On June 26, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and his army were defeated by the Native American forces led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse at the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana. The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the worst military disasters in American history. This paper will examine the causes for this disaster. As Americans began moving west, they encountered native Indian tribes. The United States policy of Manifest Destiny of the United States led to the continued expansion westward. It was a goal of the United States to settle the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Americans saw the Indians as savages and wanted them out of the way. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian …show more content…
Within that war, other battles took place. The Battle of the Rosebud occurred on June 17, 1876. The battle lasted six hours and was Lakota/Cheyenne victory. The loss of life paled next to Little Bighorn was that 28 soldiers were killed and 13-36 Indians were killed.
However, settlers would move in anyway and break the treaty which was made. Gold was soon discovered on the reservation, in the Black Hills, which was sacred land to the Sioux. The government wanted them to re-locate, so white settlers could inhabit the land where gold was discovered. The location where the Sioux were supposed to live was in a much less desirable place. This proved to be another strong factor why the settlers wanted to take over Indian land.
In 1875, a treaty with the Sioux and Cheyenne was broken which angered the tribes. They gathered 10,000 men in protest of what the US government did. The government ordered the Indians to return to the reservations but 3,000 stayed
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The United States government sent in General George Armstrong Custer and his 600 men of the 7th Cavalry division to remove the Indians. The Battle was against the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes led by Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. General Custer split his division into three. The other two were led by Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen. By dividing his division in three, this outnumbered his platoon even more as General Custer ignored the plan of a coordinated attack. Leaving himself outnumbered and without reinforcements. General Custer was supposed to wait for reinforcements but he was impatient and attacked alone with his 200 men. This impulsive and impatient behavior was something he had shown on multiple occasions in the Civil War as well as the wars with Indian
LTC George Armstrong Custer did not effectively apply the concept of mission command as a warfighting function during the Battle of Little Bighorn. While it is important to understand the context in which Custer made his decisions, those circumstances offer little in terms of excusing the fiasco that was Little Bighorn. Custer failed to follow orders, did not take pertinent intelligence into consideration, did not adequately plan or execute protection of his forces, and fought without essential fires equipment available to him. Custer did exercise good sustainment, but it was for naught, as the battle was brief.
In 1858, warriors from the Spokane, Palouse, and Coeur d’Alene tribes routed an expeditionary force commanded by Colonel Edward Steptoe. The running battle resulted in seven soldiers dead, two soldiers missing, two howitzer cannons buried, the complete loss of the pack train, and three interpreters killed. Colonel Steptoe and his command escaped in the middle of the night nearly out of ammunition and in desperate condition. The mounted infantry known as Dragoons rode through the next day covering approximately seventy miles to the relative safety of the Snake River.
Today Custer’s last stand is one of the most famous events in American History. Two Thousand Sioux Native Americans slaughtered General George Custer’s army of 600 men armed with guns. Crazy Horse was a very important leader in the Great Sioux War of 1876.
If Custer had not separated his troops into three battalions, they might have left victorious over the Sioux. Windolph also states that “The Indians also stated that the separate detachments made their victory over the troops more certain” (Windolph 161).
Back in 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. This act required the government to negotiate treaties that would require the Native Americans to move to the west from their homelands. Native Americans would be moved to an area called the Indian Territory which is Oklahoma and parts of Kansas and Nebraska. Some tribes that were to be moved are Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. All of the other tribes had relocated in the fall of 1831 to the Indian Territory besides the Cherokee who did not relocate until the fall of 1838. They did not move from their homeland without a fight. Their homeland was parts of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. They started this march in the fall of 1838 and finished in early
It encouraged Westward colonization and territorial acquisition. The Homestead Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. To America, Manifest Destiny was the idea that America was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic, to the Pacific Ocean. Throughout this time, Native Americans were seen as obstacles because they occupied land that the United States needed to conquer to continue with their Manifest Destiny Ideal. Many wars were fought between the American’s and the Indians.... ...
The Sioux and other Native Americans have always been treated poorly by some people. They had to deal with the same racism that the African Americans were dealing with in the South. No one was fighting a war for the Sioux though. The truth is white supremacy runs amuck everywhere and wreaks havoc on society. Racism separated the Sioux from the settlers, but the tipping point was something else entirely. The US made a binding contract, a promise, to pay the Sioux a certain amount of Go...
