Custer at Little Bighorn: A Deep Political Hypothesis

[Phil Dragoo]

I found the following brief summation to be of interest:




In 1876, Custer was called to testify against Secretary of War William Belknap in an investigation by Congress. Custer's comments confirmed the suspicions held against Belknap, as well as Orville Grant, and Custer was arrested. While Custer was sitting in prison, Grant ordered his forces to advance on the Cheyenne Indians, which had become increasingly hostile.
Custer was distraught by the fact that his troops would be fighting without him and appealed to Grant to let him join them. Grant relented and Custer was allowed to return to command the 7th Cavalry at Fort Lincoln. They departed on May 17, 1876 and quickly found an encampment of Indians.
Custer realized that he was outnumbered, but decided to fight without infantry reinforcements. He split his troops into three parts and advanced on the village from several directions. However, the two parts led by his subordinates were repelled, leaving Custer's part to the full brunt of the Cheyenne forces. He fell back to a hill, where his group engaged in long range gunfire with the Cheyenne, until every soldier, including Custer, was dead.
George Custer died on June 25, 1876 and was given a funeral on the battlefield before being moved to the West Point Cemetery in late 1877.






http://www.freeinfosociety.com/article.php?id=363


I was delighted with the vaudeville skit: Custer testifies against Belknap and Orville Grant; Custer arrested; Grant orders Custer to advance on the increasingly hostile Cheyenne.


Further, the Reno and Benton refusal to obey Custer's desperate summons is represented as the two unit commanders being "repelled."


It presents here, and in Charles' deft depiction, as the elimination of the inconvenient witness to corruption and subsequent defamation of character, of lurid technicolor self-destroying Ahabian-Aryan genocidal murderer.


Wilcox presents Patton as the loud future-politician threatening to push the national agenda on to Moscow eliminated by T-boning the Cadillac with a deuce-and-a-quarter.


Indeed Forrestal's swan dive from the Reichenbach Falls capped a swift transferral of the new position of Secretary of Defense to Johnson.


Was the Belknap-Grant maneuver simply the way business has been done from Little Big Horn to Dealey Plaza.


The truth which must not be spoken regarding Custer was his code of honor was dangerous to his superiors and his attitude toward the native Americans he sought to return to reservation was no more inflamed than the prevailing policy.


Nor was the 35[SUP]th[/SUP] president likely to have reversed NSAM 263, Noam Chomsky to the contrary notwithstanding. And what precisely has sexual behaviors to do with the duties the 42d president was said able to compartmentalize nicely thank you.


Charles, the facile defamation of Custer as having deserved massacre by the nobles he sought to eradicate appears to be a psychological operation designed in the manner of the executive action we expect as the continuing submerged obstacle to right action.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uQNkFmgyzI


When he left the sound check on the stage of the Allen Theater in Cleveland he turned at the stage door to the alley and told the crew, "I got to go take an injectioning."


History is the beautiful story concocted by the winners.

[Charles Drago]

In 1876, Custer was called to testify against Secretary of War William Belknap in an investigation by Congress. Custer's comments confirmed the suspicions held against Belknap, as well as Orville Grant, and Custer was arrested. While Custer was sitting in prison, Grant ordered his forces to advance on the Cheyenne Indians, which had become increasingly hostile.
Custer was distraught by the fact that his troops would be fighting without him and appealed to Grant to let him join them. Grant relented and Custer was allowed to return to command the 7th Cavalry at Fort Lincoln. They departed on May 17, 1876 and quickly found an encampment of Indians.
Custer realized that he was outnumbered, but decided to fight without infantry reinforcements. He split his troops into three parts and advanced on the village from several directions. However, the two parts led by his subordinates were repelled, leaving Custer's part to the full brunt of the Cheyenne forces. He fell back to a hill, where his group engaged in long range gunfire with the Cheyenne, until every soldier, including Custer, was dead.

George Custer died on June 25, 1876 and was given a funeral on the battlefield before being moved to the West Point Cemetery in late 1877.

Phil,

Your deep political analysis of Custer's fate is spot-on. The "history" cited above, however, is flawed to the point of unintentional comedy.

"Cheyenne forces"???

