She saw men wading through heavy streams. 

Some were oath breakers, others had murdered,

some had lured women to love.

 

There the serpent sucks on corpses,

The Wolf rends dead men.

 

Seek you wisdom still?

 

                                                                                                                                  "Voluspa" from the Elder Edda, translated by Patricia Terry[1]

 

 

 

The Pipes, the Pipes.......

 

 

 

 

In keeping with Federal inclination established during the Civil War of which he was a hero, both of Lt. Colonel George Custer's battles against the western aborigines of the United States were named for nearby rivers.  In the winter of 1868, a small stream in Oklahoma, the Washita (pronounced like Wichita), was graced with military no­menclature when a camp of Southern Cheyennes led by Black Kettle was attacked and destroyed by the Seventh Cavalry under the hawk-faced Custer.  Eight years later, an insignificant river in Montana also was lifted to fame and more when the Seventh was badly defeated and a five company battalion was obliterated in what has come down to us as Custer's Last Stand.   Virtually everyone has heard of General Custer; of all those who peopled the Victorian world, perhaps only the fictional Sherlock Holmes and his adventures are better recalled than Custer’s Last Stand and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  Even today, mention Custer or the battle, and various mutually exclusive clichés elbow their way forward.  Blind, stupid arrogance.  Heroic defiance in the face of certain death.  Pointless slaughter.  Karma due, payable, and enforced.  Duty.  Glory.  Infamy.

           

The Last Stand and the Battle of the Little Bighorn are not equivalent.  The Battle of the Little Bighorn is easily divided into two separate actions by the Seventh Cavalry: a repulsed attack on a large assemblage of Sioux and Cheyenne by Major Marcus Reno followed by a prolonged defensive battle, and the slaughter of Custer's troops while they supposedly searched for a way to cross the river further north and attack the village. 

 

Each event is currently denoted by a separate federal preserve.  When Reno retreated across the river and up a large rise with a saucer de­pression in the center, he was joined by three other companies under Captain Frederick Benteen and the pack train for the entire regiment.  An attempt initiated by some of Benteen's men to find Custer failed, and they were eventually forced back upon Reno's hill, where they fought for the next twenty-four hours against a large, surrounding group of Sioux and Cheyenne.  It is almost exactly four miles between the two battlefields over rugged ground, a distance more imposing in 1876 when feet and hooves were the only means of propulsion.  Today, a winding road connects them across private property, and only smooth minutes separate them. 

           

Heading south from the Custer battlefield, the road only nears the Little Bighorn at one point, near the delta of Medicine Tail Coulee, a drainage stream that flows from the eastern high ground.  Then it weaves around for another mile and a half and bisects a double peaked ridge as it heads south to the Reno field.  From the western peak of this ridge, officers of the Seventh Cavalry said they searched north for signs of their commander who, only an hour before, had probably stood on the same hill and first beheld the entire village under the spiritual leadership of Tatanka. From here, Custer had seen Reno’s men fight; and here - before he fired a shot or received any - when a strategic retreat could have been ordered, he made his fatal error. Leaving here, he received bad news and sent the last, famous message to Benteen.    

 

It is here all that mattered happened.   

 

When the would-be rescuers peered north from this same hill, the only activity they said they saw was of Indians firing into the ground about three miles away.  They said it was hard to see through the dust.  And it still is.

                       

Weir Point is the western peak of the ridge bifurcated by the battlefield road, which lowered the connecting saddle when it was built. In a genial conversation on the shattering events and decisions that took place here, over one hundred twenty-five years ago, you can easily trace events back to the Civil War and Revolution; in fact, back to the Conquest, and all the preceding European, African, and Asian events that had tre­mendous impact on our world.  There is obvious and direct lineage to events of the present day, along with confrontation with the myriad values and hypocrisies of our nation, our government.  To consider Weir Point, you must be prepared to review breathtaking acts of compassion and cruelty and the ridiculous myths that permeate our history.  You can also rather easily scrape away some of the garbage and meet some remarkable people, ‘coppertoned and pink,’ who, upon time spent with them, provide much illumination on how to read history, journalism, stories and derive some accuracy, sometimes elevated to “truth.”

 

  At least, how to be fair and judge accurately from available evidence.

 

If you sometimes feel an unseen presence on Weir Point, even in broad daylight with the remarkably affectionate cows lowing around you, you are not the first.

           

Weir Point is named for Captain Thomas Weir, who died only six months after he sought its summit.  A subordinate of Benteen, Weir was the officer that had first rode from the Reno redoubt to find Custer.  The man himself likely never particularly noted the steep-coned twin hillocks, folded and flattened, which now grant a view of the rangeland sliding down from the bluffs along the river.  He was furiously looking for some high ground to find his friends and commanding officer and the five companies of cavalry directly under that worthy's command.  This is often presented as an example of Weir’s fear for their safety, but as much or more suggests he was fearful of missing out on the victory.

 

Weir said he thought he had heard signals, possibly for help, from up north by means of measured carbine volley, and he set off with only an orderly from what is now called the Reno-Benteen battlefield while his own company, and eventually the whole command, mounted up and followed him.  It is assumed by the time he arrived at this steep hill that his friend was likely beyond help, and after about twenty minutes seething around in frustration and fear, the command was forced to defend its retreat back to the spot where several other officers also thought they had heard the volleys, there to sit out the next day or so under the nominal command of someone Weir, and many others, despised. 

 

He never forgave himself or any of his fellow officers for their inability to save his commander, although most likely that failure saved their lives. He died in New York of "congestion of the brain" (ending in pneumonia), Edgar Poe’s final diagnosis, which could mean an aneurysm or be one of the convenient euphemisms for alcoholic excess or tuberculoses or insanity by sexual disease, like syphilis.  It may have been severe depression.  He was certainly not totally well in his last months, if his letters are an accurate reflection.

           

Some of those letters are to Custer's widow Elizabeth, with whom he was rumored to have shared a mutual crush, perhaps more, likely not. Living with small groups of people in a harsh environment for a long period required political skills and sublimation of desire that could not have promoted mental health. In any case, he wrote that he had much to tell her about her husband and his fate and would only do it when they were alone and nobody else (a fellow officer from Weir Point, it should be suggested) was around. It is quite the case that few of the fellow officers had much to brag about, just about all had something to hide. Worse, the late husband could hardly avoid his share of the blame for the deaths of hundreds of men; his decisions seemed contradictory, at odds with what information he knew at the time. Still, perhaps Custer's plan, apparently constructed on the fly, could have worked.  It always had before.  

           

All of that may have crowded around Thomas Weir as he sat on his horse on the rise of ground that forever would bear his name, although he would never know it. 

 

There is not much room at the summit of Weir Point, and he could not have arrived very far from where I sit, and could not have seen much beyond what I see, likely lots less. His minutes on the point were blinded by the dust of hundreds of horses and men in battle in the acres around him.  It was a hot afternoon on June 25, 1876, a Sunday around five o'clock, the hour of the bullfight.  Face north today, the land of coulees and shallow gorges in the river valley softly go on forever; fifteen miles to the south-east a rugged but quite small series of cliffs and rises are dignified with the name Wolf Mountains.  Eight hours earlier, Custer and his scouts had returned from surveillance at one of those peaks, a well-used lookout point known as the Crow's Nest.  Then, after entering the valley of the Little Bighorn, he had divided his regiment into four battalions, apparently gave vague and somewhat puzzling orders to the leaders of each, and rode off with his immediate command.

           

The lizard lethargic Little Bighorn River is decidedly more impressive than Rosebud Creek, its arguably damp eastern neighbor on the other side of the Wolf Mountains, but at no time can one view it and particularly be reminded of a force of nature.  It is seemingly never over a few feet deep, except in eroded holes and the odd channels gouged out by spring currents.  From Weir Point it looks much further away than it is, a trick played on eyes not used to Montana’s uninterrupted vistas; only the horizon stops sight.  The air and a peculiar sense that wherever you are is high ground conspire to deceive you.  It may have hindered perception even among experienced cavalry officers, because they never seem to have acted as if they knew many thousands of people and horses could be shielded by innocuous bluffs. At least their leader, who clearly had been so warned and had first hand experience, should have known better, but his actions never quite indicated this.  How is it possible he would divide his command of about six hundred fifty people into four units and attack an assemblage of Sioux that, at the lowest estimate of fighting manpower not emerging from modern PC concerns, could provide negative odds of four to one?   What was he thinking? 

           

What is so fascinating about the Battle of the Little Bighorn is the lurking suspicion that it should be comprehensible; that it is small enough and well documented enough that the truth should be there, visible with lessons clearly marked.  If we cannot solve and understand the Battle of the Little Bighorn, could we ever solve more intricate events, like the Kennedy assassinations or the Iran-Contra scandal, the 2000 Presidential election, or the Iraq War?  Yet, the more layers you innocently roll back, even the contrived ones, the more interlaced layers there are seen to be.  It is such a handy microcosm for metaphor, one so easily applicable to other e­vents, that only the lamest imagination, once exposed to it, can disengage unadhered.  To this problem there is no solution.  The more you uncover about Custer and his army, government, opponents, mindset, and acolytes, the more swiftly you realize how little you understand, about Custer, history, anything.

