We've pulled off the highway to examine the interesting but utterly vapid memorial to Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a noted lunatic who led 200 cavalrymen against the assembled Sioux and
What you do get is a lot of artifacts, a number of tombstones, and two monuments, one to each side. There is also a remarkable photo of Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his wife sitting in their study. On the walls above them are two pictures. Both of them are photos of Colonel George Armstrong Custer. That gives you the measure of the man.
Custer is opposed in the museum by Sitting Bull, the spiritual and rhetorical leader of the uprising that our vain colonel was sent to suppress. His words are recorded, most are of righteous and justifiable anger. The problem, of course, was that his people did not have the power to back up those words, and that he actually led them into a hopeless and suicidal war.
After the inevitable defeat, Sitting Bull refused to surrender and went into exile for five years. He returned in 1881, and then, in 1885, embarked on one of the strangest career moves in history: he joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Audiences loved the surly chief, who rode around the ring and roundly cursed them in his native tongue. Cody, who paid Sitting Bull $50 a week for this service, had earlier helped destroy the buffalo on which the Lakota Sioux subsisted. History is not quite as simple as we think!
I've always been surprised that Red Cloud, who was also an eloquent spokesman and the only Native American leader to defeat the
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