While a relatively small number of Northern Cheyenne were encamped along the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 with impressive numbers of warriors and their families from the five Lakota (Sioux) nations, the implication here that they represented a major component of forces aligned against Custer is terribly wrong.

Nor did "he fall back to a hill" in the implied sense that "his" battalion moved as a single, cohesive unit. "He" -- Custer -- personally led five companies north along the eastern LBH riverbank. They were split along company lines into defensive positions, with only one troop formally positioned on what would become Last Stand Hill. As units were overrun, survivors made their way to Custer.

By the way, there was no "funeral" for Custer or anyone else at the site. Bodies were hastily buried and, in the case of officers, covered with stones in an effort to thwart predation. When a recovery detail arrive a year later, most if not all of the graves had been disturbed. Bones were scattered everywhere.

The chances that George Armstrong Custer's remains are interred beneath his West Point monument are slim.

Further, just one of the two battalions separated by Custer from his command unit and ordered to attack the huge village from the south and southwest was "repelled" -- Major Marcus Reno's unit that crossed the LBH under orders to "charge the village."

The suspect Captain Frederick Benteen, having been ordered by Custer in writing to "come on" and "be quick," kept his battalion out of the fight -- even when within earshot of Custer's "I'm over here!" volley fire.

In order to be "repelled," one first must attack. Benteen did not make an offensive move -- in the military sense -- during the entire fight.

Benteen's malingering (unnecessarily watering his horses and then moving forward at the most leisurely pace possible) -- his commanding officer's order to ride to his support in hand -- was later "explained" as having been necessitated by the need to reinforce Reno's whipped command as it sought shelter on high bluffs on the eastern side of the LBH five miles to Custer's south.

My hypothesis is that Benteen and/or another traitor positioned so as to influence the march was under orders from deep political authority to make certain that Custer's mission failed. And while I don't believe that such an entity knowingly would have taken actions to kill nearly 300 soldiers to "get" Custer, such were the consequences of perfidy that day.

Did Custer and his entire command nucleus have to die to accomplish the mission? Would an embarrassing but physically survivable defeat have done the trick?

Did WTC 1, 2, and 7 have to fall to accomplish the mission? Would smoldering yet standing ruins have done the trick?

Custer and a maximum number of his troopers had to perish if the larger deep political mission -- once and for all end public sympathy for the noble Red Man and enflame support for the eradication of North American tribal peoples -- were to be accomplished.

History is the beautiful story concocted by the winners.

Quite so.

[Ed Jewett]

Don't forget WTC6.

[Ed Jewett]

It's been a long time (obviously) since I visited this thread but I couldn't help return when the article at Salon [cited at the bottom of this post below the asterisks divider] came to my attention. I haven't read it thoroughly or seriously; I post it here on the off-chance that someone will find it of interest. I do not suggest it has serious insights into Drago'a hypothesis.

OTOH, the book by Lieutenant-Colonel (Retd) Roman Jarymowycz, OMM, CD, Ph.D., a decorated Canadian soldier and military educator.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Jarymowycz ] entitled "Cavalry: From Hoof to Track" [Stackpole Military History Series, 2008], on pages 113-117, makes the point [color emphases by Jewett] that the Plains Indian had access to very high caliber of horses: "the Comanche like to boast that they permitted to Spanish to stay in Texas simply to raise horses for them." [He cites Dennison's a history of cavalry, page 497]. These breeds included Arabians , Lippizaners and others introduced by the Spanish and which eventually produced the Mustang.

"The Apache and Sioux… proved masters of maneuver warfare and [were] expert guerrillas". Citing Swift's "history of the 5th US Calvary", he speaks of their expertise at securing "the advantage of surprise": "the preferred method of engagement was to lure American cavalry into a killing zone in rough terrain and then attempt a close-quarter battle".
Citing 3 references, he notes that "U.S. Army officers, who fought them, called Comanche Indians 'the finest light cavalry in the world.'

