Letters To My Sons

Michael Shannon

The Heroic painting, purposefully designed to flatter a moment in time, a place invented by the artist for two reasons. Glorify that place and the participants in it. Second to engage the public in a fantasy that will sell. Characters are dressed in ridiculous ways parading across the canvas, leaving an impression that combined with a momentous event become legend and make their way into the public’s eye, into education such as it never was and, ends up hung in a saloon as an advertisement for beer.

But sometimes a moment of truth slips into view. Not the heroic conqueror on his trusty steed waving his pistol in one hand, holding the regimental guidon in the other, his steely grey eyes daring the feathered foe to do his worst. The valiant hero stands alone. A most iconic print is Custer’s Last Fight, commissioned in 1892 from a painting by Cassilly Adams and adapted by F. Otto Becker. It’s became one of the most widely hung mass-market prints in America. Well over a million prints were made in the late 19th century. Those millions of copies hung in bars, barbershops, and homes for decades. They were all bunk.

Lakota and Cheyenne attack using shields apparently imported from the Zulu in South Africa, their headdresses borrowed from the Creeks of Florida and the Boy General himself seems to be fighting all by his lonesome. Horses are everywhere though the actual warriors stated that most of the fighting on that hill was done on foot using cover when possible. They were brave but not stupid.

Through your mind’s eye you can still see it can’t you. For once, through a combination of hubris, narcissism and driven by a desire to stand for the presidency the Boy General finally bit off more than he could chew. It cost the lives of over three hundred who blindly followed him over the grassy bluffs of the Greasy Grass that late June day. This we know.

George “Autie” Custer turns out to have had feet of clay as many of our anointed so often do. It cost him his life and most of his family but it cost the great horse cultures of the west everything. Everything.

The Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes on June 25, 1876 slaughtered the horse soldiers. This conflict, known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn (or the Battle of the Greasy Grass) was in Montana Territory, it ended in the defeat and death of Custer and all 210 men and ten civilians in his immediate battalion. It was also the end for the tribes. For although they won it, the tribes set the entire nation against them and that was the crusher.

This is the moment on which that history pivots.

Early afternoon, June 25th, 1876.*

The people of the horse were a diverse and inter-related group. Not always harmonious in their dealings with one another they nevertheless had one thing in common, The horse. In the sixteenth century the wild horse spread onto the great plains west of the Mississippi and for three and a half centuries the people who lived there built a culture around them. The horse became the most valuable currency on the plains. They were stolen, traded and displayed as a symbol of courage, wealth and status. In time the life of man and horse became inseparable.

At each midday the younger boys would lead the horses down to the stream to drink and be washed. It was an especially pleasant chore this day. By the time the sun was at its highest point the temperature was nearing 100 degrees and even the turgid stream, warmed by the summer was refreshing for both the boys and the horses. Skylarking while tending to their duties, this seemed a good day. Perfect.

Over the snuffling of the ponies and the splashing and shouting of the boys a sharp sound drew one boys attention. Off to the south end of the camp where Sitting Bulls Hunkpapa were camped, a rifle shot. It couldn’t be the Lakota police, no shooting was allowed in camp without permission.

Another, another, then a rippling patter of gunshots echoed off the bluffs to the east. Not one Cheyenne boy in the water could see what was happening. But they knew, they knew the sound of the cavalry Spencer carbine. The heavy, rolling boom marked them.

Wasichiu soldiers were falling into camp just as Sitting Bull had said they would.

One boy shouted, “only Earth and the Heavens last long.”

“If we can stop the soldiers from capturing our camp, our lives will be well spent.”…

Perhaps they were.

The mystery matters because the Battle of the Little Bighorn was not simply a chapter in the Indian Wars history or a dramatic episode from the Old West.

It represents a turning point in U.S. History, a moment when military ambition, Indigenous resistance, politics, and American expansion collided with devastating consequences.

A century and a half gone, the jury is still out.

*”The boys watering ponies” is by American Western artist Howard Terpning. He has caught something and has frozen it in amber. You can see the boy in the Kepi, the one behind the white horse, the rider in the yellow shirt has raised his head and the boy crouching behind the Roan is straining to see where the sound is coming from. The two in the center draws the eye in the instant it is begun. Terpning is well worth a search.

Michael Shannon is a writer. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California.