           

This, I warn you, gets very annoying.  It should be easy.  These are events that took place within a short period to which there is appended a great deal of direct and circumstantial evidence.  Contrary to the image of Custer riding off into mystery and myth, there is as much or more evidence about what happened to Custer than there is to, say, certain units of American soldiers in Vietnam likely hit by friendly fire, Amelia Earhart, or the shootdown of UN helicopters by American planes.  The mystery is not on the field; the mystery is in the actions of Custer and the men above who empowered him and those below who followed him and how they presented their actions to a press with an agenda.  Further, Custer’s enduring fascination to a rather large segment of the generally male population is also a mystery to the rest, in­cluding those who find the display in the battlefield museum of his jock strap more revealing about his supplicants than the General himself.   

           

Of the world’s alleged military mysteries, the Little Bighorn has ranked oddly high, where it logically does not belong.  There were, after all, battles of great importance to the history of the world whose minute by minute accounting are notably absent from the interest of historians.   While nobody spends as much time, money, and archeological effort to discover if the official story of the Battle of Waterloo is true, or why, for example, France fell in 1940, or why MacArthur, despite ample warning, was so utterly surprised in the Philippines, a dedicated and growing cadre of official and unofficial Custer Buffs patrol the ground, where some have stolen found items, and some appropriately turn them in.  Custer Buffs for years to come will apparently be brushing off tin cans and buttons from the field, whether from garbage dump or hasty grave, reverently laying bits of bone to rest, tracing footsteps, applying time/motion study, drawing sweeping conclusions from two shell casings and a bullet, and subjecting the dead to in-depth analysis until, per­haps, we have the exact posture, exact mood, time, and method of every man's death and who struck the blows. 

           

So it must be asked, to what end?

           

It is hard to shove aside the belief that much of the interest in Custer hovers around the primordial fear of how each of us will face death.  Confronted by what Custer’s battalion saw in its penultimate few minutes, would we have risen to the moment and been worthy, or would we have panicked in sobs?  I myself am quite certain I would have been incontinent and busily arranging the horses and wounded for my own protection.  All of the paintings of the battle -- and it is the most painted event in our history -- take great pains to represent all combatants as heroic or at least functioning, which they may have been, but clearly indicates a felt need to impose that view and ignore other testimony, or the accumulated knowledge of the millennia about human combat, which is much less kind.

           

George Armstrong Custer is remarkably frustrating to recall because he stirs up such emotions even so long after he was killed.  Though he is best remembered for the Last Stand, he was a celebrity long before.  It is the only defeat ever associated with his name, for he was one of the golden soldiers of the Civil War; he was, in fact, one of the youngest General officers in our history, although that rank -- in those days when the Army was still suffering from the Von Steuben influence of no or few medals -- was brevet, which means temporary and in effect granted a cash reward.  After the war, he ended up a mere Lt. Colonel, although out of politeness, the higher brevet rank was used as an accepted form of address if not in official business.  He was an extremely aggressive and energetic leader, even his enemies admit, and always led the charge, was always was in the thick of the fight. 

 

Why he was promoted to general rank when he was remains almost a complete enigma by today’s standards, although understandable at the time. Even though his casualties were always among the highest - perhaps the highest per capita of any commander in the Civil War except Robert Lee - for the most part his Civil War commands had solid regard for him, because he won and because he looked the part.  If he became or was always overconfident, brash, and slapdash in his leadership style, it cannot be said he had no basis for that approach.  Those who try to make him out as blindly consumed with ambition, or even clinically insane, are simply foolish.  One cannot rise to the rank of general by age twenty-three without political and social skills.  You cannot fake physical bravery although it can be misdiagnosed: an absence of fear sometimes leaves the same impression, but the brave person must overcome fear.  What, if anything, kept Custer awake at night or drove him to his excessive, exhausting and mind numbing activity is unknown, even though logic dictates it would be essential to this discussion.

           

Fear was a major portion of the emotional makeup of all cavalrymen during the Indian Wars, with good reason.  The plains Indians, in constant torment from their white invaders, were equally terrified of their opponents.  Parents of both people scared their children with threats of the other.  Although a soldier's chances of being hurt by the enemy during the Indian Wars was certainly a lot less than those in the Civil War, there was the sudden unexpectedness of combat on the plains that was terrifying to the military recruits.   That and the mutilations, which were reportedly even worse than those performed by the 'brotherly' combatants of the North and South in the unpleasantness just ended.

           

It is likely that mutilation was performed on virtually all of Custer's command. This universal habit of war, which so ostentatiously repels civilized people, was performed on the dead because the aborigines wanted their enemies to show up in the spirit world looking as silly as possible.  Therefore, genitalia were removed and placed within mouths.  Heads were often pounded to mush, and the body was slashed ritualistically, according to the standards of each tribe.  It is doubtful that Indians were so immune to human anger and impulse that they were con­stantly able to restrain themselves till their victims stopped quivering.   It is known that white men often cannot.  It is not likely anyone can overcome primal urges properly stimulated.  Hittites and Egyptians used to cut off parts of the others’ dead so the body count could be obtained: sometimes feet, sometimes hands from one side or the other of the body.  So it goes way back, probably starting as a way to prove you killed an enemy to receive compensation from your leader or a kiss from the wife.   Scalping in Nebraska or cutting off ears in Vietnam, it is all the same.

 

Mutilation is hardly a creation of the last century, but it seems to survive only as an ancient, primordial attempt to sexually disfigure and humiliate. When the Oglalah Crazy Horse was a boy and called Curly, he witnessed the residue of an attack by United States Cavalry that left Indian women with scalped genitalia, and not unreasonably it is assumed that this had a powerful affect on his world outlook, not to mention his inner child.  But during the 1980's, when Lebanese Phalangist troops were allowed by the Israelis back into areas controlled by rival militia, a gruesome slaughter ensued.  "Breasts and penises were had been carved off; a Christian cross was carved into the flesh of some of the victims.  Pregnant women had their wombs torn open."[2]  It can be, and has been, worse.  Sometimes, the victims are not even dead when the atrocities occur. Recent events in the remnants of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Kashmir, and Africa have updated new evidence of sophistication on this topic.

           

The perceived viciousness of barbaric peoples permeates history which is, in conformance to cliché, written by the winners, and presents as a cause of repulsion and curiosity.  For example, Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first English dictionary in the mid 18th century, considered the Scots sub-human and barbaric in the extreme. His dictionary so reflects this view and was commonly accepted by the British people as a truism. The reasons for this were many and justified, mostly because in the wars fought with Scotland during the previous few centuries, British soldiers returned with terrifying tales of fighting the Scottish Highland clans, whose members were not adverse to severing biologic keepsakes of their opponents, whatever the protests of the original owner.   It was a given among the British that the Scots periodically ate English children.  It is a surety that, at some point, they did.  All starving people resort to cannibalism and intricate mythology to excuse it.       

           

Johnson's England, however, fought in the most up to date and approved European fashion, having once been taught a lesson by the Normans under William the Conqueror.  William's knights had been equipped with the first known stirrups in western Europe and thus were able to keep their seats fighting infantry.  Men in natty uniforms lined up and fought in line, eventually the square, according to precise etiquette.  Scots, especially Highland Scots, cared nothing of this.  All they knew is they had to kill as much of the enemy as possible to prevent further invasions of their homeland of tribal squabbles, murderous grudges, attractive tartans, and religious extremes. 

           

In later years, Scots learned that spear chuckers and sword swingers standing in front of crabby and brightly clad soldiers armed with muskets briskly shrank the genetic pool.  As a result, they developed a rather obvious but effective method of fighting the English.  The Scots would hide while the British marched towards them.  Then they would charge in a spirited and disorganized fashion, waving their heavy two-handed broadswords, called claymores, above their heads. Like their counterparts, they noted and listened to the British officers.  The British riflemen would stop and form, just as Tennyson later recalled and exhorted.  The Scots ignored this, and kept charging.

           

The riflemen would set, aim, and just before the rhythmically predictable order to fire, the Scots would hit the dirt.  More often than not, the wildly inaccurate muskets would be fired way over their heads.  The British front line would reload their complicated weapons, a timed process still used to measure the progress of glaciers in parts of northern Sweden.  The second line, somewhat panicked at the utter ineffectiveness of the first volley, would aim and fire in accelerated motion, but the Scots often got the timing on that correctly and avoid most of that hail of lead.  Then, up and into the rigidly held lines of the British, cutting swaths of shredded uniforms and bone, all the time screaming horrible oaths in a strange language.  Over all hummed the horrifying wraith-shriek of the bagpipes, which alone had to be fairly terrifying to young, undersized and over-armed British soldiers. (And for those who have had the good fortune of a bagpipe recital in a small room, you know this can be recreated...)  This was not unlike tales of screaming Indians to generations of white children huddled under the covers promising to be good so the redskins would not get them, or young cavalrymen perhaps prone to jamming their carbines listening to eagle bone whistles, or Cheyenne toddlers hearing an eerie Gaelic tune called the Gary Owen one cold December morning as bullets rent their lodge.

