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Where It's At
Little Big Horn was the site of one of the bloodiest battles
in modern American history when in 1876 General Custer
and his cavalry were massacred by two thousand Sioux warriors,
defending their territory from the gold hungry whites.
History
By 1865, Gold has been discovered in Idaho and Montana, and
Congress passed a bill to create a highway from Fort Laramie
to Bozeman, across the best buffalo hunting ground of the
two major tribes, the Ogalala and the Brule. The survival
of the tribes was ecologically balanced around the hunting
of the buffalo which the new highway put under threat. The
tribes were not represented at the original talks, dominated
by greedy white merchants. Those tribes who lived or hunted
on the land of the highway resisted and attacked the white.
After many bloody conflicts between the travellers and native
Americans, Fort Phil Kearny became the site of a violent
war between the US army and the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho
Indians, who left their reservations to protect the last
great hunting ground on the plains of the Black Hills.
They gathered in Montana with their leader, Sitting Bull,
to fight for their land. Sitting Bull was the spiritual and
political leader of the Lakota tribe.
Before the epic battle in Little Big Horn, the great one had
visions of dead soldiers falling into his camp. To the tribes,
the battle signified a total end of their nomadic lifestyle.
It was an end of an era in which they could roam freely and
follow the buffalo herds, and they were determined with the
strength of their spiritual guides to hold onto their land
at all costs.
The USA army were lead by George Custer who is still to this
day the youngest General who every served in the US Army.
The Lakota succeeded in defeating and slaughtering a battalion
of 220 soldiers of the cavalry in a bloody victory. Indians
described it as the battle lasting as long as it takes a hungry
man to eat his dinner. The Indians tribes oral traditions
say that George Custer was one of the first ones to die on
the hilltop battleground, and the event is known in American
Folklore as “Custer’s Last Stand”.
The Indians victory gave the natives the strength to fight
against the white supremacy for another year, but many more
of the tribes were slaughtered and made extinct during the
19th century.
A few tribes still live on the battle site today, living as
close to nature as possible in traditional reservations. |
