Custer :: essays research papers

Custer’s Last Stand The Tragedy of Little Bighorn is such a tale for over a hundred years. This is one of the most startling defeats in the Military history. More than two hundred cavalrymen were killed in battle on June 25, 1876. Is General Custer to blame for all this mishap with the loss of his troopers including himself? Who was the real person to blame? The details aren’t fully covered in the mystery of what happened at Little Bighorn. The Europeans came to battle with the Indians to conquer the North American land that hundreds of Indian nations had lived on for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived. The Indians chief, Sitting Bull was a great military, political, and spiritual leader. He had a vision that the whites were going to battle with them. So the Indians were ready for battle. Who knows what would have happened if Sitting Bull didn’t get his visions. Would they be prepared? Would they have lost more men then they already did? It was a big concern to go to battle because of the loss of his people, but he knew that they were going to be successful with the challenge. The Europeans didn’t care about the Indians. â€Å"Everywhere that Indians live the whites speak of them as lazy, living off the Federal Government, drinking up their dole. It is essentially the same view of the Indian that prevailed in the seventeenth century.† This means that the whites felt strongly about the Indians not caring or being willing to pay for the natural resources that they were using up. All the whites cared about was the value of the land and the natural precious gold’s that came with it. General Custer and his men had been traveling for on going days without food and water. Lack of energy might have been the case for most of Custer’s’ men’s deaths including himself. Fresh trails were reported and on June 25th an Indian village twenty miles above the mouth of the little horn was reported about three miles long and half a mile wide and fifteen miles away. Custer pushed his command rapidly though they had made a march of seventy-eight miles in twenty-four hours preceding the battle when near the village it was discovered that the Indians were moving in hot haste as if retreating. Reno with seven companies of the seventh cavalry was ordered to the left to attack the village at its head while Custer with five companies went to the right and commenced a vigorous attack.