             

In Colorado, at the Battle of Beecher Island in 1868, a group of special scouts[3] under George Forsythe was surrounded by an overwhelming number of Cheyennes.  The young Sigmund Shlesinger described the Indians: “They seemed to spring from the ground like ... Highland Scots....I will frankly admit that I was frightened almost out of my senses.”[4]

 

Eventually, a few things combined to defeat this obvious and basic tactic.  It took the British a while to figure it out.  First, watch the timing.  Second, fix bayonets.  Third, perhaps the most effective if least admitted: make sure the French provide military advisors to your enemy.  By the 1745 Jacobite rebellion of the Highlanders, this was a terminal error for the Scots, who now fought in disciplined and pointless phalanxes just as the British, only with worse weaponry and a diseased army.  It took Napoleon to save the French military, but Scotland never produced anything like Napoleon. 

           

Of course, such British military flexibility immediately went away in time for the 1775 colonial rebellion in North America, where the redcoats this time fought a brilliant Jacobite Uprising of 1745.  The famous French help arrived too late to seriously further clog George Washington's already quite British view of war.  Most of the important American victories were won by native officers who had not served with the British, as had Washington.  The Father of Our Country, when a Virginia militiaman under the British fifteen years previous, had the misfortune to command a group of aboriginal scouts, one of whom killed a French diplomat in Washington's charge.  This is generally considered to have been the spark for the French and Indian War, which inflamed a then minor conflict in Europe and led directly to the Seven Years War, which devastated Europe and bankrupted England.  This forced her to overtax the colonies, which led to the American Revolution that France supported and which broke her, leading to the French Revolution.   This association of events is one Americans should fixate on, for the importance of our revolution and our history to the world at large is often and accurately interpreted far differently than our myths lead us to believe. 

           

But back to the reality of Scotland, a 'nation' then in comparison with which latter day Somalia often seems coherent and advanced.  Scotland, like the Roman Empire, is today almost exclusively viewed through the opaque and directionally ground glasses of the British Victorians, whose novels and histories of that period romanticized and distorted both civilizations. The self-enthralled British, mostly through Gibbon’s histories and a rising tide of what in their former colonies would later be called Manifest Destiny, were both puzzled and proud of the fact that their tiny nation seemed to rule the world and was making huge advances and progress in virtually every area of human existence.  They felt the need, as all nouveau riche do, to affiliate themselves with historical greatness.  Coinciding with this was the first surge of archaeological discoveries in Italy, Greece, and Egypt, including translations of previously hidden languages that led them to assume they were heirs to great things.  As a result of the British, in a charge led by Shakespeare, grafting themselves back into history, who today would cast an actual Italian in a play or movie about ancient Rome unless he could do an effective British upper class accent? 

           

That Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, popular characters in English fiction, were about as grounded in reality as tall, Nordic, lisping Caesars -- or leprechauns, or Shakespeare's historical accuracy -- rarely seeps into our image of Scotland.

           

In truth, Scotland's masses entered one century after another in poverty and tribal parochialism. Mud huts in which bog and animal produce other than wool were burned for heat and cooking resembled nothing so much as the native Americans of the Northern Plains, or recently settled nomadic peoples anywhere, anytime. The Scots, a group assembled from traditional mutual hatreds both tribal and economic like Vikings, Celts, Picts, the Irish Scotti and other then-important, now utterly forgotten racial sub-headings, had not passed many years in thinking of themselves as one people.   More often than not, all they had in common was an annoying burr in their speech and a hatred for England, heightened by religious seethings.  The Highland Scots, who retained Catholic leanings and financial support at some level and hated post-Tudor Protestant England with a greater intensity than they offered the previous Plantagenets, soon developed an even more rabid form of anti-Papism when John Calvin puttered through the rye.   A Presbyterian and Methodist Scotland now hated England because it was not anti-Catholic enough.  This did not stop them from accepting Catholic cash or make them blush when trying to insert a Catholic pretender back on the United Throne.

           

Scotland's Waterloo, or more correctly for syllogistic purposes, its Wounded Knee, was the Battle of Culloden Moor in 1746.  This was the penultimate event of the '45 Jacobite Rebellion, named after James Stuart, called the Pretender, descendent of the beheaded English King Charles I.  That worthy’s escape to France provided the final chapter, taking with him even the whiff of hope for a Scotland not under English rule. After that battle, which crushed the final bid to escape the British crown, Scotland, as legend would forever freeze it, died, literally as well as culturally.   The “...numerous wounded lying on the field were systematically bayoneted or shot or clubbed to death.”  Charles Stuart, the son of the Catholic Pretender and supposed military commander of the clans and known tool of France, succumbed to already profound alcoholic tendencies as he fled from the vindictive and victorious Duke of Cumberland. 

 

For about a year after the battle, the humorously named Bonnie Prince Charlie was rowed and borne around the Hebrides Islands ahead of the authorities and collaborationist elements, which after his recent military exploits comprised almost everyone north of Hadrian's Wall.  A prototype victim-maiden, Flora MacDonald, is, despite overwhelming contrary fact, supposed to have fallen in love with the despondent drunk and affixed herself to local myth; she is always posed in legend and painting at the oars, with Charles himself too busy being dashing to callus his palms.  To quench the delicate palate of the Young Pretender, who must have been a difficult house guest, sweetening was poured into shots of the best known regional beverage and thus was born Drambuie, the Drink that Refreshes, out of single malt scotch and honey.   In parts of the world, where Oranges[5] are still squeezed more or less in jest over bowls of water, that connection to the ’45 Rebellion is taken seriously. 

           

One of the alleged lovers’ last domiciles in the Hebrides was the Isle of Skye.  Just after Charles took wing on a vessel reluctantly sent by the French to bring him back to Morlaix, Ms. MacDonald, foreshadowing the fate of women for at least two more centuries (none more than Elizabeth Custer’s), perhaps realized she had to cash in on her association with her recent companion, who had just left her with a compensatory Hearty Handshake.  Finding inspiration in an old sea shanty, she added some self-serving lines for her love, and created a song considered a popular classic up to the last century.  In fact, "The Skye Boat Song" was a favorite of the 7th Cavalry, and in those pre-Walkman days great pleasure was afforded in the evening by harmonizing around the fire on the open prairie.  It was sung by a group of Custer’s officers at their first camp before they reached the Wolf Mountains and rode into the valley of the Little Bighorn. 

           

While Charles Stuart and La MacDonald were fulfilling romantic convention for - and underwritten by - the people, in conformance to historic realism the peasantry of Scotland took it firmly in the sweetbreads.  The wearing of clan colors, the playing of the pipes, the participation in anything that could be construed by fairly loose definitions as seditious or rebellious meant death under the newly confirmed power of the British crown.  Period.  The Duke of Cumberland, called The Butcher even by those who admired him, settled into his role as military commander of all of Scotland, and started immediately in the enforcement of incomprehensible and oppressive laws designed to destroy Scottish culture right down to daily life.  Little in the way of  fairness attended the implementation of these actual laws, and the Clan system -- made up of tribal groups who voted or fought each other to decide group actions -- was broken up.  Clans, like the tribes of the Louisiana Purchase, were no longer viewed by an Imperial government as manageable or preferred units.  They were made ineffective as representative bodies by being segregated, ignored, restricted, and penalized.  They were to be destroyed by other means.

           

This was accomplished by the literal decimation of the population.  Scotland started on its way to becoming a theme park and fishing camp for British nobility.  The Scottish nobility held its digits damp to the thermals, concluded that beef had its points compared with haggis, and like social climbers everywhere, headed for The Big City.  There in London, Birmingham, and Glasgow they became investors in the Industrial Revolution that used many of their former clansmen and peasants as indentured workers.  Some joined the Army that had defeated them, and settled totally into the Babylonian ways of sublimating conquerors by becoming more rabidly Imperial than they.

           

The Scottish hoi-poloi, however, because of the new laws (which were: you cannot own land anymore. We need it for these altogether interesting sheep.  Bye.) and no money and terrible crops, had to leave, and they went to Australia, if they were in debt, or to America, whether or not they were in debt.  Those who were captured at the battle of Culloden Moor - 976 men, women, and children - went to America as slaves, a subject that is rapidly ignored as soon as mentioned.  If white, it is embarrassing because it flies in the face of even racial justification.  If black, because it looks like an attempt to usurp the victimization of slavery.  Certainly, all races, all people have engaged in slavery, and most provided them to others at one time or another.  Samuel Johnson, whose hold on the civilization of his city, the world's capital, was complete, drew convenient definitions of the Scots that are today indistinguishable from eighteenth century London's blatantly racist view of Africans or apes in his dictionary, English's first.  Highland Scots were simply not human to Johnson.[6]

           

Highland Scots, when they arrived in the new world, managed to avoid the British as much as possible, heading for the wilds of Canada or the inner forests along the eastern seaboard. As servants in the Tidewater or the plantations of Virginia, they naturally met the black slaves.  Whatever other synergy evolved, Scots did usurp the banjo, a strung tambourine with a clear history in Africa, another geographic area that developed a brother to the bagpipe.  Since they were unable by British Law to play bagpipes for their native music, the Scots adjusted the look of the banjo, adding a drone string nearest the thumb to replicate the drone notes of the beloved pipes.  By developing a strictly down-motion strumming style evolving into what  is now known as double-thumbing and frailing, they were able to play their songs -hornpipes and ballads - in a manner remarkably reminiscent of the bagpipe, and in doing so invent what became bluegrass and a large portion of the rich if vaguely defined genre of American folk music.  

