Week 9: Custer, Little Bighorn, and the Birth of a Legend

Welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Eleanor Finch, here with Simon Carver. And Simon, I want to start by taking us to a newspaper page from July 10th, 1876. On that morning, readers of the New York Daily Tribune opened their papers to find a brand new poem by Walt Whitman, written in a white-hot fury of inspiration. Whitman was reacting to a shocking headline that had broken just 24 hours earlier. General George Custer and over 200 of his men had been completely wiped out at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Whitman, of all people. He didn't waste any time, did he? Writing a eulogy for a massive military disaster literally the next day. No he didn't He called it a death song for Custer painting this picture of sternest coolest heroism But what strikes me is how instantly the reality of that muddy chaotic defeat on the Little Bighorn River was transformed into absolute myth We tend to think of myth as something ancient but here it took less than 24 hours It's incredible how fast the lines blur when a nation is desperate for a story And 1876 was a very specific moment right It was the centennial of the United States They're celebrating a century of progress in Philadelphia And suddenly this modern industrializing nation gets this massive public shock from people they'd written off as Stone Age Exactly. And the sheer speed of that myth-making makes you realise how hard it is to separate the history from the legend. Take Custer himself. He finished dead last in his class at West Point, racked up over 700 demerits, and was court-martialed before his career even properly started. Yet, within weeks of his death, he's a romantic martyr. And that's the classic pattern isn't it Real deeply flawed humans get inflated into giant figures while complex cultural realities get completely shrunk down It actually reminds me of how Irish mythology evolved You start with the Tuatha Dé Danann these powerful god like figures in ancient Irish lore And over centuries of Christian scribes and cultural shifts they literally shrink into the Wee Folk the fairies Meanwhile mortal warriors like Finn McCool get inflated into literal giants who build the giant's causeway That's a beautiful parallel. It's this double-sided mirror of folklore. The gods shrink to fit under the hedge, and the men grow to touch the clouds. And in Custer's case, the shrunk-down part of the mirror was how the public viewed his opponents. The Sioux and the Cheyenne weren't a monolith, but they were painted as a single terrifying force. Right the American public treated them like a single mythic enemy under Sitting Bull But in reality there was no single Sioux nation in a modern political sense You had seven distinct Lakota bands plus the Cheyenne all operating under different leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse They were sovereign highly adaptable societies fighting a desperate logical defensive campaign for their actual lives Yes and they were adapting with highly modern tools too One of the great ironies of the Little Bighorn is that many of the native warriors were carrying Winchester repeating rifles they'd acquired through trade while Custer's Seventh Cavalry was armed with single shot Springfield carbines Wait, really? The U.S. Army had inferior tech? That completely upends the standard bows and arrows versus the Gatling gun narrative. It completely does Custer actually turned down Gatling guns before he set out because he thought they'd slow his march He was terrified the Lakota would scatter before he could catch them and win his great glory He was so focused on preventing their escape that he made the catastrophic decision to split his 700 man force into three separate detachments So he literally divided his own forces in the face of an enemy that outnumbered him three to one, all because he was worried they'd run away? That's not just hubris. That's tactical madness. It was madness but it was fed by decades of systematic policy The backdrop to this entire conflict was the systematic destruction of the buffalo In the 1850s millions of buffalo roamed the Great Plains By the mid 1870s they were actively being hunted to extinction often encouraged by the railroad companies I remember seeing those awful archival photographs. People literally leaning out of train windows, shooting into the herds for sport. It's devastating because the buffalo wasn't just food. It was their housing, their tools, their entire economy. It's like someone burning down your grocery store, your bank, and your home all at once. Exactly And the final fabricated trigger for the war came in late 1875 The government issued an ultimatum All native bands must report to reservations by January 31st 1876 Now Simon this was the dead of winter in the Dakotas It was physically impossible to move entire villages through those blizzards When they didn't show up the government declared them hostile and sent in the military So they set an impossible deadline in the middle of a plane's winter just to manufacture a legal pretext for war. That is incredibly grim. It's like setting a trap and then blaming the prey for stepping in it. It was entirely manufactured and when the news of Custer's defeat hit the public it was used to justify an even more brutal crackdown It's what Saul David called the ultimate irony By winning their greatest military victory the Lakota and Cheyenne sealed their fate The US military went into total war mode forcing almost all the major chiefs onto reservations by the end of 1876 It's a tragedy wrapped in a myth. And then, only a few years later, you have Sitting Bull himself touring with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, reenacting the very battle that destroyed his people's way of life for paying audiences in eastern cities. It's almost surreal isn't it The survivors performing their own tragedy as commercial entertainment But that's how myth functions It takes the sharp bloody edges of history – the broken treaties the gold rush in the sacred Black Hills the sheer tactical blunders – and softens them into a neat digestible story Yes and maybe that's the real lesson here The myths we build aren't just harmless campfire stories They are active tools we use to cope with the uncomfortable truths of how nations are actually built Custer's Last Stand became a legend not because it was a glorious military feat but because the alternative—admitting a massive failure of arrogance and policy—was too much for a young empire to bear I think that's exactly right, Simon. The legend tells us very little about what actually happened on that riverbank in June of 1876 but it tells us absolutely everything about the country that survived it. And with that, we'll sign off for today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Thanks everyone. See you next time.