Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff. Lauren
Speaker 1: vogelbam here. In eighteen ninety six, twenty years after General
Speaker 1: George Armstrong Custer was killed alongside two hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: one of his cavalrymen at the Battle of Little Big Horn,
Speaker 1: the beer company Anheuser Busch, brewed up a wildly popular
Speaker 1: advertising campaign. The company produced one hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: copies of a chromo lithographic print called Custer's Last Fight,
Speaker 1: and they plastered it in saloons and taverns across the
Speaker 1: United States. The print, based on an eighteen eighty eight
Speaker 1: painting by Cassiley Adams, depicts a chaotic battle scene on
Speaker 1: the Montana Territory plains, with some dozen blue uniformed cavalrymen
Speaker 1: laying dead or wounded on the ground as war painted
Speaker 1: American Indians finished them off with clubs, spears, and rifles.
Speaker 1: In the center of the violent scrum is a long
Speaker 1: haired Custer, addressed in fringed buckskin, raising his saber skyward
Speaker 1: to dispatch one last enemy warrior before succumbing to the
Speaker 1: overwhelming force of his attackers. For the article, this episode
Speaker 1: is based on how stuff works. Spoke with Tim Lahman,
Speaker 1: a professor of history and political science at Rocky Mountain
Speaker 1: College in Billings, Montana. He said, more people learned about
Speaker 1: what they think happened at Custer's Last Stand from this
Speaker 1: Anheuser Busch lithograph, and probably after a few Budweisers. Even today.
Speaker 1: In American mythology, the popular notion of Custer's Last Stand
Speaker 1: echoes the story told in this much reproduced painting. Custer's
Speaker 1: Down to the Last Defeat ranks with the Alamo as
Speaker 1: a tale of white heroism in the face of Native aggression,
Speaker 1: of patriotic martyrs dying with their boots on to protect
Speaker 1: colonists moving westward. But the real story isn't nearly so
Speaker 1: cut and dried. Today, let's talk about what was really
Speaker 1: going on with Custer's Last Stand. On June twenty fifth
Speaker 1: of eighteen seventy six, the Civil War cavalry hero known
Speaker 1: as the Boy General George Custer led a US army
Speaker 1: attack on a Native village in the Black Hills in
Speaker 1: violation of a treaty promising those lands to the Lakota people.
Speaker 1: A Custer and his seventh Cavalry were clearly the aggressors,
Speaker 1: and if the Battle of Little Bighorn was anyone's last stand,
Speaker 1: it was that of a group of Plains Indians defending
Speaker 1: their very way of life. Layman said it was crystal
Speaker 1: clear to sitting bull in the Lakota that they would
Speaker 1: be attacked that summer, and they saw the confrontation as
Speaker 1: one last great fight for their free way of living
Speaker 1: before they had to submit to agencies and reservations and
Speaker 1: federal domination. Custer was a complex and controversial figure even
Speaker 1: in his day. A brash troublemaker at West Point who
Speaker 1: graduated last in his class a, Custer earned fame during
Speaker 1: a series of heroic cavalry charges at the Battle of Gettysburg,
Speaker 1: which landed him on the cover of Harper's Weekly and
Speaker 1: propelled him to becoming the youngest general in US military history.
Speaker 1: After the Civil War, Custer chased further glory on the
Speaker 1: Western frontier and rebranded himself as an and I quote
Speaker 1: Indian hunter, a complete with buckskin suits cut in European
Speaker 1: styles with fringe on the callers and sleeves. In dispatches
Speaker 1: that Custer wrote for newspapers and magazines back east, he
Speaker 1: sold himself as a veteran frontiersman with intimate knowledge of
Speaker 1: indigenous ways, but in reality, Custer didn't speak a lick
Speaker 1: of Lakota or Cheyenne languages and had very little understanding
Speaker 1: of the peoples he fought. After the eighteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: Battle of Washida River, Custer bravely or foolishly went to
Speaker 1: a Cheyenne encampment, nearly alone, to negotiate the relief of hostages.
