Why Not Wounded Knee?

Custer may have died for your sins but the way the slaughter went down was entirely his fault. Arrogant, vain and not so bright, Col. George Armstrong Custer started his military career by scoring dead last in his class at West Point and in his ultimate engagement made almost every tactical mistake possible.

So giddy was the buckskin-clad dandy at the prospect of slaughtering a large camp of Northern Cheyenne, Hunkpapa and Ogallala Sioux families that he split his forces into three columns, left his pack train of water and ammo far to the rear and did almost no reconnaissance. As Custer rode off toward his prey a colleague shouted after him: "Don't be greedy."

Instead, the end came fast. Custer soon realized his mistake and, according to recent archeological evidence, quickly allowed his skirmish lines to collapse. The cavaliers, now on foot, bunched up in terrified clumps making even better, more compact targets for the waves of furious and vengeful Indian warriors. Mounted and on foot, Indians rushed up from the banks of the Greasy Grass River where they were camped, swept over the invaders and destroyed them.

After all, these were the men who would ruin a whole way of life; the beasts who wore the skin of dead Indian women's vaginas as hatbands. And so, the battle of Little Big Horn ended with 260 troopers of the Seventh Cavalry annihilated, their corpses strewn along a five-mile stretch of rolling ridge tops. Among the bodies was Custer's little brother Boston, who (though technically a civilian) had come out for some riding, killing, raping and fresh air. An estimated 40 Indians also fell in the fight.

History Clean

For a full account of this, the ultimate piece of payback in American history, one can read any number of books or if you're driving through South Dakota on Interstate 90 tour the extensive, well-groomed and lavishly detailed National Monument at Little Big Horn.

Just north of the highway, this site is "living history" but of the highly mediated, politically neutered variety. The field of battle is accessed by a walking path in the valley near the river, and a blacktop road along the ridge. The road is fitted with over 20 pullouts and viewing stations, each offering up an illustrated and text-rich placard mapping and narrating the experiences of the Seventh Cavalry on July 21, 1876.

The monument also sports a graveyard of American veterans from foreign wars, a gift shop, bathrooms, bus tours and very vigilant post-9/11 security in the parking lot. By the looks of it, this is a favored stop for plump middle-class American ramblers and RV retirees.

At the visitors' center I find a ramrod-straight former military park ranger in his 60s giving a long, meandering lecture to an entirely white audience seated in half-opened faux teepees. He paints a picture of something like a football game in which "our Native Americans" who were "camped just south of where your cars are now parked" did well. Any culpability is lost in a swamp of passive construction: "Conflict existed." "The Native American way of life was receding." And quite crucially, Custer was the underdog that day and his defeat subtextually inverts reality, casting America as victim.

The ranger's tone, like that of the viewing station texts, is not overtly offensive or backward. Custer is not portrayed as Errol Flynn, brave and valiant, putting down savagery in the service of civilization. That sort of off-the-hook bigotry would almost be refreshing, or at least entertaining. Instead, the Little Big Horn monument is imbued with a creepy and polite sterility. The language and images have all been updated for a post-‘60s, "multicultural" America, but in the most technocratic I'm-OK-you're-OK sort of way.

This is perhaps best summed up in that we are told Custer was going to attack the village but never told what he would do there. Answer: massacre sleeping and unarmed Indians just as he had done against Black Kettle's already beaten Cheyenne on the banks of the Washita in the winter of 1868. At the obelisk bearing the names of the dead troopers and marking the last stand, I unwrap a sandwich and sit on the edge of a mound marked "mass grave stay off." Fuck Custer and the PBS-style pap Americana he inspires.