Little Bighorn Revisited

In 1876 the United States of America, under President Ulysses S. Grant, declared war on the Sioux nation and allied tribes that had been resisting the immigration of gold miners into the Black Hills. To lead the campaign, Grant named a fellow Civil War veteran, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Custer’s “last stand,” on the Little Bighorn River, became the most famous defeat in American military history. His entire force, civilian and military, 265 in all, was slain. His men took 100 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho to the grave with them.

Last Tuesday the House gave final approval to a Senate-passed bill changing the name of the monument commemorating this defeat from Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. The lone American Indian in Congress, Rep. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (D-Colo.), sponsored the bill, whose noble intention is to commemorate, for the first time, all those who died.

In historian John S. Gray’s book “Custer’s Last Campaign,” the hero is neither Custer nor Sitting Bull but Custer’s scout, Mitch Boyer, son of a French father and a Sioux mother, married to a Crow woman and adopted by her tribe. Custer may have died for “our” sins, but Boyer, who died with him, symbolizes better what “we” have become since then: a mixed nation still trying to make sense of (and peace with) ourselves. The new name, respecting that, is a good name. The change is both wise and necessary.