Speaker 1: The Cheyenne invited him to a pipe ceremony to settle
Speaker 1: the agreement, which Custer took as a sign of respect,
Speaker 1: but that wasn't the intended message. Layman explained. They understood
Speaker 1: that Custer promised never to attack the Cheyenne again, and
Speaker 1: if he did, he would be rubbed out. They took
Speaker 1: the pipe, dumped out the ashes, and rubbed them into
Speaker 1: the dirt as a sign of what would happen to him.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty eight, Fort Laramie Treaty created a reservation
Speaker 1: of land for the Lakota people in the Black Hills
Speaker 1: region of modern day Montana, But when gold was discovered
Speaker 1: in the Black Hills in eighteen seventy four, Congress decided
Speaker 1: it was time to rewrite that Treaty, Custer and the
Speaker 1: seventh Cavalry were sent to Montana Territory under the pretense
Speaker 1: of convincing resistance leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse
Speaker 1: to come to the nego otiating table, but the real
Speaker 1: intention was a colonist takeover of the lucrative Black Hill's
Speaker 1: gold deposits. In June of eighteen seventy six, Custer was
Speaker 1: given orders to engage with the Lakota at the head
Speaker 1: of the Rosebud River, but Custer decided to follow tracks
Speaker 1: to the nearby Little Bighorn River. The preferred US Army
Speaker 1: tactic was a dawn raid on Native villages, but Custer
Speaker 1: worried that waiting for morning would sacrifice the element of surprise,
Speaker 1: so he split his forces in three and ordered the
Speaker 1: attack on Sitting Bull's encampment in mid afternoon. Under Custer's
Speaker 1: battle plan, Major Marcus Reno led a direct charge into
Speaker 1: the village while Custer and one hundred and twenty men
Speaker 1: occupied a ridge where they could round up any escaping
Speaker 1: women and children to hold his hostages. This was a
Speaker 1: charming tactic Custer had used before to force surrender. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: for Custer, the plan fell apart almost instantly. Arino's men
Speaker 1: were easily repulsed by the Lakota and Cheyenne fighters, and
Speaker 1: a contingent of Ogla La Lakota, led by Crazy Horse,
Speaker 1: circled back on Custer's forces and trapped them on what's
Speaker 1: now known as Last Stand Hill. A. Custer ordered his
Speaker 1: men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses for
Speaker 1: a makeshift bunker, but it was hopeless. The end captured
Speaker 1: in paintings like Custer's Last Fight show Custer and his
Speaker 1: men bravely fighting until their last breath, but the archaeological
Speaker 1: record and contemporary Native accounts say otherwise. Olayman said the
Speaker 1: evidence suggests tactical disintegration, which is a nicer way of
Speaker 1: saying that they got really scared and started to run
Speaker 1: once the panic set in. Indian combatants said it was
Speaker 1: like hunting buffalo. We just rode down and killed them.
Speaker 1: The shocking news of Custer's death spread like wildfire, and
Speaker 1: the newspapers immediately cast him as a martyr for manifest destiny.
Speaker 1: The New York Herald published a wholly fictional account of
Speaker 1: the battle's final moments, quote in that mad charge up
Speaker 1: the narrow ravine with the rocks above, raining down, led
Speaker 1: upon the faded three hundred, with fires spouting from every
Speaker 1: bush ahead, with the wild swarming horsemen circling along the
Speaker 1: heights like shrieking vultures, waiting for the moment to sweep
Speaker 1: down and finish the bloody tale. Every form, from private
Speaker 1: to general, rises to heroic size. They died as grandly
Speaker 1: as Homer's demigods. Success was beyond their grasps, so they
Speaker 1: died to a man. It's unclear where the particular phrase
Speaker 1: Custer's last stand was first coin, but the mythology of
Speaker 1: a last stand was well entrenched at this point in
Speaker 1: the American Indian Wars. Custer himself had used the same
Speaker 1: poetic language in a letter to the father of a
Speaker 1: soldier whose company was by a Native ambush in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven. In the decades after Custer's death, the last
Speaker 1: stand myth was popularized, and not only in beer advertisements,
Speaker 1: but in Buffalo Bill Cody's immensely popular Wild West show,
Speaker 1: in which the real sitting Bull actually participated for a time.
Speaker 1: And Custer's widowed wife, Libby, spent the next fifty two
Speaker 1: years of her long life writing books and giving lectures
Speaker 1: about her heroic husband that cemented his legacy. This fictional
Speaker 1: concept of Custer's heroism and his last stand was used
Speaker 1: to justify unbridled westward expansion, despite the fact that there
Speaker 1: was already a civilization there. It just didn't look like
Speaker 1: what European Americans expected, and it had resources that they wanted.
Speaker 1: Layman said. It created the image the Custer in a
Speaker 1: last stand was simply defending himself, and that European Americans
Speaker 1: more broadly, were defending themsel from these aggressive hordes of Indians.
Speaker 1: People created the death that they wanted to imagine had
Speaker 1: happened to their hero. It turned out that the last
Speaker 1: stand story spread by the pro Custer press had its
Speaker 1: intended effect. The army experienced a rush of recruitment of
Speaker 1: so called Custer Avengers, who waged a series of brutal
Speaker 1: campaigns over the following year that defeated the holdout Lakota
Speaker 1: and Cheyenne resistance. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: Beer Ads and wild West Shows hyped the myth of
Speaker 1: Custer's heroic last Stand on how stuffworks dot com, written
Speaker 1: by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio
Speaker 1: in partnership with how stuffworks dot com and is produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio.
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