In 1896 , on the nose 20 age after General George Armstrong Custer was pop alongside 261 of his cavalrymen at the Battle of Little Bighorn , thebeercompany Anheuser Busch brewed up a wildly democratic advertising campaign . The company reproduced 150,000 copies of a lithograph name " Custer ’s Last Fight ! " and plastered it in saloons and tap house across America .
The lithograph machine , based on an 1888 painting by Cassilly Adams , show a chaotic battle scene on the Montana kvetch with a dozen dark - uniformed cavalrymen laying numb or offend on the ground as war - paint Indians finish them off with clubs and spears before ritually scalping the white work force ’s corpses . In the substance of the vehement scrum is a prospicient - haired Custer dressed in laciniate buckskin , raising his sabre skywards to dispatch one last " brute " before yield to the overwhelming force of his attackers .
" More people ' learn ' about what theythinkhappened at Custer ’s last stand from this Anheuser Busch lithograph , and probably after a few Budweisers , " saysTim Lehman , a prof of history and political science at Rocky Mountain College in Billings , Montana , and generator of " Bloodshed at Little Bighorn : Sitting Bull , Custer , and the fate of Nations . "
In American mythology , the popular notion of Custer ’s " last stall " echoes the account separate in that 19th - century painting . Custer ’s down - to - the - last defeat ranks with the Alamo as a tarradiddle of white heroism in the face of " barbarian " aggression , of patriotic martyrsdying " with their boots on"to protect Western settler .
But the real chronicle of Custer ’s last stand is n’t nearly so impeccant , or slue and dry . On June 25 , 1876 , the Civil War cavalry torpedo known as the " Boy General " lead a U.S. Army onrush on an Indian settlement in the Black Hillsin violation of a treatypromising those lands to the Lakota Sioux . Custer and his 7th Cavalry were clearly the assailant , and if the Battle of Little Bighorn was anyone ’s " last standpoint , " it was the Plain Indians ' .
" It was watch glass clear to Sitting Bull and the Lakota that they would be attack that summer , and they see the confrontation as one last corking fight for their free way of animation , before they had to submit to federal agency and reservation and Union supremacy , " says Lehman .
Custer Cultivated an ‘Indian Hunter’ Image
Custer was a complex and controversial fig even in his day . A brash bad hat at West Point who graduated last in his class , Custer earned fame during a series of heroic cavalry charges at theBattle of Gettysburg , which put down him on the cover of Harper ’s Weekly and propelled him to becoming the youngest general in U.S. military history . After the Civil War , Custer chased further glory on the Western frontier and rebranded himself as an " Indian hunter , " complete with aDaniel Boonebuckskin suit .
In expeditiousness that Custer wrote for Eastern newspapers and magazines , Custer sell himself as a veteran frontiersman with internal noesis of the Indians ' shipway , but in realness , says Lehman , Custer did n’t speak a lick of Sioux or Cheyenne and had very small understanding of the tribe he oppose . After the 1868 Battle of Washita River , Custer courageously ( or foolishly ) went to a Cheyenne encampment near alone to negotiate the freeing of surety . The Cheyenne invite him to a pipework ceremony , which Custer take as a sign of esteem , but that was n’t the intended message , read Lehman .
" They realize that Custer foretell never to attack the Cheyenne again , and if he did , he would be rubbed out , " says Lehman . " They took the pipe , floor out the ash tree and chafe them into the dirt as a sign of what would happen to him . "
Custer’s Folly in the Black Hills
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 created a reservation for the Lakota Sioux in the Black Hills region of modern - twenty-four hours Montana . But when amber was discover in the Black Hills in 1874 , Congress settle it was time to rewrite that treaty . Custer and the 7th Cavalry were sent to Montana under the pretense of convince holdouts like Sitting Bull andCrazy Horseto come to the negotiating mesa , but the real intention , says Lehman , was a livid takeover of the lucrative Black Hills gold deposits .
In June 1876 , Custer was given order to employ with the Sioux at the head of the Rosebud River , but Custer decided to pursue runway to the nearby Little Bighorn River . The pet U.S. Army maneuver was a dawn raid on Indian village , but Custer worry that waiting for morning would give the element of surprise . So he split his violence in three and order the onrush on Sitting Bull ’s encampment in mid - afternoon .
Under Custer ’s battle plan , Major Marcus Reno led a unmediated armorial bearing into the village while Custer and 120 humanity occupied a ridgeline where they could polish up up any escaping Sioux fair sex and children to hold as hostage .
" This was a manoeuvre Custer used in the Battle of Washita River with big winner , " aver Lehman . " Custer write that once the women and children of an Indian village were under ascendence , the warriors were much more gentle . "
alas for Custer , the plan fell aside almost instantly . Reno ’s workforce were easily repulsed by Sioux and Cheyenne fighters , and a contingent of Oglala Sioux lead by Crazy Horse encircle back on Custer ’s force and pin them on what ’s now known as Last Stand Hill . Custer consecrate his men toshoot their horses and pile the carcassesfor a makeshift sand trap , but it was hopeless . The ending captured in paintings like " Custer ’s Last Fight " show Custer and his men bravely defend off the Indians until their last breath , but Lehman says that the archeological disc and contemporaneous Indian accounts say otherwise .
" The grounds suggests ' tactical disintegration , ' which is a dainty style of saying that they got really scared and started to run for , " aver Lehman . " Once the panic define in , Indian combatants said it was like trace buffalo — ' We just ride down and kill them . ' "
The Myth is Born
The shocking news of Custer ’s death spread like wildfire and the newspapers immediately cat him as a martyr for Manifest Destiny . The New York Herald published this wholly fancied account of the battle ’s concluding moment :
It ’s indecipherable where the particular musical phrase " Custer ’s last stand " was first coined , but Lehman says that the mythology of a " last viewpoint " was well entrenched at this point in time in the Indian Wars . Custer himself used the same poetical languagein a letterto the father of a soldier advert Lyman Kidder whose caller was vote out by an Native American ambush in 1867 .
" It make the image that Custer in a ' last stand ' was simply defending himself , " articulate Lehman , " and that Americans more broadly were defending themselves from these ' fast-growing horde ' of Indians who represented this savagery that was well beyond the picket of civilization . People created the demise that they wanted to guess had happened to their hero . "
The " last stand " story spread by the pro - Custer press had its mean effect . Lehman says the Army experienced a Benjamin Rush of recruitment of so - called " Custer Avengers " who waged a serial publication of cruel political campaign over the following twelvemonth that defeated the holdout Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne once and for all .