           

Later in western Canada, where Scottish names claim the landscape from Calgary to the Fraser River, the erstwhile tribal Scots, now in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or in the British Army, came across groups of proud, war-loving, extended families, often nomadic, whose means of obtaining food and the land they got it from was under threat from a large, obtuse Imperial government just across a vast border, a government that found them animal-like and of no more importance than an insect.  To this government, the only morally acceptable status for the natives was achieved in death.  This rang carillons of bells to Canada's Scottish immigrants.  Bells that resonated deep.

 

Highland Scots, and to a lesser extent those nearer the British border, were a chaotic brew of Irish, native Celts, and a heady admixture of Norse Vikings from Norway.   It seems odd, at first, but the fatalistic world view of the Vikings that underlies the religion and humor of Scotland bore more than a passing resemblance to the Native Americans’.  Nowhere was this more evident than in their view of death and war.  A description of the Sioux, or any Native American warrior’s preferred death could have been ripped from the Viking Basic Training Manual, referencing the section on Stoic Defiance.   This Norse fatalism most likely had been honed as the family of Ghengis Khan over-ran Asia and Eastern Europe and threatened the Western lands, thus providing literature and continental mythology with the image of  'orcs' and all sorts of hazily recalled events, dragon banners, and problems.  These images of horror were rather cheerfully adapted by the Vikings themselves a few centuries later.  And because most early immigrants to America came from just those areas that had suffered the worst from Viking deprivations[7] and from the fear of the East and were rich in folk tales of those raids, the resemblance of these archetypes to the American aborigines must have seemed uncanny and it was therefore no difficult task to replace the Viking or Mogul as a bogeyman with the Indian in the recesses of the European mind.   And the way - the only way - to defeat such an enemy was to out-endure him and prove to be better men.

 

"And I understood that, madman or seer as he might be, he knowingly wanted to die because he believed that in dying he would defeat his enemy, whoever it was.  I am overwhelmed with admiration and fear."[8]

 

(The Norse) hero can prove what he is only by dying. The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil  while facing certain defeat.  Such an attitude toward life seems at first sight fatalistic, but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the Norseman's scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul's or in that of his militant Protestant followers, and for  precisely the same reason. Although the Norse hero was doomed if he did not yield, he could choose between yielding or dying. The decision was in his own hands. Even more than that. A heroic death, like a martyr's death, is not a defeat, but a triumph. The hero in one of the Norse stories who laughs aloud while his foes cut his heart out of his living flesh shows himself superior to his conquerors. He says to them, in effect, You can do nothing to me because I do not care what you do. They kill him, but he dies undefeated.[9]

              

A certain Mr. Cox watched the Flatheads torture a Blackfoot. Not only did the captive endure it without wincing, he taunted his captors, jeered at their best efforts, and told them they knew nothing about the business. While they were shortening his fingers a joint at a time he addressed a one-eyed Flathead as follows: "It was by my arrow that you lost your eye," whereupon the enraged Flathead scooped out one of the Blackfoot's eyes with a knife and almost cut his nose in half. "I killed your brother, and I scalped your old fool of a father," said the Blackfoot to another, whereupon the second Flathead leaped forward, scalped him, and was about to stab him when the Flathead chief interfered. Says Mr. Cox: "The raw skull, bloody socket, and mutilated nose presented an horrific appearance, but by no means changed his attitude of defiance." Then said the irrepressible Blackfoot to the chief: "It was I that made your wife a prisoner last fall; we put out her eyes; we tore out her tongue; we treated her like a dog.  Forty of our young warriors. . ."  At which point the Flathead chief shot him through the heart.[10]

              

They seized the warrior - there was no other way -

 they couldn't let the hero live any longer;

 laughed then Hogni - all the men heard him -

 he knew how to steel himself to stand the torture.[11]

 

 'No!' said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow.  'You have conquered.  Few have gained such a victory.  Be at peace.'  ....But Borimor did not speak again.[12]

 

Although many cultures share similar bloodthirsty tales and attitudes, the Scots - the same homogenized Scots ironically presented to the world by British literature - bow to nobody in their tales of gore, revenge, and battle.   Feuds among the clans in the Hebrides and other islands in the North are chock full of battles for slags of rocks today cheerfully acknowledged as among nature’s lesser triumphs.  One tale in many variants concerns a race between two clans in separate long boats for title to one island, the contest to be decided by whose hand touched land first.  The losing clan leader at the last minute drew his sword and cut off one hand, after which he threw it ahead of a no doubt startled opponent about to step on the beach, and so won.  

 

During the time of the crusades, a Scottish warrior -- a knight, a member of a high caste warrior society like the Sioux Brave Hearts -- carried, in a small casket, the heart of a valued friend and clan leader, a member of the Douglas tribe.  Scottish clan chieftains took the name of their family.  The head of the Douglas clan was called, as by tradition in all clans, The Douglas.  Douglas’ friend, by oath, had sworn to take the heart to the Holy Land, and he did, thus fulfilling a vow Douglas himself had taken.  In battle, he would throw the small casket into the ranks of the enemy and therefore have reason and inspiration to cut his way in and retrieve it.  “A Douglas!!” he would scream.  “A Douglas!!” 

 

After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a story arose about a Sioux named Rain-in-the-Face, who supposedly had cut the heart out of Custer and ate of it.  Longfellow committed poetry on the subject, and the public became convinced of the horror of this (likely fictitious) act.   The event, which did not take place in the book by James Fenimore Cooper, was reinserted into the 1990 remake of the Last of the Mohicans.   Although the filmmakers may not have recognized the prototype, like Cooper himself, they knew the rites and the reverberation of the act.

           

Carillons of bells.

           

It remains something of a hideous embarrassment that Canada and the United States shared a large border and many of the same tribes but there are virtually no Canadian Indian Wars.[13] Only in the United States.  Partly, this is due to the greatly reduced population pressures, but as was so often pointed out by everyone from Frederick Benteen to Sitting Bull, the Canadians kept their promises to the Indians, whereas the American government's treatment of the aborigines can only under the influence of much liquor be upgraded to puzzling.  It should be repeated that the Canadians involved were often first or second generation Scots, recently shoved out of their homeland, and altogether responsive to the plights of the Indians because it took little imagination to see themselves in the same position.  As a result, feats of compassion and decency were commonplace among the red coats, whereas in the United States Army, psychotics and drunks and the shattered human detritus from the Civil War often seemed to rule the western forts with racist condescension, cruelty, and deep stupidity.[14]

           

Those forts were built for two purposes.  First, they were generally placed to protect railroads and wagon trails.  Second, they were there to encourage peace between the tribes, a fascinating concept then but a topic no longer politically correct today for two reasons.  One, the Native Americans do not like to have their internecine warfare recalled for current political purposes and, two, the United States is still applying this most interesting theory around the world with much the same success that makes contemplation of our history with aborigines worth a visit to the bar, legal or damp.

 

  One of the most obvious failures of revisionist historians since the 1960’s has been the elevation of Indian culture into ridiculous myth as a perfect spiritual lifestyle of peace and harmony with nature and each other.  In reality, the only thing that kept Native Americans from utterly despoiling the land was their high death and low birth rate, a certain portion of which was due to each other.  In this, they are almost exactly replicate of the Scots and English, who destroyed their lovely, ancient forests and left much of the land fit only for sheep and their herders. Like the Highlanders, and their Viking antecedents, most of the nomadic plains Indians loved war, lusted for it.  It was the key to social standing and wealth.  Most tribes had the horse for less that one hundred and fifty years before the reservations loomed, and despite all the white myths about Indian culture, the horse had done little besides provide a new currency and give lots more free time to the men, not noted for helping around the camp, developing hobbies, a written language, or the wheel.  As a result, the tribes had more time to spend warring against each other.

 

So the forts were there in part to act as calming agents to the wars between the tribes, at best a questionable concept.  The white Americans never quite understood -- or so professed --  that Indians did not look upon war as an evil, a symbol of civilization's failures, diplomacy's blunders.  They looked upon war as a test of manhood, quite like the Vikings and most people not united and comfortable with the idea of living well as the best revenge, such as the pre-Nuremberg Germans.  Thus, the myriad pointless treaties and agreements not to fight whites or other Indians meant absolutely nothing to the natives, who could not, with exceptions, read anyway, but who could hardly sign away a major prop of their culture.  What killed the native American cultures -- continues to kill it -- was the presentation of more free time and no immediate reason to fill it.   To pretend that living a pointless ritual brings back a golden age condemns a people to a slow, painful, and -- if available -- alcoholic death.  Confronted by much the same facts, the Scots surrendered utterly -- throwing something of a conciliatory nature to dignity -- and moved on, nudging their former clan culture into instant myth and being rewarded by its acceptance and promulgation by the winners.

