The Battle at Little Bighorn: Bears Belly

The desire of many Americans at this time was to see the Indians eradicated or, at the very least, placated and pacified. They wanted these people to become neutered and impotent. The reservation systems put in place would be like the severing a eunuch faced in old times, handicapped and without the ability to produce as desire wanes. Indians were marched into reservations with promises of food and care without the hassle of having to produce that work themselves, without the hassle of that pesky freedom, meaning that Indians would be appeased enough not to want to roam the lands they once did.

Ownership meant different things to different people at the time, and those with greater firepower got to define what ownership was for them and all others. However, few Indians wanted this. Some may have welcomed the added provision and accommodation, removing the unpredictable nature of the hunt and agriculture. Still, there was an inherent distrust of the white man among many Indians after being lied to many times. The Arikara sided with Custer not because they wanted to lose their freedom and be placed on a reservation but because they saw him as a means to an end for greater freedom.

Their ongoing quarrel with the Sioux, who were a larger warring tribe, often left the Arikara beaten and at a loss of people and livelihood. The Sioux were not a tribe that most wanted to mess with. Many tribes in the Dakotas fell victim to the Sioux at different times throughout history. Some, like the Arikara, faced annihilation, having once numbered in the thousands but only around 250 when Edward S. Curtis photographed them in the early 1900s. The Arikara wanted freedom. They wanted survival. They wanted protection. The Sioux were not on their side, so they partnered with the Mandan and, later, the Hidatsa to gather their forces and band together. Still, in modern times, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes live together as one federally recognized tribe but still three affiliated tribes.

All three of these tribes had to band together for help. They couldn’t and didn’t trust the Sioux or other tribes in the area. However, they found in Custer the very thing they needed to ensure their survival: power. In the man Custer, the Arikara saw the ferocity of the white man and the door to their prolonged lives. Custer had the same ambitions as they had. He wanted to get rid of the Sioux. Or, at the very least, render them useless.

At the leadership of Sitting Bull, the Lakota Sioux were a fierce tribe and fought against anyone telling them what they could and could not do. In the previous years, they were forced, like all other tribes in the area, to settle into a single reservation, a parcel of land where they would be stuck as prisoners and fed by the Great Father in Washington. They would have things given to them so they wouldn’t have to, or get to, or be able to, wander the land and live free anymore.

The Dakota saw the problem with this right away and felt their need to fight against it. They resisted and didn’t relent when the government tried to force them into prison camps written off as reservations. The white man tried to lie to Indians, telling them everything would be fine and they would be provided for if they only gave up their means of defense and locked themselves into a piece of land that most didn’t want until they wanted it later for the gold found within. As a result, the treaty was annulled, not at the behest of the Indians or through any sort of legal means. America saw gold and wanted it, so they took it, treaty be damned. They didn’t think much of the people, so what was it to them to abuse the contract they set out with the Indians? Since there was gold in the hills, the land of the Sioux became smaller and less attractive to them. Indians were relegated to land that was desolate and lifeless. Unfruitful land in an area as beautiful and life-giving, as noted earlier by Custer, within the prairie did not inspire confidence in the Sioux. They did not see the white man as honest, as a person who would fulfill his promises. So they revolted and went on with their old way of living. If freedom meant war and sure death at the hands of new and robust firepower, then so be it. The Sioux were not going to let anyone imprison them. Sitting Bull saddled up his men and encouraged them not to give in to the encroaching white man. He urged the Sioux to fight! And fight they did.

As they neared one another, Custer and his men on one side and Sitting Bull and his Lakota warriors on the other side of the battlefield of Little Big Horn, or the Greasy Grass as the Lakota called it, the fates of the different groups would converge and bring about a more significant consequence for both sides. As they neared the Sioux party, Custer got into an argument with a Crow scout, Big Belly, on whether or not the Sioux knew Custer's army was marching after them. Custer was adamant they did not know, while Big Belly was sure the Lakota had seen the fire of their camp with their scouts. “I say again we have not been seen,” Custer yelled at Big Belly. “That camp has not seen us, I am going ahead to carry out what I think. I want to wait until it is dark and then we will march, we will place our army around the Sioux camp,” (Libby 92). Custer wanted to attack quickly and did so. On June 25th, the Seventh Cavalry marched into battle but not out. Two hundred sixty-eight of Custer's men died alongside him in the battle that is said to have lasted less than an hour.

Custer’s wife, Elizabeth, waited at a fort nearby for her beloved husband and his regiment to come home. She knew the danger of the work her husband was engaged in. She knew the risk of what could come from an arrow’s point. Yet she stood by her husband a distance away and waited. She was always waiting. She had hope for their future when they wouldn’t have to worry anymore about whether or not a savage Indian would murder her husband. She dreamt of a future where they could spend the rest of their days locked away in a room or house on the prairie or the city and raise their children in peace without any Indian coming to savage them on their land. That was the dream of many a settler in those days. They wanted to take the land and till it, to use it like any good Lockean should to produce something from the land. However, her dreams were shattered by the news of decimation.

Not only did the Sioux fight in the hills called Bighorn and Little Bighorn, but they won. This wasn’t the outcome the Arikara wanted. This wasn’t the outcome the Seventh Cavalry wanted. But the cavalry faced the same thing they wanted to do to the Indians: pure extinction. Not a white man was left from the battle who walked with the Seventh Calvary. Every individual soldier fighting alongside Custer lay cold on the prairie alongside their leader. Custer’s ambitions lay dead alongside him in the long grass blowing in the wind. The lives and dreams of the other soldiers lay the same. The wives back home would not hear of their deaths until a few days later. Their hearts broken at the news, and their futures up in the air. What seemed so permanent to them was now fleeting. What was left there for them to do? Elizabeth Custer returned east and wrote books about her adventures as Custer’s wife. She died angry at the Sioux, and all Indians, for the murder of her husband. And that is the human tale. We love those closest to us and care not for those outside of our experiences.

Elizabeth Custer loved her husband and didn’t care that he murdered and destroyed many Indians. She maintained her hatred for those same Indians until she passed away, having lived a long and full life in comfort away from the daily threat of Indian wars she faced as a young woman alongside a man who not only encouraged those wars but skillfully engaged in them to the extent that he became a hero, a modern folk-tale, for the masses to sing his praises and good deeds around “civilized” America. He did the good deeds of killing Indians. That was all America ever wanted. They wanted the race to disappear but to keep a few as well in their fairs and available to the rich to toggle about as icons of a time and place and a people that meant all too little to them, a people who would soon be forgotten. A people who never even deserved to live in the first place in their minds. But no matter, where would the Indians go from here?

This article is part of a larger series on Bears Belly. You can read the previous entry here.