"Custer's command penetrated deeply into Sioux (Lakota) territory and fought a series of skirmishes against a Sioux-Cheyenne alliance led by Chief Sitting Bull. Finally, Custer set out to find and destroy the main encampment. The raid was a series of blundersineffective reconnaissance was the greatest failure. The 7th Cavalry of the 1870s was not a crack unit. Custer relied on hired Crow Indian scouts and not his own troopers. He tend to suspect the information he could get, and for all practical purposes, he was tactically blind. Custer's skittish command stylequite the opposite of his… exploits in the Civil Warproved him less adept in maneuvering a single horsed regiment than a brigade of Union cavalry. Brig. Gen. Frederick Benteen, who commanded a reinforced squadron at the Little Big Horn battle, found Custer "vain, arrogant and egotistical". [Benteen added later: "I'm only too proud to say that I despised him."


Sitting Bull caught Custer's force deployed piecemeal. The 7th cavalry's notorious battle was actually a series of uncoordinated dismounted dragoons actions far from skirmish lines and, in some cases, rough shell scrapes. [Benteen's] initial failure to reinforce Custer has been criticized in a battle when no American cavaliers demonstrated fingerspitzengefuhl."

That last term is defined on page 3 of the book as "a sixth sense, intutive comprehension: 'thinking in the saddle' ".

****

http://www.salon.com/2010/05/07/philbric...ast_stand/

THURSDAY, MAY 6, 2010 09:01 PM EDTGeorge Custer: An American embarrassment

An award-winning author exposes gruesome details about Little Bighorn and revisits the story of its much-hated hero

BY TOM CARSON, [URL="http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/"]BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW

http://www.salon.com/2010/05/07/philbric...ast_stand/[/URL]

[Keith Millea]

Being an Ex-Cavalryman,with a Northern Cheyenne/Lakota Ex-Wife,I can admit here that we had many various re-enactments of the battle.

Everybody loses in the end.............

[Ed Jewett]

Being an Ex-Cavalryman,with a Northern Cheyenne/Lakota Ex-Wife,I can admit here that we had many various re-enactments of the battle.

Everybody loses in the end.............

Hopefully, Keith, you did not suffer the same consequences as Custer that were noted in that Salon article.

[Tracy Riddle]

Well, this is a new one to me. I'm really only familiar with the official story of LBH.
Here are a couple of sites I found with Custer tinfoil:

http://custer.over-blog.com/article-15431577.html

http://lamecherry.blogspot.com/2011/09/m...eorge.html

[Charles Drago]

Thanks for looking and rekindling interest in this thread. Our understanding of deep politics can indeed widen and deepen our perspectives on historic events that took place decades, centuries, and even millennia before those we commonly examine here. I'm endlessly curious about Little Bighorn, so I'll re-post my opening thoughts -- EDITED AND EXPANDED -- with the hope that they'll stimulate renewed exchanges.
____________________________________________________________________________________________

The Battle of the Little Bighorn (a/k/a Custer's Last Stand and the Battle of the Greasy Grass) comprises, with Gettysburg and the Alamo. the holy trinity of American military engagements fought in North America. The events of Sunday, June 25, 1876 leading to the annihilation of Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer's command nucleus of five troops of the 7th U.S. Cavalry along the banks of a narrow, twisting river in the high plains country of what is now eastern Montana remain the subjects of intense scrutiny by an international cadre of scholars, amateur historians, and "buffs."

Literally thousands of books focusing on that engagement and its principal combatants have been published in the intervening 137 years. Yet mysteries and impassioned arguments regarding everything from the development of the battle itself to the motives and even mental states of Custer and at least two of his junior officers continue.

And until the creation of this DPF thread, no one has recognized, let alone analyzed, Little Bighorn as a deep political event.

Without further ado, I offer the following hypothesis:

Deep political forces within the military/industrial complex of the time conspired to embarrass Custer -- and thus neutralize him as a political force viewed as a serious impediment to the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny -- by sabotaging his actions during the Montana campaign. Perhaps due to the fog of war, perhaps intentionally, the "embarrassment" escalated into something far more terrible.

ITEM -- Custer had incurred the undying enmity of President Ulysses Grant. Earlier in 1876, the House Committee on Military Expenditures had conducted an investigation of alleged criminal acts committed by Secretary of War William W. Belknap. Custer was called to testify in the proceedings. He all but confirmed the accusations not only against Belknap, but also against President Grant's brother, Orville.

