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 268 men of the 7th Cavalry have been completely wiped out near the Little Bighorn River in Montana 268 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. Exactly The newspapers literally depicted him as a fallen knight a shining beacon of civilisation 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 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? 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. Because they have no ears Talk about a perfect metaphor for the U S government's approach to treaties They literally refuse 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 Precisely In 1874 the Grant administration sent Custer himself on a massive military expedition into the Black Hills to investigate those rumours 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 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. 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 1 000 warriors led by Crazy Horse who completely flanked and routed them So the military gets absolutely humiliated. But instead of reevaluating their aggressive expansion, the U.S. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 war like threat Which brings us to the tragic, horrific climax of this entire mythology. On December 15, 1890, police kill Sitting Bull on the Standing Rock Reservation over a dispute about the Ghost Dance. Two weeks later, on December 29, Custer's old regiment, the Reconstructed 7th Cavalry, intercepts a group of over 300 cold and starving Lakota men, women, and children and led by chief spotted elk at a creek called Wounded Knee. 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 7th Cavalry opened fire on the largely unarmed crowd. Between 150 and 300 Lakota were slaughtered, many of them women and children, chased down and killed miles from the camp. And yet, immediately after, the U.S. military and the press celebrated Wounded Knee as a great, heroic battle. They literally framed it as the revenge of the 7th Cavalry for Custer. The Army even handed out 20 Congressional Medals of Honor to the soldiers involved. 20 medals of honour 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 memorialise It really makes you wonder, what other myths are we still holding on to today because the truth is just too uncomfortable to face? A question we should all keep asking. That's all for today's Quick Take. We'll see you next time. Goodbye, everyone.
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