           

The Indians refused to give up their culture, primarily because little enough was open to them in the new world of the white man, and then because many white Americans wanted to keep the reservations as their very own Enlightenment theme park of Rousseau’s noble savage, much as the British viewed Scotland.  With the frontier gone, the image was needed more than ever.  This pretend world had diverse, distorting and sad results.  What in retrospect are clearly seen as an advanced cases of institutionalized, hallucinogenic cabin fever are presented by the re-revisionists and nuevo romantics as spiritual visions and religious moments, although these could undoubtedly be replicated by sitting people for long periods in a Montana teepee and burning buffalo dung with insufficient ventilation for three months of winter.  There are syllogisms that can be applied to European monasteries as well as Asian temples, but in any case it is a foolish and cruel thing to malign a people for surrender, worse to praise them for pointless if heroic defiance because of its therapeutic value to the conquerors.

           

Anglo-American culture today comes under vicious attack because it has been so successful.  What is meant when you call a culture successful?  Well, longevity for one, flexibility for another, finding points of commonality between the people as high up the ethical pole as possible.  That is the role of myth, religion, and law to civilization.  In exaggerated example, it would not be as successful to unite warring street gangs by pointing out common appetites like drive-bys and drugs.  It would be better to find points of common aspirations in their music and hopes. Further, people need to feel necessary to the health and well being of their immediate commonweal.  If they do not, and are not fooled by make-work enterprises and job training for non-existent, non-relevant jobs, deep and broad social depression is their fate.   However, one necessity might be an increase, a substantial increase, in free time; i.e., time not needed for hunting, growing, clothing, or protecting oneself.  Time for brooding, thinking, creating, and enjoying.  

           

Plains' Indian culture was barbaric in the academic sense, and because their tribes were so much alike, it was a culture of division and separateness, going to extreme lengths to find distinctions.  In just about all their languages, for example, their tribal names meant Us the Human Beings whereas they called their enemies animal names with unpleasant implications.  They desecrated each other's religious totems and enslaved each other.  They killed women and children and sometimes violated understood taboos and raped those they kept.  They lived for revenge, and wore body parts of slain enemies.  They saw no ethical flaw in torture since it granted an opportunity to the victim for cultural vindication.  They were, in direct comparison, at about the same level of moral development as the Europeans, who even after the Discovery impaled and raped their enemies, burned their insane, slaughtered each other to no evident military purpose but giving great satisfaction to racist psychotics.  Compared to Rwanda or Bosnia today American aborigines may be said to have shimmied sufficiently higher up that ethical pole to ignore condemnation from other people.  (Can anyone say that their ancestors were somehow less repulsive than those of other people?)  

           

They performed human sacrifice in a very few extreme cases, the Pawnee being the most obvious example on the plains, but this was widely considered awful by their neighbors.  In short, they were very much like everyone else all across the planet.  Because Europe was then in the midst of a huge cultural shift due to climatic warming and the less than coincidental industrial revolution, the difference in 'civilized' tendencies seemed much greater, the difference in cultural progress more vast, than indeed it was.

           

It is worth noting that cultures which have a small population in relation to their physical environment value human life more than over-populated cultures.  Religious reasons evolve to justify both points of view.  The slaughter of an enemy’s infants was, like the Spanish killing of the bull, a transferred and ironic demonstration of courage; since children were the most strongly defended items by warriors in the other camp, a necklace of children’s hands was a sign of great courage, implying what had to be overcome. The North American plains Indians’ wars were often just male potency rituals, where the idea was to show courage and not necessarily to kill the opponent.   In direct comparison to Northern Europeans, where “...ritual confrontation rather than bloodletting...” and “....even the most grievous passages of arms were fought out within the mutually recognized bounds of time-honored protocols....”[15], Native Americans are remarkable for their similarities rather than their distinctions to their conquerors. 

 

Thus, tribes of only several hundred people could war on each other for years and do very little real damage, although this could immediately change according to how plentiful food supplies were.   In over-populated Asia, it was, perhaps is, common to have religions provide justification for suicide -- indeed, make it honorable -- and to inculcate the population with views of multiple afterlives or spiritual permanence.  

 

As our own nation becomes more overpopulated, euthanasia and suicide are viewed more and more favorably in direct contrast to its immediate European heritage of life after the Black Death.[16]  Europe is full of stories of individuals sacrificing themselves to save the majority.  Roland, Horatius, Cincinnatus, Arthur, and even the utterly fictional Hobbits are representative of the sacrificial instinct for the common good.  Christ himself had his story altered and embellished to illustrate this very European viewpoint, which then made his message much more emotionally resonant to those in colder climes.  Other views changed as well.

           

Before the patriarchal religions arose, it was not the dewy-eyed virgin whose sacrificial death improved the coming harvest but that of the great stud himself.  When women ruled, the stag was the sacrificial animal, most impressively demonstrated by Artermis or Diana the Huntress and her cults.   Perhaps due to the observation that deer shed their horns and visibly re-grew their male potency each summer, it was concluded that the warrior king must die each year in reality so that symbolically the tribe or village might be revitalized by a younger man.   

             

In many communities, but especially those still subject to the odd mini-ice age, the relationship between population and the village’s health was well known and acted upon.  In Europe, broken by rugged terrain and plagued by short growing seasons, the amount of food needed was carefully weighed and noted by the elders planning hunting parties and estimating how much land they could reasonably change to agriculture, till and protect.  Therefore, birthrates had to be high enough, and no greater, to fill the jobs as they evolved without risking war or starvation.

           

The term ‘exposure’ today puts most in mind of wild-eyed men in raincoats and nothing else, but for most of our existence exposure was a well understood and institutionalized form of population control.  Religions score politically correct points by announcing their hatred of abortion, which is a difficult and dangerous form of birth control, but they skip over discussion of this ignored topic.  History teaches us that exposure was the horrid practice of the militant Spartans in ancient Greece, who gave newborns up for observation to the priests and community leaders.  The weak were put on a hill to die, eaten by wolves and birds.  This practice of the Spartans, eventual losers through the eyes of their rivals, the highly literate and historically minded Athenians, has always been presented as a most demented ritual of inferior peoples.  Yet, all of Europe practiced it.  It had to.

           

How many people know what an utburg is?  Not very long ago, utburgs were the blamed characters for the tortured dreams of many demented and old (twenty-five years and up) women.  In northern Europe, rural and totally dependent upon short growing seasons and diminishing game every year, a tradition once considered the sole provenance of ancient Sparta was respected by the community in the era previous to birth control.  Deformed, small, weak-looking infants were ’exposed,' which meant exposed to nature and tossed into a field for the wolves and birds.  With this in mind, the stories of Romulus and Remus, or Moses, thinly disguised tales of exposure, take on new meaning.  Depending upon recent crops and economic fortune of the family or village, the criteria might be supposed to vary.  Females, who might not do as well as farm labor or as soldiers, often must have looked weaker than their brothers to the village elders and certainly to the father, who would have to provide a dowry.  Into the rocks with her.  But male or female, elements of Christian Europe retained this charmless habit well into the era of debates about abortion.   If a mother had lost a child or two this way, and could do nothing about it, mental health was not a song away.   The guilt, the bitterness, the desolation made her ripe for the visit of the utburg: the ghost of her sacrificed child. 

           

So common was this rite of exposure that Scandinavian women were subject to fits of dementia attributed to the visits of the utbergs.  This occurred well into the age of Christianity, and there are stories that it continues in many parts of the world today.   It takes no subscription to Psychology Today to see this budding guilt as a weakening of the old religions and the coincidental improvement of modulated food supplies.   Exposure would soon be viewed as murder.

           

When contemplating the newborn, it would be hard to tell what definition of 'weak' might occur to the village elders.  Females, for example, might be viewed as such by a warrior chief desperate for men and not willing to spend twelve years of food to produce another breeder, who could be stolen from another tribe.  A father, with sufficient children in advantageous proportion, might view a daughter as a burden whose life and wedding had to be paid for and whose potential beauty, judged by the mother and himself, may not bring enough of a bride price to offset the expense.   Any new mouth might be "weak" in view of the recent drought and spring flood that destroyed the bottom land and suggesting the whole village might need to move soon.  (Unlike rabbits, women cannot reabsorb a fetus if food gets scarce.) 

 

Common sense might suggest that the winnowing away of excess female children, with the resultant excessive competition for wives later on, might explain a lot of our species’ history. Certainly, it plays a role.  There are places around the world today, including the Kurile islands and other remote spots in Japan, where daughters are sometimes killed at birth.  Certainly, our cousin simians do the same.      

                

Abortion, the subject that so lacerates rational thought today, is often the subject of religious discussion of its moral dimensions, i.e., whether or not it is murder.  Christianity, a religion that evolved in often under-populated Europe, detests it, but probably because it decreases the available power of the church, then and now found in various tithe-paying populations of believers.  And possibly because the sex of the child could not be determined until it was no longer relevant.