ITEM -- Custer had incurred the undying enmity of mining and railroad interests. In 1875, Custer had made a solemn, spiritual commitment to the Sioux (hereinafter Lakota) that never again would he take up arms against the continent's tribal peoples. Custer's promise coincided with a meeting between a U.S. Senate commission and Lakota leaders to negotiate the purchase of access to the gold mining fields in the Black Hills (which Custer had discovered a year earlier). The Lakota eventually turned down the government offer in favor of an 1868 treaty that promised U.S. military protection of their lands.

ITEM -- Custer, writing under the nom de plume Nomad in "Turf, Field and Farm," had reached a wide audience with his idealized depictions of "noble savages" and wilderness worth preserving. At its core, the conflict between the indigenous peoples of the North American continent and Americans was and remains a spiritual conflict (ask Leonard Peltier).

ITEM -- Custer's "And we are all mortal" declaration: In his memoir, My Life on the Plains, Custer had written, "If I were an Indian, I often think, I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in.... The Indian can never be permitted to view the question in this deliberate way.... When the soil which he has claimed and hunted over for so long a time is demanded by this... insatiable monster, there is no appeal; he must yield, or, like the car of Juggernaut, it will roll mercilessly over him, destroying as it advances. Destiny seems to have so willed it, and the world looks on and nods its approval.... Two hundred years ago it required millions to express in numbers the Indian population. Today, less than half the number of thousands will suffice. Where and why have they gone? Ask the Saxon race ... " [emphasis added]

How was the aforementioned "sabotage" carried out?

To reduce a long and complex story to its essence: Custer's attack on the huge village encountered at Little Bighorn was doomed to failure due to the actions and inactions of the subordinate officers to whom he had entrusted command of combat battalions.

Historians continue to try -- in vain -- to explain why the as yet unengaged Captain Frederick Benteen refused to obey Custer's direct, written order, issued at a point in the fight when Custer finally understood the enemy's strength, to ride quickly with his intact battalion to his commander's relief. As Custer's five troops came under fire, and as Major Marcus Reno senselessly ended his all-important charge against the village and retreated in panic across the river to take up a defensive position some five miles distant from Custer's final stand, Benteen casually watered his horses miles from the action and finally came up at a leisurely trot.

Benteen, an avowed Custer hater, found Reno's whipped troops and, rather than rallying them in a march toward Custer, sat impassively within the sound of Custer's volleying rifle fire (an established signal to indicate position and predicament) and allowed his commander's battalion to be destroyed.

I submit that the confusion of historians is in the main to be attributed to the absence of deep political perspective in their analyses of Little Bighorn.

You should not read the absurdly condensed narrative offered above as an argument for George Armstrong Custer's highly developed moral conscience. The Boy General was an opportunist of the highest order. And he was America's first modern public relations creation. (In violation of a direct order, he brought Mark Kellogg, a reporter for the Bismarck Tribune, with him on the final campaign. They died less than a mile apart.)

There is much more to tell. My hypothesis is the basis for a motion picture treatment that I've written and that will be seriously shopped beginning in September. The story of Little Bighorn is a bonanza for sub-plots. The best: The only officer at the Reno-Benteen position who attempted to ride to Custer's aid was Captain Thomas Weir -- the man who Custer suspected of having had an affair with his wife, Elizabeth Bacon Custer. Weir survived the Custer fight only to die -- allegedly of acute alcoholism -- less than six months later. Shortly before his demise, he had written to Libby Custer to note that he knew the "real" story of why her husband perished.

In any event, I hope this little exercise in deep political thinking helps us along as we pursue more contemporary -- but hardly more relevant -- inquiries.

[Tracy Riddle]

Very interesting. What are your views on Lincoln's assassination? Do we have a thread on that subject?

[Charles Drago]

I'm utterly unqualified to voice anything remotely resembling an informed opinion on the nature of the Lincoln assassination -- other than to sense that it is a deep political event.

George Michael Evica, who was more than conversant on the subject, told me more than once that certain documents relating to the killing remain classified. He also spoke of war profiteering and the Dupont family within a certain event-related context.