Pursuing this approach to the battle I was pleased to pick up Gregory Michno's book Lakota Noon, whose subtitle indicates that it looks at the Indian narrative, something distinctly lacking from most accounts of the battle. The book is, it must be said, a boon to anyone who wants to do this and it would have been an excellent read prior to the battle. Michno has not just gathered many different indigenous accounts together, he has arranged them in a novel way. Rather than reading different accounts, from different viewpoints at one time, he has collected the parts of peoples' accounts together at the estimated times that they happened. Thus we can read differing points of view from the moment of Reno's attack, or during the chaos of the final moments of Custer's defeat.
The accounts are often shocking. Rarely do we read the actuality of conflict, and this was violent, hand to hand fighting, and the accounts by the Native Americans do not diminish that. But these are not just the reminiscances of arrogant victors, rather they are from soldiers who understood that they were fighting a great and significant battle. For many of them it was to be the most important milestone in their lives, their Lakota Noon. Thus we also also learn about Native American beliefs, their preparations for war, their understanding of US Cavalry tactics, and above all, their praise for the brave men they defeated.
There are some fascinating things among these accounts. One is that of the role of women. One Native American, Antelope, spent significant time on the day close to the action as she searched for a relative. Antelope "had seen other battles and had always liked to watch the men fighting, though she had been teased about it, for not many women followed the warriors to battle". Another example is that of Chief Gall, who recollected his personal experience of losing non-combatant relatives to the US cavalry, "his lodge was vacant. He extended his search around the point of timber a short distance o the south. There he finally found his family. Dead. His two wives and his three children, killed." Another account by Rain in the Face, recollected that a woman Moving Robe, whose brother had been killed was among the fighters. "Behold, there is among us a young woman! Let no young man hide behind her garment" shouted Rain in the Face to inspire the other warriors.
But mostly readers will want to learn the accounts of the battle by Native Americans, like Low Dog:
They came on us like a thunderbolt... The Indians retreated at first but managed to rally and make a charge of their own. Low Dog called to his men, "This is a good day to die: follow me." They massed their warriors. So that no man should fall back, every man whipped another man's horse as they rushed the soldiers. The bluecoats dismounted to fire, but did not shoot well. While firing, they had been holding their horse's reins with one arm. The frrightened horses piulled them all around and many of their shots went high in the air and did the Indians no harm. Nevertheless, the white warriors stood their ground bravely, and none made an attempt to get away.
But there are problems with the book. One of the largest was that the Native American accounts are not direct quotes. Michno acknowledges the problems of the sources - they are biased, sometimes recorded many decades after the battle, often contradictory and frequently have grown in the telling. Memory plays its tricks, but so does the reality of a confusing, scary, noisy and smoke obscurred battle field. Disappointingly though, Michno's narratives are not direct quotes, but are his rewriting of the various testimonies in order to make a readable account. This makes things clearer for the reader, but its not the collection of eyewitness voices I expected.
Michno presents the book as being a final word in understanding what happened. Rightly, he argues, it has been near impossible to know what actually happened to Custer's direct command on the day. By piecing together the Native American accounts, together with a close analysis of the battlefield site, he hopes that he has presented a definitive history of the day. He is dismissive, sometimes to the point of pomposity of some other historians. But by and large his arguments about events on the day are persuassive, as does his unpicking of the conflicting and sometimes extremely unclear accounts of different Native Americans. He points out, probably accurately, that the famous charge by Crazy Horse likely never happened.
Michno is keen to tackle what he sees as the political correctness of recent scholarship of the battle. In fact the book is really an attempt to state a particular viewpoint of the battle using definitive studies and eyewitness accounts, in order to defend a particular historical approach. This is, I think, most notable when considering the Reno-Benteen fight and defense. After Reno is driven off, the battle recentred on Custer's attack. This is not surprising. The Native Americans had to regroup to drive off the bigger threat to their village. But the Reno-Benteen command did make a stand, and faced many hours horrificaly besieged. Michno provides no eyewitness accounts to this. Perhaps there are none. In which case it would have been useful to know. Or perhaps Michno thinks that because Cavalry troops from these events survived, then there's no need to give accounts (though this does not prevent him giving them about earlier parts of the battle). I suspect the real reason is that Michno is focused on other events because the purpose of his book is actually to polemicise about the significance of Custer's final defeat for latter day accounts of the Indian Wars.
This is especially visible in his critiques of those who argue there was "no last stand" in the sense that the battle did not have a definitive ending, rather pettering out into smaller and smaller clusters of killing. These he says are often motivated by a "those more concerned with officious moralising than with finding historical truths". For instance, he bemoans one author whose book contains multiple references (Michno gives them all!) to "genocide, greed and injustice".
The problem with Michno's approach here is that it is difficult to write a genuine history of Native America and its encounter with the US government without acknowleding the "genocide, greed and injustice" that was directed at them from the earliest days of European colonialism in the Americas. Indeed, the books concluding focus on the reality of a "last stand" is less about actual events and more about defeating "revisionist interpreations and political correctness".
The problem of course is that the last stand can mean different things to different people. Those who enjoyed the historically laughable They died with their boots on at the cinema in 1941 and since have a different understanding of the heroism of that day to that of the Native American eyewitnesses here. Indedd they would also probably not agree with Michno himself who is not dismissing the Native Americans as savages.
The point is not the battle, but the context - culturally and historically. Endless debates about about cartridge numbers from battlefield archaeology cannot overcome the wider historical backdrop which is far more important to understanding the aftermath of the Lakota Noon.
Those interested in the battle should read Lakota Noon, if only for the eyewitness accounts and the discussion about events on 25-26 June 1876. For those wanting a subtle study of the context, there are other, better books, polemical in their own way.
Related Reviews
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Estes - Our History is the Future
Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Cozzens - The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
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