           

In Northern Europe, still reeling from small ice ages and with a growing season of forty-five minutes, strict compulsive religious and social attitudes arose to make sure the crops were planted and harvested in time.  In Southern Europe, where the warmer sun shone and things to eat were easier to find, the lax and amiably corrupt Catholics ruled with a more flexible hand.   When one considers the tale of the grasshopper and the ant is not appreciated as an Aesop's fable but a Protestant hymn of self-regard, that Luther and northern Germany hated the church for wasting things before they resented the corrupt income, and that the land desecrated and raped by a Hundred and a Seven Years war looked with cancerous eye on the wealth accumulated in southern Rome, the Reformation can be seen as a climatic clash as much as a religious one.

           

It is also worth noting that culture does not change unless it must, at which point it busies itself with explanations, normally of a religious nature.  Change today is very quick because of the rapid pace of technology; but it was not always so.  If a Sioux or Scottish tribe four hundred years ago could feed itself and coincidentally fill just about all its free time in keeping itself alive, there would be little advancement.  When the horse hit the American plains cultures, there was suddenly a lot more free time for the men.  Yet, it changed the culture very little except for war and the backs of women who would have had to pull what horses now carried. Unless the buffalo population decreased to the point where other forms of food would have to be substituted, there was no need to change.   It is an attitude common in cultural groups and military ones.

           

As population pressures rose in the continental US, attitudes did change among the tribes, culminating in the pathetic ghost dance and Wounded Knee.

           

It is often a distant and dark view from Weir Point.   "...of all the places in America, this is the saddest place I know....There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass, and the river weeps."[17]

           

Below Weir Point - along the western side of the Little Bighorn - was once one of the largest known gatherings of Plains Indians in history.  Perhaps four, perhaps ten thousand people, their things, their food, their horses.  In the hot June of 1876, Sioux swains would cut the bark off the cottonwoods by the river, and from the trees' secretions they would make a foamy mixture; when cooled in a container in the Spring runoff from the Bighorn mountains, it was a refreshing treat, like ice cream.  A vast and hungry pony herd munched away further west.  Thousands of households of children playing, women cooking, men tending their duties among perhaps 15,000 horses is an image difficult to forget or ignore once visualized.  The noise, smoke and smell should have alerted any unsuspecting visitors to its size and existence, but somehow it did not.  So maybe it wasn’t all that big.  But I think so.

           

One of the first things noticed when one begins to read actual history of the American West, is that while there were people of remarkable physical skills in fighting, tracking, scouting and general observation, there were seemingly few of them.  Studying the Indian wars is a perusal of battles in which one or the other parties involved was utterly surprised.  This applies to the wars between the tribes as well.  The Battle of the Washita, Custer's only actual major victory in the Indian wars, was an utter rout.  In the dead of an Oklahoman winter, a noisy, clumsy cavalry regiment complete with band playing Gaelic tunes (the pipes, the pipes...) surprised an Indian village that had been warned of its presence.   It was such a cold night, the village's one lookout apparently had said to hell with it and returned to his robe.  This does not lend itself to the image of the ever vigilant Indian, able to hear an enemy's approach miles away.

 

The prototype of the superb (white) frontiersman, and early on recognized as such, was born in Becks County Pennsylvania in 1734, to a Quaker family.  Working as a hunter and trapper in the Appalachian Mountains, at the age of twenty he found a job as a wagoner during the French and Indian War on an expedition funded by Benjamin Franklin.  British Major General Edward Braddock was moving against the French forces at Ft. Duquense, where Pittsburgh now stands.  Heading his colonial militia was George Washington, who tasted his first enemy fire at this battle, and also his first of many defeats.  Braddock was the stereotypical British ham-headed officer and he insisted  upon fighting in ordered ranks in the middle of the woods.  Ambushed by the French and their Indian allies, the British were slaughtered, Braddock killed, and Washington led the retreat.  The wagoner lad fled with the others, his wide brimmed Quaker hat pulled tight over his head. 

 

It was not the only time that Daniel Boone ran, and it is true that his later exploits were exaggerated for profit by J. Filson, a friend and proto-novelist whose The Discovery, Settlement and present (sic) State of Kentucke illuminated the ranks of real estate boomer literature in 1784, setting the standard for American frontier mythology by including an utterly fictitious autobiography of Boone.  The fallout of that chapter permeated  American mythology for well over one hundred years, directly inspiring Parson Weems’ odd treatment of Washington, Davy Crockett's treatment of himself, Ned Buntline's handling of Wyatt Earp and Frederick Whitakers' homage to Custer.  But of all the people who played a role in the conquest of America, and who were demonstrably capable and charismatic leaders,[18] Boone probably was the man you would want at your side.  Whether blessed with extraordinary luck alone, or with unequalled talent and smarts, or both, he survived a hellacious life to within a few weeks of his eighty-sixth birthday, dying, it is said, of eating too many sweet potatoes at his son's home in Missouri.  The most impressive thing about Boone was that it was not necessary to exaggerate his frontier abilities to be impressed.

 

J. J. Audobon, a trained and exquisite observer - at least of birds - met Boone when Daniel was an old man and yet was so awed he described him physically as "gigantic."  Boone's son Nathan was less histrionic, and noted his father was only about five foot eight, weighed about one hundred and seventy-five pounds, and was fair of skin and blue of eye, born out by the few paintings that exist.  That Boone cast a huge presence in any gathering must be assumed, since few Americans were so world famous as to have been included, as Boone was, in a poem of Lord Byron's.  What Boone thought of his public persona must have provided some inner conflict, for the cameo he received in Byron's Don Juan is somewhat at odds with his evident claim that Filson's mythology was true, "every word." 

             

Boone was not given to undue modesty, and his assessment of his abilities in the wilderness may be well founded.  Certainly, he had a sense of humor, and a self-deprecating one, and this is hardly the stigmata of the fool or one given to believing his own myths.  "I can't say I was ever lost," he  allowed in old age, "but I was bewildered once for three days."

 

 In 1765, he traveled to northern Florida and was among the first to travel the newly discovered path into Kentucky four years later.  The Cumberland Gap - named for the Duke of Cumberland by those less inclined to call him the Butcher - became an immediate highway, and Boone led many settlers over into the new state.  He was impressive to most of his clients.  "...was (sic) I to enter an exception to any part of his conduct, it would appear on the ground that he appeared void of fear...too little caution..."  These hesitations echo quietly the concerns Custer's contemporaries shared of him, and perhaps of all men on the frontier, myth and fact. 

 

The real life people on whom fictional characters are based are far more interesting than their literary or cinematic equivilants.  Roy Chapman Andrews, a legendary paleontologist, traveled in search of fossils to many exotic places, including Mongolia, in the 1920's.  Along with his predecessors, like Copes and Marsh  in the Dakotas,[19] he was an acquisitive and fame-hungry individual, whose most famous work, All About Dinosaurs, was nearly the layman's reference book on the subject for several decades.  It certainly was the most popular of the early children's books on dinosaurs.  He and his cohorts were the likely basis for George Lukas' Indiana Jones, an archeologist and adventure.  It is not likely that Andrews, who wore the hat and may have carried a bullwhip on occasion, was less ingenious than Jones. 

 

In any case, the icon of the frontiersman, later emulated by everyone from Davy Crockett to Kit Carson to Buffalo Bill to George Custer, are but variations on the theme of Daniel Boone.  Certainly, Boone was not the man to dare, taunt, or annoy.

 

When two of his daughters were captured in his absence by the Shawnee and Cherokee,  Boone returned and, with few men, took off after them.  He found his children, apparently killed all the captors, and returned the girls safely home.  His daughters were, from beginning to end, in little doubt of the outcome.   When the long rifles of Boone and his men first blazed away, one of them apparently noted with some equanimity, "That's Daddy."  This story, which appeared more or less intact in Last of the Mohicans, is fairly convincing proof that Daniel Boone was the nearly sole basis for Natty Bumpo - Hawkeye, the Deerslayer, the Pathfinder, the hero of James Fennimore Cooper's novels that enchanted and warped a century of thought about native Americans and pioneers.

 

In 1778, Boone himself was captured by the Shawnee in the pay of the British during the Revolution.  He lived with them for quite a while, was given the name Sheltowee (Big Turtle) and was even allowed to hunt - under close supervision.  When he eventually discovered the Shawnee were on their way to attack Boonesborough, the town he founded in Kentucky, he escaped, ran to the town and organized its defense, and fended off a fairly impressive offensive by the surrounding Indians.  Despite this - or perhaps because of these stories - there were many who felt Boone's ties to the British and their allies were never completely severed, and that he would as soon work for them as for the American government.

 

He moved to Missouri, then a Spanish territory, and he was welcomed with the understanding that he would bring settlers to the region.  He did so, was rewarded with about 800 acres of land, and was subsequently less than thrilled that Spain forfeited the land to France and even less pleased when the United States bought it in the Louisianna Purchase; now he was back in the hands of creditors from Kentucky, who questioned his patriotism and willingness to settle their claims.  He appealed for help to Congressional friends, of which he had many, but the War of 1812 prevented much being done.  To score brownie points with the federal government, he attempted to enlist in the army, but he was turned down.  Something about his being seventy-eight, one supposes.

 

If so, the army screwed up in disallowing this remarkable specimen.  For during his sixties and seventies, Boone had traveled widely throughout the Louisiana Purchase, perhaps as far as Yellowstone in northwestern Wyoming - which would have brought him into contact with the Sioux, Cheyenne and Crows and all the tribes of the upper Missouri.  Here, he did some surveying and land deals for various parties, an occupation at which he apparently was not at his best, since his fouled up surveys allowed land to be sold more than once, providing him with an endless series of legal headaches for himself (he shorted on his own lands as well) and his family.

