The evening of July 3, 1876, was sultry in Philadelphia, but the dignitaries arriving for the much ballyhooed opening of United State’s Centennial Exposition were buoyed by moods that seemed immune to the cloying heat and the rapacious mosquitoes. This once-in-a-lifetime gala affair, America’s hundredth birthday, had been years in the planning. Much of that planning showcased the latest tools of empire, such as the telegraph, western paddle-wheelers, and 100-ton railroad locomotives that could conquer the Rocky Mountains at 50 miles per hour. Everyone who was anyone would be there, including President Ulysses S. Grant, who had agreed months earlier to inaugurate the event with a keynote address celebrating America’s manifest destiny. After an evening of drinks, cigars, and small talk, hosted by Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, Grant and the organizers were about to sit down to a seven-course meal when a courier arrived with an urgent message for the president.
The president stepped into the corridor and opened the telegram. The message, in fact, had traveled 2,500 miles in less than a week’s time, a miracle of the day; first by foot, then horseback, steamboat, and finally, by a succession of telegraph keys tapped out in Western Union offices out on the frontier. The first words of the message seemed to knock the president off balance. Color drained from the ruddy flesh beneath his eyes. It was astonishing news, made all the more shocking for being so unexpected. The man being courted to replace him as president, the man who stood beside him at the surrender of the Confederacy eleven years earlier at Appomattox, Colonel George Armstrong Custer, along with his entire command in the Army’s 7th Cavalry, had been massacred in the Montana Territory by an overwhelming force of hostile Indians. Now, the man who had cast a cold, philosophical eye across 9,000 dead bodies at Cold Harbor, Virginia, was stunned to silence by the unnerving image of Custer’s famous locks hanging from the coup-stick of a Cheyenne warrior.
News of the blood bath on the Little Big Horn deflated the high-toned jingoistic pomp of Grant’s speech the following day. The Indians, it seemed, had their own ideas about manifest destiny. Apart from a blizzard of sensational stories that filled newspapers for weeks to come, beyond the heated public vows made in Congress to ‘bring the savages to justice,’ the cultural cataclysm that took place on the hillside above the Little Big Horn River was the shocking residue of paradoxes underlying the basic framework of federalism of the United State’s government. Moreover, as George Washington had feared, the government’s military adventures in the west had proven that the new republic could only promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – those values memorialized in the Declaration of Independence – by denying them to Indians, Mexicans, or anyone else who stood in the way of the republic’s manifest destiny.
A generation earlier, James Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall had openly expressed their fears that those paradoxes and conflicts would one day lead to no good. The ugly truth about the young nation’s appetite for land – an appetite masquerading as a superior moral calling to vanquish the heathens and infidels and to subdue the wilderness – would soon be forced into the light of day as Americans moved west onto the frontier. But perhaps no one had described this citizenry with more insightful brevity than Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859): “Americans are to other races of men what man in general is to animate nature. When he cannot bend them to his use or make them serve his self-interests, he destroys them and makes them vanish little by little before him.”
Ever since the guns fell silent on that fabled hillside above the Little Big Horn River in Montana, from the moment the last scalp was taken and raised on teepee poles to celebrate the victory, every school-age child in America has learned of two great battles that were fought on American soil: Gettysburg and the Little Big Horn. Few events in our history have been more over-simplified in the retelling than the meeting between Colonel Custer and Chief Sitting Bull. Yet, 130-plus years later, no encounter between the native and non-native cultures has become more iconic than the 1876 battle on the Greasy Grass. From the Little Big Horn Trading Post, at Crow Agency, Montana, to the Prairie Edge Trading Company at the corner of Sixth and Main in Rapid City, South Dakota, history’s downstream freight is still big business. Big business, indeed. Tee-shirts, tote bags, bumper stickers, and key chains show the faces of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull superimposed on Mt. Rushmore above the title: “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1491.” In 2009, the dissolute artifacts of the living paradox that is America and the bloody and broken remnants of its manifest destiny are still a hot item in the curio shops of the western Dakotas.
Paul VanDevelder’s book Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), tells the story of westward migration through the eyes of the Mandan/Hidatsa clan that hosted Lewis and Clark in the winter of 1804/05. His newest book, Savages and Scoundrels (Yale University Press, 2009), dismantles the dominant myths about America’s ‘manifest destiny’ in the 19th century.
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