Today in America we remember how Custer’s men didn’t make a stand, and instead collapsed and scattered into chaos when they were confronted by American Native warriors along the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana Territory.
If Custer stood for anything, it was the Epstein-like kidnapping of young girls to “force surrender” as blackmail. On this day, when he marched on the Lakota, they sent warriors to confront him. History now records this as five companies of his men quickly killed as they fell into chaos and disarray when challenged. The American Native people defended their vulnerable children from a wicked man and his poorly led soldiers.
Unfortunately, like with Epstein, America spent many years ignoring the stories of the women and children who were in danger. The Lakota and Cheyenne were telling the story exactly as it happened. President Grant blamed Custer publicly in the New York Herald on September 2, 1876, calling the defeat a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself, wholly unnecessary. Custer was described back then how Donald Trump is called out today. Sheridan was critical of him too. And yet, pop-culture of America rebuilt the erratic, impulsive, predator into a martyr, a reputation his widow defended for six decades while the mainstream media spun unnecessary and shameful rout into heroic “stand”. Only recently have historians been able to confirm what been said by the American Natives was correct.
Related: over a dozen US bases were severely damaged in the Iran War while Pete Hegseth ranted from a bully pulpit that America now dominated the skies, and that Iran had been totally neutralized. Even today Iran continues to launch attacks on American bases. Hegseth’s chaos has created a reputation of poorly led, poorly defended, “sitting ducks” of the Middle East. Apparently, the Custer mentality hasn’t disappeared yet.
Errors in the Letters
I’ve also been asked to take a look at the 150th-anniversary piece in Letters from an American, which is clearly sympathetic to the Lakota. While it’s the right tone, it’s badly sourced on the facts. Here is what really stood out to me:
| The claim |
The record |
| Custer led the thousand-man Black Hills expedition in 1875 and returned reporting gold. |
Wrong year. That expedition was 1874. Custer left Fort Abraham Lincoln in July 1874 and gold was reported in August. The 1875 column into the hills was a Jenney-Newton scientific survey sent to confirm the strike. Custer did not lead that. |
| Crook planned the three-pronged converging attack. |
Crook commanded only one, so that was actually Terry. It matters to get this right because it also begs why Custer had been put in prison and demoted to a subordinate. The converging-column plan came from Sheridan’s Division of the Missouri, directed by Terry. He, with Custer under him, came from the east, Gibbon from the west. Crook commanded only the southern column out of Wyoming. |
| The Great Sioux Reservation ran from the Missouri River west to the Big Horn Mountains. |
Too big. The 1868 reservation ended at the western edge of Dakota Territory. The Powder River and Bighorn country beyond it was unceded territory, a separate legal category. That line mattered because it defined who could be labeled “hostile” for hunting off-reservation. |
| The only survivor of the battle was a horse, Comanche. |
This is mythology of the human trafficking predators, to invoke sympathy for their defeat. Seven of the regiment’s twelve companies survived under Reno and Benteen on the bluffs. Comanche was the best-known surviving horse from Custer’s own wing, not the only one, spun as disinformation into a sole-survivor legend. |
| Custer lost his entire command. |
Again, mythology, to erase the actual chaos, leadership collapse and retreat. Custer’s wing of five companies, around 210 men, was destroyed. There were seven other companies of the 7th Cavalry who survived. |
| The 1865 to 1868 fighting is now known as the Lakota War. |
A bit of a waffle, as other names are known. The standard name for the 1866 to 1868 war is Red Cloud’s War. The Great Sioux War is 1876 to 1877. |
| The Lakotas lost about 40. |
There’s a range, which is why the topic gets revisited for science to improve. Native dead are estimated from roughly 30 to over 100. The figure is uncertain, and 40 is the low end. |
Historiography in the Letters
Now lets move from the errors individually, to the overall pattern. In the Letters piece, I can see someone retelling a battle from the losing predator’s side of the field, and undermining a proper framing for the victorious defender.
The biggest indicator is the use of the Comanche survival legend to inflate the “all was lost” fraud. The sole-survivor legend is the most familiar piece of Little Bighorn folklore and it is also well-known for being the least accurate. A historian reproducing mythology as a settled fact marks a synthesis drawn from a disinformation canon rather than the scientifically corrected record.
The reservation boundary error is another example. Pushing the western line out to the Big Horn Mountains erases the line between reservation and unceded land. That line is the entire legal basis for calling Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse the hostile ones, when it is in fact the exact opposite. The mistake is akin to Epstein victims being shamed for being in the wrong place, rather than starting from the moral foundation regarding men who capture women and children for blackmail.