 

Boone was a remarkably tolerant and open-minded family man, marrying a smart, tough and fecund woman who gave him ten children, two of which were killed by Indians, and one of whom was the result of an affair with his brother when she had reason to believe Boone had been killed or was not going to come back.  Or come back soon, anyway.  Something.  His attitude is refreshing.  "If the name's the same, it’s all the same," he felt, and let it go.  There is reason to believe that this was not a common attitude at the time.  Or now.

 

Others could look the (faux) look, and walk the solitary walk, but they could not fill the shoes.  Boone was the mold, and because of his seeming infallibility to the general public, others who would cash in on the image emulated him.  Although he never wore a coonskin cap, Filson said he had, and so the fad began, up to the Davy Crockett mania of the mid 1950’s.  Crockett never wore a coonskin cap either.   A coonskin cap is a lousy hat for a hunter.  The tail moves, disturbing game, and it has no visor to shield the eyes while sighting a rifle.  Boone, a Quaker by birth, wore the wide brimmed Quaker hat that adorns cereal boxes and sufficed as the Nike shoe of its era.

 

Boone was revered as an Indian fighter, although he cheerfully admitted that he had hardly fought any, and probably had a deeper regard for them than for his white brethren.  When he moved to Missouri, under pressure from creditors and in need of income, he said to a journalist that he was moving because it was getting too crowded in Kentucky.  This epithet became famous, the pithy saying that seemed to emulate all of the great frontiersmen.  It just wasn't entirely true, of course, like the all the myths about them and their perceived enemies, the Indians, who were ever so routinely surprised in bed by attacking soldiers.  

 

Generals Ranald MacKenzie, George Crook, and several others all were able to pull off the same stunt as did Custer at the Washita against the As-One-With-Nature plains warrior.  It seems simply amazing that after centuries of warfare with each other, tribes still never seemed to take the threat of attack by known enemies all that seriously.  However monumentally dense the whites were in learning to fight Indians, they learned how to beat them with overpowering numbers, bought treason, and amazing firepower.  The Indians, with bow or rifle, never did learn how to beat the whites; they never really understood the point of a white man's war until it was too late. 

           

The Army was temporarily often much worse in appreciation of its enemy's skills, especially right after the Civil War when few competents and fewer still of the highest quality stayed in service.  For example, history records that shortly after the Civil War ended, each day of the brief life of Fort Phil Kearny (just south of Sheridan, Wyoming) seemed to start with the post commander, Colonel Henry Carrington, slapping his forehead because his wood train was being attacked.  This was a shock.  If only he had known.  Of course, the Sioux under Red Cloud had said they would do it, literally sending personal warnings directly to the fort.  Carrington knew Red Cloud's troops surrounded the new buildings.  Red Cloud himself barely stopped short of buying the 19th century equivalent of radio time to announce his plans to wipe out all the hated Bozeman Trail forts of which Phil Kearny was one, sending screaming warriors to serenade the troops in a manner requiring no translation. Who would have thought?  Just because it had happened every single time the wood train went out, that was no reason to think it would happen today, December 21, 1866.

           

Like Civil War General George McClellan, Carrington was a great organizer and builder and little else.  In 1866, he and five hundred men built and manned three of the four proposed forts to guard the Bozeman Trail leading to the Northern Rockies in western Montana.  Of these, Ft. Phil Kearny was the showpiece.  Superbly placed with water, grass, and wood nearby, the fort was called the best in the United States by the Inspector General of the Army.  There were forty-two buildings, including a bandstand and barbershop, all enclosed by a heavy log stockade of the sort legend, movies, and television erroneously visualize in describing all army forts of the period.   On the last day of October, 1866, a flagpole one hundred and twenty feet tall was erected to great fanfare.  Serious effort was offered to make the fort habitable and impregnable, nearly an enjoyable place, not only for the officers but for the enlisted men and families.   This does not speak of a cruel or cold commandant, often Carrington’s description.

           

It’s easy to make fun of Carrington, and his men often did.  But it isn’t fair or accurate.  Despite having raised his own regiment, he had had to sit out the Civil War for health reasons, and subsequently he never indicated a willingness to run any risks whatever, which, after all, is an element in military endeavor.  Yet, given the fact he only had, at most, 300 men at Ft. Phil Kearny, one might understand his hesitations to retaliate for these raids.  During the first six months of Phil Kearney’s existence, the Sioux killed one hundred fifty people around the fort, stole eight hundred cattle and horses, and completed fifty-one attacks worthy of reprisal.   Carrington could not afford to lose any men, so he simply refused to patrol the vicinity, ensuring that the Sioux achieved complete surprise all the time. 

 

This would seem to be the height of stupidity, yet about eighty years later our military had similar choices to make, and did so as badly as the allegedly wimpy Carrington. "Where planes are not available to cover all sectors, the selection of the sectors to be covered is left purely to chance..."[20]  Hence, Pearl Harbor.

 

Here is the familiar military quandary of building a fort or assembling a fleet for the purpose of projecting power and finding that it can barely defend itself.  In our own time, Admiral Rickover,[21] the champion of nuclear submarines in the United States Navy, looked askance at the huge aircraft carriers that sucked dry his budgets.  He coldly allowed that in war with the Soviet Union the carriers of the United States could not even save themselves, much less project power, and lasting, perhaps, two days.   He felt that in a general war, a small and inaccurate enemy missile could blow away the entire task force, but that in any case, the best it could do would be to protect itself.  There was much huffing among the surface admirals but near total agreement from the rest of the Navy. 

           

While in hindsight it is now hard to fault many or any of Carrington’s decisions, at the time and for some time thereafter things were not so clear.  Some of problem resided in Omaha where General Philip St. George Cooke resided.  Actually, much of the problem resided there. 

 

The father-in-law of the late Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, Cooke had been humiliated by his daughter’s husband repeatedly during the war, and apparently was looking for some way to assert himself to history.[22]  When young, Cooke had been a prescient and capable officer, and had served in the West well.  But since the Civil War, Cooke may have become the largest fool still in the Army, and he made Carrington’s life miserable with silly dictates. 

 

The prime example of Cooke’s incomprehension of his command involved the delivery of mail to and from the forts and his headquarters at Omaha, which had numerous and rather obvious reasons for often being late.  Cooke’s petty mind and surprisingly deep ignorance of transportation logistics suggested a solution to the delay of the arrival of Carrington’s reports: henceforth, Carrington’s reports were to be sent once a week, the riders to travel not less than fifty miles a day.  No consideration given for hostile Indians, weather, or the chronic lack of sound horses.  Given that half the horses (and all the cattle, for that matter) had already been stolen by the Sioux, this was a problem. 

 

During that first winter of 1866, Carrington’s farthest construction project -Fort C. F. Smith up on the Bighorn - had only ten rounds of ammunition per man, and Phil Kearny had not much more.  Cooke made this horrid situation even worse by pointlessly deciding that Phil Kearny was to be restricted to a notional twenty-five square miles, apparently feeling the less land to defend, the less ammunition needed.  But this decision cut off the best grazing, hay, and timber from the legal control of the army, and so Carrington had to employ civil contractors, and had to defend them, which is to say twice the danger at four times the expense.

 

Cooke was not, himself, immune to the danger from the Sioux.  As an expression of his appreciation for their talents, he kept twelve companies of his better cavalry in Omaha - where there was absolutely no chance of their being needed - but thoughtfully sent sixty-five cavalrymen equipped with muzzle-loading infantry rifles up the Bozeman to Phil Kearny.  In case Carrington had been lulled into a sense of false security, Cooke attached ninety-five totally untrained infantrymen to slow the advance of a nearly useless but hungry reinforcement.  Possibly in shock at his own largesse, he sent another missive to Carrington ordering that Jim Bridger - probably the best scout then extant - to be fired from the rolls of Carrington’s fort.  Having thus saved the taxpayer a full five dollars a day, even at the expense of relieving Carrington of the only person who had some semblance of competence, Cooke settled in for a comfy winter.   Carrington, the alleged wimp of the west, sent back his refusal to fire Bridger by the next weekly mail.     

 

But he obviously did not know how to control or even command minimal respect from his junior officers, questionable as they in turn were.  His image with his troops was not helped by one of his first priorities during the construction of this impressive but constantly embattled fort: the placing of “Keep off the Grass!” signs around his new parade ground.  Under Carrington, active young officers, fresh from a winning war, chaffed.  A Lt. Grummond and a Captain Brown were among those frustrated by the scholarly officer who overbuilt his fort and seemed always on the defensive.  The fact is that Carrington was waiting for winter when he could logically assume the Sioux would be in hibernation and vulnerable to attack.   He was absolutely correct in this assumption.  Normally.

