer from the Battle of the Washita in 1868, and had seen him up close the following spring when he had come to make peace with Stone Forehead and smoked with the chiefs in the lodge of the Arrow Keeper. There Custer had promised never again to fight the Cheyennes, and Stone Forehead, to hold him to his promise, had emptied the ashes from the pipe onto Custer’s boots while the general, all unknowing, sat directly beneath the Sacred Arrows that pledged him to tell the truth.
It was said that these two women were relatives of Mo-nah-se-tah, a Cheyenne girl whose father Custer’s men had killed at the Washita. Many believed that Mo-nah-se-tah had been Custer’s lover for a time. No matter how brief, this would have been considered a marriage according to Indian custom. On the hill at the Little Bighorn, it was told, the two southern Cheyenne women stopped some Sioux men who were going to cut up Custer’s body. “He is a relative of ours,” they said. The Sioux men went away.
Every Cheyenne woman routinely carried a sewing awl in a leather sheath decorated with beads or porcupine quills. The awl was used daily, for sewing clothing or lodge covers, and perhaps most frequently for keeping moccasins in repair. Now the southern Cheyenne women took their awls and pushed them deep into the ears of the man they believed to be Custer. He had not listened to Stone Forehead, they said. He had broken his promise not to fight the Cheyenne anymore. Now, they said, his hearing would be improved."
- http://www.smithsonianmag.com/
https://youtu.be/VKDkM_z3ZH8
"The Custer Battlefield Archeological Survey of 1984"
Battle summary begins at 45:00
Jun 26, 2017 21:14:36 #
Jul 9, 2017 22:13:50 #
pafret,
Many thanks for posting this most interesting and informative series. It's been a while since I read a story concerning "Custer's Last Stand." Plus, to read the story from the point of view of the Indians who actually participated in and survived the battle, makes it even more interesting.
If you're interested, please read the book (a diary actually), of Jose Enrique De la Peña, who was a colonel in the Mexican Army commanded by General Antonio López de Santa Anna. De la Peña participated in the Battle of the Alamo.
In 1955, a book of his memoirs including events leading up to, the battle, itself, and events that followed the battle, was published. I read the book while I was in college, taking a course in Southwestern US History. The book is a fascinating read. Many Texans, today, dispute the book's story; calling it a forgery and/or a 'made-up' story. It severely contradicts the story we've been taught regarding what happened at the, Battle of the Alamo.
As the saying goes, "To the victor goes the spoils." So goes, too, how history records the winners and losers. In this case, even though Mexico lost the war, it did win this particular battle. As such, I'm inclined to believe the de la Peña version; with apologies to Walt Disney, John Wayne and all the other actors in the famous movie most of us saw as small kids and still think is the way the battle really happened. But, I digress.
Being a "white," I feel remorse for the treatment the Native Americans have received from us over the centuries, since our arrival on THEIR shores and our continued "stealing" of THEIR lands.
I would hope that we would've recognized our bad treatment of the Native Americans and brought a halt to it. But, NOooo! Not us! Even today, our government continues to treat Native Americans like 3rd-class people; not worthy of our keeping our promises and treaties to and with them.
The lands of Native Americans are still being used and abused (plundered). Look at the pipeline that's to go from Canada, through the Northern Plains and transverses several states, on its way to the Gulf. That pipeline is to go tnrough Indian land, too. They filed suit to stop the pipeline from going through their lands. Did our "white" courts pay heed? Of course not. Instead, the courts backed-up the whites' desire for "profit" and allow the pipeline to go on as planned. This is just the most recent example I could think of. I'm sure the list of our stealing from the Native Americans could fill volumes of books, several inches thick, each, if one were to take the time to research it more throughly.
We like to point our fingers at other nations and chastise them for the, "human rights violations" of their people. But, we're no more than hypocrites. We're just as guilty, if not more so, than they are, of the very same things. We can even add our history of slavery to the list of atrocities we, as a nation, have comitted on our own people.
Now, I'm sure there are many who will take issue with me. But, that's okay. I'd like to hear their arguments. I doubt any of their arguments will go beyond personal insults, be based on lies and/or innuendo, or even outright racism. I'd like to be wrong. A nice, facts-based discussion would be welcomed and quite different than what I normally receive after posting my views.
Many thanks for posting this most interesting and informative series. It's been a while since I read a story concerning "Custer's Last Stand." Plus, to read the story from the point of view of the Indians who actually participated in and survived the battle, makes it even more interesting.
If you're interested, please read the book (a diary actually), of Jose Enrique De la Peña, who was a colonel in the Mexican Army commanded by General Antonio López de Santa Anna. De la Peña participated in the Battle of the Alamo.