The method in the piece has a deeper problem. It quotes Sitting Bull as if to give context, or invoke sympathy. And yet it narrates fighting through Custer’s eyes instead, with him dividing his command where troops are surrounded and killed to the last man. That is the white man’s method of retelling, where it both gets asserted as fact and also unverifiable because “nobody survived” to correct it. The actual evidence is completely missing from the assertion. However, this is long settled as wrong. After a 1983 fire cleared brush from the battlefield, Douglas Scott and Richard Fox reconstructed the fight from cartridge cases and confirmed what the Lakota and Cheyenne had described all along. The Custer companies had held formation, then broke apart when challenged. A single charge overran them and the survivors died fighting in the chaos of their own making. While the author waves a flag to honor the Lakota and Cheyenne with quotations, the text subtly disagrees and overrules them. The actual history, a detailed examination of battlefield evidence, popped the Custer myth. This piece tries to inflate it again.
Disinformation research tells us that a quote can give the impression of a position, while it is in fact inverted by the frame built around it. Imagine a picture of a pipe that says “this is not a pipe”. Put “warning: always keep your hands on the wheel” in a car’s manual, yet spread social media commentary about driverless being real, and the warning is useless, evaporated. The words of the warning are there, yet it is the negation that carries all the meaning. That’s a sad reality in The Letters piece, which quotes Sitting Bull and then works hard to erase him and what he’s saying. The quotation is overruled with disinformation. Whether or not the author planned it, that is a disinformation method seen plainly in the text.
The sole-survivor fraud was built to be uncheckable, which is how it survived all the checks. The myth said every witness in the war of extermination was dead, so only the predator side could tell the story. That was a lie twice over. The Lakota and Cheyenne had told it accurately from the start, and white audiences refused to hear them for a century due to the Libby Custer white supremacist propaganda machine.
…someone without much of a conscience couldn’t feel very good about it, unless you’re Custer, who glorifies everything. … He is operating from the 17th century cavalier point of view where presence glorifies the act. Washita was a terrible, brutal attack on a basically friendly village of Cheyenne, and in his portrayal, it was his small band against this huge group of Indians where, in actuality, it was not quite as one-sided as that, and really was a pointless military campaign. But Custer, with the help of his wife, Libby, who was a great writer, would elevate this to a story of Western imperial vanguard into the West.
Even Grant had said as much, a sitting president today regarded as the greatest American general in history, and yet even his expert voice didn’t hold back the “imperial vanguard” myth makers promoting genocide.
As an important side-note, Grant had been politically attacked by Custer in March and April of 1876. Custer had testified before the Clymer Committee with sensationalized hearsay about Belknap, a man who had already resigned. Sherman told Custer to see Grant to make peace, and Grant refused him three times and then had him arrested in Chicago by early May. This is why command of the Dakota Column went to Terry while Custer was held under detention.
Grant was hammered by the press siding with Custer, against his expert judgment, to restore Custer and let him march a “hero” into danger. Grant relented in early May, with the crucial condition that Custer only ride under Terry (see table above). Custer thus rode into Little Bighorn as a subordinate to Terry, already relieved and arrested on Grant’s order.
By June, Custer was making erratic, aggressive choices as if trying to make a political point. He had been eyeing the Democratic nomination for the 1876 election, with the convention set in St. Louis for the week after the victory he expected in Montana. He refused to let his men rest, refused the offered Gatling guns, and refused reinforcements. He weakened his own chances as a story-telling bravado tactic. From hearsay aimed at a sitting president, to his own public humiliation, to a daylight raid to seize and kill women and children, he was a man throwing caution aside to turn his lack of judgment into a run for the presidency.
The figure in the White House today is what Custer hoped to become by riding massacre as campaign material: a publicity-built brand whose ambition runs ahead of his judgment, whose cruelty is recast as strength, and whose myth is managed for him. Custer at least rode into the battle he started. The “bone spurs” draft-dodger in the White House has only ever been coddled into control.
The Lakota were right about Custer. Grant was right about Custer. These are the highest-quality sources that should have defined the Custer story from the beginning. And yet, Libby Custer was who kept lies going instead. What finally forced the American culture to see the truth was evidence documented, the field full of cartridge cases proving the military experts were right all along. Not Custer’s wife. The excavated battlefield was physical evidence that the disgraced Custer had dissolved into a rout, not even close to being a stand. It proved the erratic, racist, predator of women and children was always the aggressor, and certainly no martyr.
With ground truth repeating what better men and witnesses had told the world all along, finally the predator myth popped. The propagandists had banked on erasure of their targets forever. They had not anticipated the burn down and evidence. And yet, as we see with The Letters, the shameless mythology still appears.
