Was Custer a war criminal?

But in slight defense of the actions, it was just was it was for the times. We cannot

blame them by today's moral yardstick.  Just as everyone can honestly say

slavery was wrong today, 140 yrs ago it wasn't wrong. It was what it was. Custer's

actions were just one more turn of the wheel of history. He did well during the 

Civil War with these same kinds of tactics, but this time, the hand of Fate decided

to deny him. The rest is history.

The frank truth is the Plains tribes way of life was doomed once the Americans started crossing the plains and widespread european immigration provided the masses that would people the 'Great American Desert". The great majority of those involved, white or red, never understood how rapid that process would take place. Bernard deVoto's Across the Wide Missouri which is a study of the Mountain Man culture, captures the period when the middle of the continent was the Red Man's territory, and the sadness of those who, a mere generation later, realized that it was passing into history.

Custer was merely one cog in the wheel of the nation, and those insist on viewing him as some agent of genocide are engaging in mere 'feel good' rhetoric that ignores the meaning of the word. Ah yes, it must have been the design of those evil republicans! There was one light in this thread's darkness, as evidenced by the reference to the Comanche, whose northern plains counterparts were the Cheyenne and Lakota. Pekka Hamalainen's Comanche Empire is well worth the read, despite it's sometime overly stilted sentences, for anyone truly interested in what life in the Southern Plains was like for native Americans.

Oh, Autie, here's an idea: It was never about 'land' per se. It was about the improbability of two such different civilizations sharing the same continent. And the American expansion west was no different than the Vietnamese expansion south, and the Cossack expansions east, or the European expeditions into the heart of Africa. All of them impacted upon the peoples they came across, sometimes to their benefit, and sometimes not.