From the History in the Margins Archives: Custer’s Last Stand?
And speaking of Buffalo Bill, as I believe we were, one small exhibit in the Buffalo Bill Museum circled around the question of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
The focus of the panel, titled “Trail to the Little Bighorn”, was on the role the battle of the Little Bighorn played in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Cody’s troupe first performed a “re-enactment” of what he called “Custer’s Last Rally” in 1888 at Madison Square Garden. It was wildly popular, and the show would perform it thousands of times over the years—sometimes using actual participants from both sides of the battle as performers. Custer’s widow, who spent 50 some years after Custer’s death burnishing her husband’s memory as a hero, wrote to Cody praising the show’s “terrible” realism. (There is an ambiguity there that I suspect she didn’t mean.)
The exhibit tiptoed around the question of the battle itself, and the changing nature of Custer’s reputation over time.* (In all fairness, Custer and the battle were not the real topic of the exhibit.) Which led me right back to this [lightly edited] post from 2016, in which I offer you a few thoughts on Custer’s defeat and how we report on historical events. I think they hold up five years, almost to the day, after I first wrote them.
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Sometimes I think that no matter how much we may know about history as individuals, collectively we know nothing at all.
Case in point: Custer’s Last Stand.
I am currently working on an article that is about a painting about the event that you and I have always known as Custer’s Last Stand.(1) I went into the piece with only the vaguest sense of the historical event, something I felt no shame about because American history is not my field. Here is what I had going in:
Custer during the Civil War. The long curls were gone by Little Big Horn.
- Custer was a Civil War hero, and he was as problematic after the war as that other Civil War hero, Ulysses S. Grant. Though not in the same way.
- A small group of soldiers under his command died fighting a large group of Native Americans at the Battle of Little Big Horn
- A vague sense that Custer was at fault(2)
- A certainty that it must have been a critical battle, because otherwise why would I have heard about it?
- It occurred after the American Civil War, during the period when the west was “opened”.(3)
None of that is completely wrong. Except for the part about it being a critical battle. It wasn’t. Whether you think the death of the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876 was a military blunder or an act of heroism–or both(4)– the battle changed nothing. It was barely a battle, even by nineteenth century standards. It had no lasting effect on the so-called Indian Wars, or on the drawn-out dreary campaign of which it was a part. The Sioux won the battle, but gained nothing by their victory.
The battle/fight/skirmish is historical fact, but it turns out that the popular image of that skirmish as a “last stand” is an artist’s creation, reinforced by other artists’ creations over the last 140 years. And the power of that largely mythical image is one reason an otherwise meaningless military encounter became, and remains, an important emblem of a ugly struggle that stands at the root of America’s westward expansion.
When it comes to the the Battle of Little Bighorn, we don’t actually know what happened and the question of whether Custer showed poor judgment continues to be hotly debated among those who care. The Seventh Cavalry, under Custer’s leadership, was intended to be one prong of a three-pronged campaign to encircle the Sioux and drive them from their treaty territory. When Custer’s scouts reported the discovery of a Sioux village, Custer divided his forces into three parts, keeping only five companies with him to face what turned out to be a much larger force than the US Army had originally estimated. Companies under the leadership of Captain Benteen and Major Reno retreated to a defensive position on the bluffs rather than attacking an overwhelming force. As for Custer, the last thing we know of him is his often-quoted final message: “Benteen. Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs. W.E. Cooke. P.S. Bring packs.” According to Trumpeter John Martin, who carried the message, Custer was about to charge the village as Martin left.
This is the point at which traditional histories often say that no one survived the battle. In fact, hundreds of people survived the battle–most of them members of the Sioux and Cheyenne nations. Some of them left their own accounts of the battle, but those accounts disagree about the actions taken by Custer’s troops. (This should come as a surprise to no one. Soldiers in the front line of battle seldom have a sense of the big picture.)
Maybe the battle, from the perspective of the 7th Cavalry, was a heroic last stand.(5) Maybe it was a rout. The one thing we can say for certain is that whatever happened, it probably didn’t look like this:
William Cary’s Death Struggle of General Custer appeared on July 19, 1876
(1) If you’re interested, it appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of American History
(2) Almost a reflex for me. I was twelve in 1970, when Little Big Man hit the screen and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was released, The ironic Western and revisionist examinations of Native American history are deeply rooted in my brain. Possibly my first step in a career based on trying to walk in someone else’s historical shoes.