 

When a young, aggressive semi-hero of the Civil War named Lt. William Fetterman arrived at the fort, the dam broke.  Fetterman, with Lt. Grummond, Brown, and others, mimicked and ridiculed Carrington while the commander coolly ignored it and continued in his duties.  After demanding Carrington reassign a rescue party to his command to foil this day's attack on the wood train, an insubordinate action that under another commander would have put him in the brig, Fetterman proceeded to fall for a trap that is instinctively employed by children playing variations of Capture the Flag.  One he had fallen for before.

           

The Fetterman  debacle -- no other word for it -- spoke accurately  of the US Army's quality of post Civil War officers[23] and its knowledgeable, intelligent handling of  troops fighting Indians.  Orders were not obeyed.  The use of infantry to fight mounted warriors, early on considered the finest cavalry in the world, speaks volumes about the contemporary military mind.[24]  The use of cavalry with infantry, meaning the horse soldiers had to slow down to protect the infantry during the few times the blinding speed of the foot soldiers allowed any Indians whatever to be found, is another puzzler. The yellowlegs became taller targets atop altogether attractive means of propulsion.

 

It is written Fetterman had said -- had often said -- that he and eighty men could ride through the entire Sioux nation to the Tongue River, prompting old Jim Bridger to drawl to Carrington “Your men who fought down South are crazy!  They don’t know anything about fighting Indians,”[25] which to the childish Fetterman seemed like a challenge.  So on December 21, 1866, when the Sioux attacked, Carrington ordered out units to defend the wood train and get it back to the fort.  The foaming Fetterman efficiently assembled both necessary elements of an American Western military debacle: insufficient cavalry under an inexperienced commander, and just enough infantry to slow down the whole expedition. Lest there be a remote chance of success, Fetterman separated both units out of supporting range of each other by disobeying orders, which were to stay within range of the Fort and not to go beyond  a certain landmark, Lodgepole Ridge. When the Sioux approached and waved their genitalia at the soldiers, it is possible Fetterman lost composure.  He apparently chased these rather obvious Sioux decoys - who might as well have had DECOY stenciled on their buckskin like FBI swat teams - and left his infantry plodding through snow up over a high hill, trying to catch up.  

           

Fetterman had many admirers among the soldiers.  He had a good war record and was an experienced fighter of Confederates, a quality repeatedly demonstrated throughout the frontier as an absolutely valueless commodity in dealing with the Indians.  But at least he wanted to do something to take the war to the enemy rather than react to the inevitable like Carrington.   Frederick Brown, one of those all-too-prevalent racist psychotics sharp as a pound of wet leather, had practically jumped up and down when the force left the fort, saying he was being transferred and if he did not get to fight now, etc. etc.  So he rode with Fetterman.  They were found close together near where the battlefield monument is today.  They may have killed themselves.  There is a theory they killed each other by pact, but reality rarely allows such a perfect and fitting end.  There are those, both Indian and white, who felt many of the men panicked and killed themselves rather than fall wounded into the hands of the Sioux.   If so, they were wise.

           

All under Fettermen were buried at the Fort, and later disinterred and buried in the Custer cemetery.

           

Evidently, Carrington decided, when Fetterman saw the decoys, the cavalry gave chase, leaving the infantry wheezing behind. The land north of Ft. Phil Kearny is rugged, steep, and clawed with deep ravines and sharp conical hills, decidedly not ground suited for cavalry.  The cavalry was hit by a huge number of Sioux who had easily hidden in wait,  and fell back, eventually towards where the infantry had taken cover, leaving a strew of bodies in their wake.  This was the second such trap in a short time for which Fetterman had fallen, and his entire command, which may have exactly tallied his desired 80 men, was destroyed and hideously mutilated.   Red Cloud's foremost warrior, Crazy Horse, may have been in charge of the whole thing.

 

Anglicized Indian names are often romantic but there is something condescending and annoying about their use.  It is also puzzling the habit is seemingly reserved only for the Indians of the northern plains.  Forgetting the occasional habit of giving an arbitrary Christian name, as to King Phillip or Chief Joseph, hardly any Indian names are translated into English except those of the Sioux and Cheyenne.  Perhaps, because they so often walked away from battles the winners, the eerie implications of the name Crazy Horse appeals to the same mentalities that have Born to Be Bad tattooed on their arms, sympatico with the Good Ole Boy mind set.   It is less likely the habit would have been continued if people were aware that ‘crazy’ in the Cheyenne language and - it might be assumed - in the language of their closest Sioux cousins, the Oglala - meant something close to lascivious.  Perhaps more accurately the greatest warrior of the Northern Plains might be called Horny Horse.  On the other hand, nothing whatever can be read into this, since he got the name from his father, who relinquished it for another. 

 

 It is too often forgotten that most of our names are not anglicized and translated, but simply pronounced in an English manner.  For example, my name is Richard MacLeod, which when translated into English (something my parents would never do....) from the Gaelic and old French probably means Brave Heart, Son of Ugly.  (I am really quite certain they would not do that to me knowingly...)  That would take some getting used to, dealing with the implications of your name every time you are addressed.   In any event, it cannot be sheer coincidence that Crazy Horse participated in and certainly was a leader in the three greatest military victories of the Plains Indians: Fetterman Fiasco, the Rosebud, and Little Big­horn.  This compares well with any of the credits shared by his opponents.

           

Fetterman, typically, was lauded as a hero, Carrington -- the survivor -- as a failure.  The now forgotten controversy swelled for years, but Carrington may have taken some vengeful pleasure when the Army exonerated him (years after forcing him out) and in the knowledge that his new wife was the widow of one of his enemies, cavalry leader Lt. Grummond.  Husband and wife shared many interests, both writing literate and absorbing books, and apparently were very happy. 

           

For a nation that, until Vietnam, has claimed to have won all its wars, the frequent appearance of such stupidity calls into question the whole myth.  How is it that we won all our wars?  The answer, of course, is that we have not.

           

A strong case can be made that Washington was a terrible general on the field and that the French (and an England exhausted by European conflict) won our Revolution.  The War of 1812 is viewed quite differently in, say, Canada, where our truly incompetent invasion attempt was stopped by Canadian police and our leaders arrested, leaving us with four -- 4 -- single engagement frigate battles, three by the Constitution, some activity around the Great Lakes under Oliver Hazard Perry, and a land victory in New Orleans fought after the war was over.  In the interim, we had our capital and presidential home burned.  Whatever this was, “victory” does not elbow its way to objective lips.            

 

There was an undeclared and essentially unfought naval war against the French we might have won, although nobody then or now has offered a coherent explanation for or description of this alleged event, including Alexander Hamilton[26], the man who pushed it, and John Adams, the President who deflected it.

 

            A war against the Miami Indians in Ohio led to the slaughter of over six hundred soldiers in a single battle, three times worse than even the Little Bighorn. 

           

            Our war against the Tripoli pirates managed, with the coincidental assistance of the French and English navies, to produce a treaty, not a surrender.

           

            We declared our intention to defeat and remove the Seminole Indians from Florida; many of them are still there, good citizens, studying about their new nation's undefeated military.

           

            We fought an embarrassing war against Mexico that few who participated in it would recall with pride.  Ulysses Grant, who was there, called it the most unfair war a strong nation ever waged against a weaker.

           

            We fought a war against Red Cloud's Oglala Sioux, who wanted us to remove the Bozeman Trail forts.  After some brisk action and a new southern railroad that removed the cause, reflection on the then-current state of our military -- so recently called into focus by the original cast of Ft. Phil Kearny -- propelled the removal of the Bozeman Trail forts, which the Sioux joyfully burned.  Not the blush of victory.

           

            The United States never declared war against the Indians; these were technically our first Presidential police actions.  So maybe we try not to count undeclared wars or police actions.  Yet, by 1876, the Union had convinced itself it was unbeatable, that it was, in fact, on a mission from God, a Christian Crusade to improve the world, and had picked up the white man's burden in seriousness long before Kipling set pen to paper in irony.  And then, just a few days before its 100th birthday, a shocking telegram arrived back east from the Department of The Missouri.  Custer and much of the Seventh Cavalry had been slaughtered.  Nobody knew where the victors were.  Nobody knew anything about their leadership.  Nobody knew if they could be beaten.  If the tribes stayed united, would the old nightmare of white America and the dream of Tecumseh come to pass?   Was this the result of new organization of the aborigines under charismatic leadership fit for war?   And if our army could not beat the Sioux, asked various parties engaged in proposing Empire around the world, precisely whom could it beat?

           

            To answer that question while the nation celebrated its 100th birthday, military minds amateur and professional turned their gaze to the land around Weir Point and sought explanations.  They had a few operating theses to install in all discussions: whites were the superior race, America had a ’Manifest Destiny,' and it was a cultural 'noblesse oblige' to rule lesser races, who should be grateful.  Furthermore, they had just won the Great War of the Rebellion and all military genius had to be judged forward and back from that event.  Everything about Custer’s Centennial Fiasco denied these cherished notions, and not a few minds at the celebration in Philadelphia were focused on just that fact.

           

            Throughout the nation, memorial services for the Custer dead were planned, and in consequence, local tenors honed their chops singing that most plaintive and evocative paean, a cliché even then, from a father facing death by age to a son facing death in battle, resonating as truly among the river-licked dogwoods in Montana as in Scottish dells and dingles.

           

 

 

“Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,

From glen to glen............”