Week 9: Custer, the Black Hills, and the Road to Wounded Knee

Eleanor Finch

Welcome to the show. I'm Eleanor Finch, here with Simon Carver. And Simon, I want to start on July 4th, 1876. The United States is celebrating its centennial -- one hundred years of independence, fireworks, grand speeches. But amidst the celebration, a devastating telegram reaches the East Coast. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and all five companies under his immediate command, two hundred and sixty-eight men of the Seventh Cavalry, have been completely wiped out near the Little Bighorn River in Montana.

Simon Carver

Two hundred and sixty-eight men. On the nation's absolute peak day of self-congratulation. I mean, the psychological whiplash of that news must have been staggering. It's no wonder the American press immediately went into overdrive to spin this. They couldn't just accept a catastrophic military defeat, so they painted Custer as this romantic, Christ-like martyr. "Custer's Last Stand."

Eleanor Finch

Exactly. The newspapers literally depicted him as a "fallen knight," a shining beacon of civilization cut down by what they called "demonic savages." But if you actually look at the tactical reality, it wasn't a tragic ambush or a heroic sacrifice. It was a brilliant, highly coordinated defensive victory by the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces, who actually call the battle the "Battle of the Greasy Grass."

Simon Carver

The Greasy Grass. I love that we have the actual name they used. And wasn't the entire defense inspired by a specific vision from the holy man Sitting Bull?

Eleanor Finch

Yes. Just days before the battle, Sitting Bull underwent a sun dance where he had a vision of US soldiers falling into the camp like grasshoppers. And in his vision, a voice told him, "I give these to you because they have no ears."

Simon Carver

"Because they have no ears." Talk about a perfect metaphor for the US government's approach to treaties. They literally refused to listen. They signed the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which guaranteed the Black Hills to the Sioux Nation for their "absolute and undisturbed occupation." But then what happens? Rumors of gold break out, and suddenly those solemn promises are worthless.

Eleanor Finch

Precisely. In 1874, the Grant administration sent Custer himself on a massive military expedition into the Black Hills to investigate those rumors. Custer, who graduated dead last in his West Point class but was a master of self-promotion, brought three journalists along with him. He sent back reports claiming he found gold "among the roots of the grass" in "paying quantities."

Simon Carver

"Among the roots of the grass." He was basically acting as a real estate promoter for land he didn't own! Even though the official government geologist, Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, submitted a report to Congress in 1875 discounting those massive gold finds, the public didn't care. They wanted the gold, they wanted the land, and the government used Custer's glowing reports to justify trying to buy -- and then force the Sioux to sell -- their most sacred ancestral territory.

Eleanor Finch

And when chiefs like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse refused to sell, President Grant quietly withdrew the troops that were supposed to keep white prospectors out. Settlers flooded in, conflicts flared, and the army engineered a pincer movement to force the independent bands onto reservations. But at the Greasy Grass, Custer's tactical arrogance caught up with him. He marched his men right into a force of up to one thousand warriors led by Crazy Horse, who completely flanked and routed them.

Simon Carver

So the military gets absolutely humiliated. But instead of re-evaluating their aggressive expansion, the US government uses the outrage over Custer's death to fuel a policy of total subjugation. And this wasn't just raw anger; it was backed by these high-minded Enlightenment theories of "progress."

Eleanor Finch

Yes, theories like Adam Smith's "four stages of development." The idea was that human societies naturally progress from hunters to pastoralists, then to agriculturalists, and finally to commercialists like the Europeans. Because Native Americans were viewed as stuck in "Stage One," policymakers argued they were culturally inferior and destined for extinction -- the myth of the "Vanishing American."

Simon Carver

So the logic was, "Since they aren't using the land to build factories or fence off neat little square farms, they don't really own it anyway. We're actually doing them a favor by civilizing them." It's incredibly cynical. It leads directly to the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act, which broke up communal tribal lands into individual private plots to force them to become "yeoman farmers."

Eleanor Finch

And the "surplus" land left over from that allotment? It was sold off to white settlers, stripping millions of acres from native control. But the most insidious part of this forced assimilation was cultural. In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was founded in Pennsylvania. Its explicit mission, coined by its founder Richard Henry Pratt, was to "kill the Indian, and save the man."

Simon Carver

"Kill the Indian, save the man." I've seen those famous "before and after" photos of the three Lakota boys arriving there. In the "before," they have long hair and traditional blankets. In the "after," their hair is shorn, they're in stiff military-style uniforms, and their faces look completely hollowed out. They weren't being educated to be leaders or professionals; they were being trained for the lowest rungs of manual labor, literally forced to "vanish" into mainstream society.

Eleanor Finch

And this systemic pressure, the loss of land, the forced assimilation, created immense despair. By the late 1880s, this gave rise to the Ghost Dance -- a peaceful spiritual movement predicting that if Native people danced, the white settlers would disappear, the buffalo would return, and their traditional life would be restored. But the US government and settlers didn't see it as a peaceful ritual. They saw it as a warlike threat.

Simon Carver

Which brings us to the tragic, horrific climax of this entire mythology. On December 15th, 1890, police kill Sitting Bull on the Standing Rock Reservation over a dispute about the Ghost Dance. Two weeks later, on December 29th, Custer's old regiment, the reconstructed Seventh Cavalry, intercepts a group of over three hundred cold and starving Lakota men, women, and children led by Chief Spotted Elk at a creek called Wounded Knee.

Eleanor Finch

Spotted Elk was actually suffering from severe pneumonia, lying helpless in the snow. The soldiers surrounded the camp, aiming rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns at them. When they began confiscating weapons, a scuffle broke out. A single shot was fired, and the Seventh Cavalry opened fire on the largely unarmed crowd. Between one hundred and fifty and three hundred Lakota were slaughtered, many of them women and children chased down and killed miles from the camp.

Simon Carver

And yet, immediately after, the US military and the press celebrated Wounded Knee as a great, heroic battle. They literally framed it as the "revenge of the Seventh Cavalry" for Custer. The army even handed out twenty Congressional Medals of Honor to the soldiers involved.

Eleanor Finch

Twenty Medals of Honor for a massacre of unarmed, freezing people. It took nearly a century, the rise of the American Indian Movement, and the publication of Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" in the 1970s, for the mainstream public narrative to finally shift from a "gallant battle" to the historical truth of a horrific massacre. It shows us how deeply these national myths are guarded, and how much work it takes to pull back the curtain on the heroes we choose to memorialize.

Simon Carver

It really makes you wonder -- what other myths are we still holding onto today because the truth is just too uncomfortable to face?

Eleanor Finch

A question we should all keep asking. That's all for today's quick take. We'll see you next time.

Simon Carver

Goodbye, everyone.