James Donovan: A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Big Horn – The Last Great Battle of the American West – 2008
I read this mostly because I’m researching the South Dakota of my great-grandparents Jacob K. Smith and Emma Kate (Day) Smith, who immigrated to Mitchell, in the Dakota Territories, in about 1880, just four years after Custer’s last stand at the Little Bighorn, 472 miles to the west of Mitchell. I’m not very interested in battle history, but I found the details of clothing, relationships, army culture and the incidental representations of 19th century life to be interesting windows on the world of my great-grandparents. They were married in 1876 in Eldora Iowa, the same year Custer’s force was destroyed. By 1880 the Dakotas were open to settlement and they were among the first settlers in Mitchell. The book itself tells the battle story in a matter-of-fact and interesting way, but it is easy to forget as one reads it and finds oneself sympathizing with how Custer may have been betrayed by his fellow soldiers that the whole lot of them were on a vicious genocidal mission to destroy and imprison an entire nation. If these genocidal American “Nazis” had succeeded on that June day in 1876 women and children would have had their heads bashed open on the rocks. Instead, just this once, the “Jews” (l’havdil) beat them back. The genocide was postponed, although not for long. The picture is further confused by the fact that there were so many native scouts helping to track down other Native Americans and enabling the army to kill them. While their presence highlights the “multi-cultural” nature of the frontier and the army and the social complexity of the frontier space, in the end these army Indians were cooperating in the genocide against other tribes of their broader “people.” Then, upon all of that, I must consider the fact that my own ancestors, Jacob and Emma, and their parents and grandparents had each moved into the lands opened by genocide and built their lives there. These genocides were committed for people just like them, and they took full advantage, and yet were able to do so with relatively little personal involvement (although one ancestor, my third great-grandfather Joshua Bland did, possibly, participate in the Blackhawk war in 1830.) For three generations Joshua Bland and his spouse, their daughter Mary Ann (Bland) Smith and her husband Samuel Smith, and their son Jacob K. Smith and his spouse Emma Kate (Day) Smith, advanced successively into Illinois (1833), into Iowa (1841) and into Dakota (1880) in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing operations. They were not the soldiers (except perhaps Joshua Bland, although in his late 40s he is unlikely to have been a front-line soldier), but the families for whom the soldiers drove the Indians out, and onto the reservations. Some of their memoirs even speak of childhood memories of “wigwams in the trees.” The Native Americans were still around in their world but depleted and defeated, ghost people who were no longer much of a threat. Custer’s story at Little Bighorn is the story of one bad day in the life of a not terribly competent but competent enough military machine that carved out the liebensroom that made my ancestor’s lives possible. Sitting Bull’s story at Little Bighorn is the story of one good day in a long and painful defeat. All of that, in turn is the karma that comes down to me through my mother and more broadly to the United States as a whole. It is interesting to think whether such karma is localized in place and localized in persons, or whether somehow all parts of the United States and all people in it now share it equally.
February 2, 2010