Many suspect that they were with Washington only to maximize the hate on both sides of the battle. They went against Washington’s orders to not be the aggressors. Soon large units of British and American soldiers were sent to settle what should have been small battles. The French however were prepared to fight back and even had the Indians as allies to help with upcoming battles. In July, Braddock’s army which consisted of over 2000 British soldiers rode west with George Washington and came upon 250 plus French soldiers with over 600 Indians allies. Nearly 1000 British were killed, unlike George Washington who was unhurt during the battle was soon promoted to commander of the Virginia army for his bravery. (Roark 146)
It was thought that God had a plan for Whites to move across both coasts and start the New World. In the painting, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” it shows how difficult and unforgiving the trip westward was (Pohl 163). However, the painting also shows a sigh of relief and excitement that Native American travelers had finally met their destination (Pohl 163). Unfortunately, Native American’s new way of life would be cut short years later due to Andrew Jackson’s secured Passage of the Indian Removal Bill (Pohl 163). This bill was responsible for relocating 70,000 Native Americans to Oklahoma (Pohl 163). The Cherokee who were the most affected group of Native Americans had adopted the living format of Whites. Once they were removed, Whites were able to take over their land. This removal also led to the “Trail of Tears” which ended up taking the lives of 4,000 to 16,000 Cherokee Indians. The Manifest Destiny also caused the uproar and eventual war with
The American settlers wanted Indian land for many reasons. These reasons include geography and terrain, location, resources, and old grudges. First, the geography was perfect for farmers with its fertile land. Next, the location was perfect for trade. It was close to the Mississippi river where trading ports were located. Third, there were many resources such as gold, fertile soul, and water. Finally, the American settlers had old grudges with the Native Americans due to the fact that they sided with the British during the Revolutionary War and slaughtered many American colonists. Due to many reasons, the American settlers wanted Indian land for their own gain.
Whites thought Indians were savages or odd people and they had all the lands. Georgia wanted the federal government to give land to the Cherokee in the Appalachian Mountain and the government approved Georgia’s request. In 1817 6,000 Cherokee were convinced by Jackson to move voluntarily to the Arkansas Territory, but most of them refused. When Jackson was elected as a President, he was committed to move the Cherokee by force. After that, congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and the other Indians tribes went, but the Cherokee planned to stay and fight back politically and legally.
For Americans to expand west, the Indians would have to leave the picture. Americans wanted to acquire more land and take advantage of the newfound resources, however with the Native Americans residing in the land it, caused more difficulties. This was largely the reason why Americans felt there was a need to kill Indians or move them. Americans were also strong believers in Manifest Destiny, “the belief that the United States had a “God-given” right to aggressively spread the values of white civilization and expand the nation from ocean to ocean” (American Promise: A History of the United States).
Manifest Destiny is a phrase used to express the belief that the United States had a mission to expand its borders, thereby spreading its form of democracy and freedom. Originally a political catchphrase of the nineteenth-century, Manifest Destiny eventually became a standard historical term, often used as a synonym for the territorial expansion of the United States across North America towards the Pacific Ocean. The United States government believed that the Native Americans were a problem that was hindering Manifest Destiny from being fulfilled (or at the very least, used the idea of Manifest Destiny to gain land and resources the Indians possessed), and would do everything in their power to exterminate the “Indian Problem.” The U.S. government, along with the majority of the U.S. population, eradicated this problem through lies, forced removal, and murder. This eradication nearly wiped out a race of people, whose only crime was mere existence in a land they had lived on, respected, and cherished for hundreds of years. The U.S. government had three main ways of solving the “Indian Problem”. They would remove them, kill them, or segregate them from the “civilized” white man by placing the Indian on reservations. The Indians soon learned that the U.S. government could not be trusted, and fought fiercely against the harsh injustices that were being administered. Tragically, the Indians would eventually have their spirits broken, living out their meager existence in the terrible homes called reservations.
On June 25, 1876, The Battle of Little Bighorn took place near the Black Hills in Montana. This was one of the most controversial battles of the 20th century and the line between good guys and bad guys was grey at best. Gen. George Armstrong Custer (reduced to LTC after the civil war) had 366 men of the 7thU.S. Cavalry under his command that day. Sitting Bull (A Medicine Man) led 2000 braves of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes (Klos, 2013). At the conclusion of the battle, the stories of the Indians savagery were used to demonize their culture and there were no survivors from the 7thcavalry to tell what really happened.
At the time Andrew Jackson was president, there was a fast growing population and a desire for more land. Because of this, expansion was inevitable. To the west, many native Indian tribes were settled. Andrew Jackson spent a good deal of his presidency dealing with the removal of the Indians in western land. Throughout the 1800’s, westward expansion harmed the natives, was an invasion of their land, which led to war and tension between the natives and America, specifically the Cherokee Nation.