In 1955, a book of his memoirs including events leading up to, the battle, itself, and events that followed the battle, was published. I read the book while I was in college, taking a course in Southwestern US History. The book is a fascinating read. Many Texans, today, dispute the book's story; calling it a forgery and/or a 'made-up' story. It severely contradicts the story we've been taught regarding what happened at the, Battle of the Alamo.
As the saying goes, "To the victor goes the spoils." So goes, too, how history records the winners and losers. In this case, even though Mexico lost the war, it did win this particular battle. As such, I'm inclined to believe the de la Peña version; with apologies to Walt Disney, John Wayne and all the other actors in the famous movie most of us saw as small kids and still think is the way the battle really happened. But, I digress.
Being a "white," I feel remorse for the treatment the Native Americans have received from us over the centuries, since our arrival on THEIR shores and our continued "stealing" of THEIR lands.
I would hope that we would've recognized our bad treatment of the Native Americans and brought a halt to it. But, NOooo! Not us! Even today, our government continues to treat Native Americans like 3rd-class people; not worthy of our keeping our promises and treaties to and with them.
The lands of Native Americans are still being used and abused (plundered). Look at the pipeline that's to go from Canada, through the Northern Plains and transverses several states, on its way to the Gulf. That pipeline is to go tnrough Indian land, too. They filed suit to stop the pipeline from going through their lands. Did our "white" courts pay heed? Of course not. Instead, the courts backed-up the whites' desire for "profit" and allow the pipeline to go on as planned. This is just the most recent example I could think of. I'm sure the list of our stealing from the Native Americans could fill volumes of books, several inches thick, each, if one were to take the time to research it more throughly.
We like to point our fingers at other nations and chastise them for the, "human rights violations" of their people. But, we're no more than hypocrites. We're just as guilty, if not more so, than they are, of the very same things. We can even add our history of slavery to the list of atrocities we, as a nation, have comitted on our own people.
Now, I'm sure there are many who will take issue with me. But, that's okay. I'd like to hear their arguments. I doubt any of their arguments will go beyond personal insults, be based on lies and/or innuendo, or even outright racism. I'd like to be wrong. A nice, facts-based discussion would be welcomed and quite different than what I normally receive after posting my views.
Jul 10, 2017 12:22:50 #
alabuck wrote:
pafret, br Many thanks for posting this most inter... (show quote)
Every dominant power had the same mentality, the mohammedans swarming out of Arabia to inflict terror and destruction throughout the world. The Europeans contesting with each other for new lands and sources of wealth became conquerors in their turn. Consider this list of military Conquerors:
Hari Singh Nalwa
Genghis Khan
Alexander the Great
Attila the Hun
Julius Caesar
Cyrus the Great
Francisco Pizarro
Napoleon Bonaparte
Hannibal Barka
Timur i Leng aka Tamerlane
Hernando Cortes
Together their death toll mounted into the hundreds of millions and they all had the same mentality, they were the chosen and all others were sub human to be disposed of in any manner. Any group, such as our Native Americans, were easy pickings because they ran into the unbeatable combination of guns germs and steel which has been described by Dr. Jared Diamond in his book of that name. These explorers brought diseases, which the Indians had no resistance to. It was what wiped out the Polynesians in Hawaii. Smallpox destroyed many Indian tribes, sometimes with the active assistance of the invaders who sold them infected blankets.
Most of society was based on theft, taking from the weaker by the stronger and even those who should have known better (the church) were infected with this disregard for the victims of their avarice. Couple this with the standard dehumanization of the foe and you end up with invader groups ready to slaughter, rob, rape and kill, all indigenous peoples.
We fought slanty-eyed gooks in Asia, Krauts in Europe, Niggers in Africa and Redskins in America, they weren't people, they were "objects". The Aussies fought the abo's, Aboriginal indigenous people, lumped into this catchall even though they were as different as the Native American tribes. Categories of discrimination were set up 'half-caste' and 'full-blood', with differing degrees of disenfranchisement but they were not permitted to be free. This dehumanization process is still in play to this day.
In current time, the Indians are not the victims of one race pitted against another. What you see happening to them happens to all of us. Their lands are violated so that a major corporation can make money. A man’s property is seized by eminent domain because a business can put it to a use, which will generate revenue for the local politicians. Any time a citizen or a sovereign nation such as the Native Americans conflicts with the ruling classes ability to extract money we lose. We are once more in a feudal system as bad as any in the Dark ages.
The situation with the Indian nations is especially difficult. Legally and legitimately they claim huge swaths of territory and are in the courts to press their claims. Here in the Northeast there are millions of people who bought and live on the claimed lands. You know these people are going nowhere, no matter what decision is reached.
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