(3) A phrase that ranges from problematic to horrific. Once you start looking at a period of history with an awareness that there are two sides to every historical event you find linguistic pitfalls everywhere. I have no good answer for how to cope with this other than to type with my eyes wide open and carry a large bag of quotation marks.
(4) The two are not mutually exclusive. Think the Charge of the Light Brigade.
(5) According to the OED, a last stand is “an act of determinedly holding or defending a position against a (more powerful) opposing force; a final show of resistance or protest”. Wikipedia adds a few critical elements from the popular definition: the defensive force usually takes very heavy casualties or is completely destroyed and (most important for the rest of this discussion) the last stand is a tactical choice taken because the defending forced recognizes the benefits of fighting outweigh the benefits of retreat or surrender.
History on Display: The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, pt. 2 –The Buffalo Bill Museum, Man of the West, Man of the World
[If you’re joining us late to the subject, you can find an overview of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in my last post.
It is not surprising that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming, has an entire museum dedicated to Buffalo Bill Cody, and his Wild West Show.* And I wasn’t really surprised, though somewhat saddened, by the fact that the Buffalo Bill Museum was much more crowded than the museum devoted to Plains Indian history and culture. I was surprised by the ways in which the curators used Cody’s story as a lens through which to consider the subject of America’s westward expansion, and to question that popular image of the American west which Cody himself did so much to promote. And I was deeply amused by the number of Buffalo Bill look-alikes among the attendees.
In the first twenty years of his life, Cody took part in some of the most iconic experiences of the United State’s westward expansion.
Cody was born in 1846 in Iowa on the western banks of the Mississippi, which was the dividing line between east and west. The family moved to what became known as “Bleeding Kansas” when the Kansas Territory opened up for settlement in 1854. His father died in 1857 in the violence that surrounded the question of whether Kansas would enter the United States as a free state or a slave state. With his father’s death, eleven-year-old Cody became the family’s principal means of support. He found work on wagon trains carrying supplies west for the freight company, Russell Majors and Waddell. According to some accounts, he paused to try his hand as a prospector in the Pike’s Peak gold rush in 1859. (He seems to have been determined to try all the things.) When Russell Majors and Waddell established its famous and short-lived Pony Express mail service in 1860 and advertised for “skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily,” fourteen-year-old Cody signed on. (Or maybe not. Cody regularly contributed to his own legend and sometimes it’s hard to untangle fact from fiction. And there was a lot of fiction. According to the museum, Cody is the hero of more fictional accounts than any other figure in American history.) Two years later, as troubles heated up on the Kansas-Missouri border, he joined the “jayhawkers,” anti-slavery vigilantes who raided across the border into Missouri. When the Civil War began, he enlisted in the Union army, working first as a scout and later as a member of the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, which saw action in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war, he headed west again, working as a buffalo hunter for the railroads, which needed meat to feed their construction crews. In 1868, he returned to the army as chief scout, earning the Congressional medal of honor in 1872.**
For those of you who have not been keeping track, Cody was now 26 years old*** and well on his way to becoming an American folk hero, thanks to a series of short stories, novels, and plays about the adventures of Buffalo Bill. At some point after 1872, he made the transition from army scout to American showman. By the early 1880’s millions of people in North America and Europe knew Cody as Buffalo Bill.
A large part of the exhibit deals with the creation of Cody’s public persona as Buffalo Bill, his role in creating that persona, the development of the Wild West Show and the Congress of Rough Riders of the World, the importance of the Wild West Show in shaping the image of the American West, and the tension between Cody the person and his persona. I was fascinated. So fascinated that I stopped taking notes—not a conscious choice and something that almost never happens. (My favorite fact: Cody was in favor of women’s suffrage.)
I came away from the Buffalo Bill Museum with one big idea: before Buffalo Bill, most people saw cowboys as social outcastes. Through his Wild West Show, Buffalo Bill created the image of the cowboy as a heroic icon and elevated the United State’s westward expansion to an epic adventure.**** That’s powerful stuff.
*Not to be confused with Wild Bill Hickok, seen here with Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack Omuhundro at the time of Cody’s first Wild West show, Scouts of the Prairie (1873), in which all three men performed. Their paths crossed a lot and I for one find it easy to muddle the combination of Wild and Bill.
**His medal was revoked in 1917, when Congress retroactively tightened the rules for the honor. One of those changes was that the award could only be given to military personnel, and scouts were considered civilians. (To which I can only say, huh?) His medal was reinstated in 1989.
***Anyone else feel like a slacker by comparison?
****Leaving out big chunks of the history in the process, as happens when history is transformed into myth or reduced to comic book.
Travelers’ Tip: While you’re in Cody, make sure you visit the nightly rodeo. Lots of fun, though I must admit in the events that involved lassoing and typing up an animal, I found myself rooting for the animals.
History on Display: The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, pt. 1 –The Plains Indian Museum
The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, was the ultimate goal of our two weeks on the road. And it was well worth the trip.
The museum is, in fact, a cluster of five museums dealing with different aspects of the American West—the Plains Indian Museum, the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, the Draper Natural History Museum, and the Whitney Western Art Museum—plus a special exhibit space. I went through three of the five museums and the special exhibition space, which featured a photo essay by Ivan McClellan titled Eight Seconds: Black Cowboys in America.
This is not the museum campus to visit if you are interested in homesteading or the role of the railroads in transforming the west. On its website, the museum bills itself as “Five Museums, One Wild West” and offers visitors a chance to explore Plains Indian cultures and “trailblazing cowboys and cowgirls.” On the surface, it’s a fair description. Looked at in broad terms, the museum focuses on “cowboys and Indians.” And yet, that is not the whole story. In each of those museums, the exhibits look at the subjects they present with depth and perspective and the curators question popular representations and iconic visions of the west, wild and otherwise. In fact, the exhibit on Black cowboys included a useful discussion of the difference between icons and stereotypes.*
The Plains Indian Museum looks at Plains Indian cultures in terms of both historical adversity and contemporary renewal, with an emphasis on “own voices”, traditional and contemporary. The result is a fascinating balancing act between big ideas and specific details. It explores questions of identity, and how the various nations are rebuilding their identities today using cultural centers, events, history and language.** It dives deep into the use of “material culture,” both through an extraordinary collection of traditional objects dating from the late 1700s to around 1890 and by looking at how modern Native artists have reinterpreted familiar objects. It shares important stories from traditional cultures and highlights the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women. One wall is devoted to a timeline of encounters between Native peoples and European-Americans—physically at the center of the gallery, but not the center of the exhibit.
Here are some of the things that particularly struck me:
- Earth lodges and tipis belonged to the matriarch of the dwelling.
- The models on which traditional clothing and horse equipment were displayed were all abstract and made it neutral tones. It was visually striking, but the curators made it clear that the decision was not simply aesthetic: “Our monochromatic figures intentionally look this way to avoid stereotyping Indigenous Peoples and their any skin and hair colors. The models are created in natural earth tones to highlight the museum objects.
- There was a tipi-shaped structure made of brush and branches that I assumed at first was another example of a modern artist exploring a traditional shape. It turned out to be a temporary “camouflaged” lodge built in the woods on hunting and war trips.
- This verse of modern poetry, which led me to learn more about the poet: “When we sing/We are not playing/We are praying for life. “ Lance Henson. “For Soft Dresser”
- This verse of a traditional dong: “If there is anything difficult/If there is anything dangerous/That is mine to do.” Kit Fox Society Song. Oglala Lakota.
I would have counted our visit to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West as a win based on the Plains Indian Museum alone.
Next up: The Buffalo Bill Museum
* Ivan McClellan’s mission statement for the show is worth sharing:
“I come from a place where black folks work the land, tend to animals, rope, ride horses, and identify as cowboys., this is a narrative rarely told by media. People of color are mostly presented as victims, criminals, rapers or athletes….My aim is to expand the cowboy icon to include people of color. To saturate the world with this image so my kids will draw a cowboy with brown skin.”
**Language is always a big issue when a people are asserting their identity. Sometimes the first issue.