UBC: Fox, Archaeology, History, and Custer's Last Battle

Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined by Richard A. Fox

My rating: 5 of 5 stars




This is an excellent book. It has a few flaws, most notably, Fox's writing style, which suffers vilely from the almost-right-word, and of course it's more than twenty years old, so for all I know it's been completely discredited.

I hope not, because Fox presents a clear, rational, and extensively substantiated argument about what happened in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and why Custer lost.

This book is also an excellent complement to Custer's Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed. Where Gray takes you through the campaign leading up to the battle, Fox uses archaeology, specifically an analysis of bullets and shell casings found, plus a consideration of the US Cavalry's tactical manual (Cavalry Tactics, United States Army (1874)), the testimony of white eyewitnesses, and the testimony of Native American participants and observers, to take you through the battle. (He calls Gray out specifically on his failure to use Native American testimony to reconstruct the battle; I think Gray is very good at using Native American testimony when he can figure out how to measure time from white testimony, but without that yardstick, he doesn't seem to know how to proceed.)

Fox argues that Custer's battalion (Cos. C, E, F, I, and L, plus HQ staff, plus scouts and civilians) was on the offensive as it headed into Medicine Tail Coulee (the last time the battalion was seen alive by white men). Custer's orders were less about fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne and more about rounding them up and returning them to the reservations, so (Fox argues) when the battalion reached eyeshot of the village and saw that the women and children were fleeing west and north, he didn't attack, but pursued. The warriors were mostly off fighting Reno to the south, so Cos. C, I, and L staked out Calhoun Hill while Cos. E, F, and the HQ staff went north and west, looking for a good place to cross the river in pursuit.

What happened then is basically a demonstration of why guerillas can hold out against traditional armies for much longer than seems at all likely. Cos. C, I, and L stood still, L Co. defending against the known but not serious threat to their immediate south, while the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors infiltrated the coulees and ridges around them. When the soldiers realized that warriors had gotten uncomfortably close to the west, C Co. charged them, and that's where the whole thing starts to fall apart.

Fox is using a combat model he calls stability/disintegration, and he points out a number of factors that made Custer's battalion ripe for disintegration. The final straw was the fact that there were a lot more Native American warriors a lost closer than C Co. was prepared for. The company disintegrated and fell back to Calhoun Hill, at which point some officer (who was not Custer, since Custer was off northwest on Custer Hill looking for the women & children to capture) made a serious tactical blunder. He swung L Co. from holding a defensive line against the south to holding a defensive line against the west--while the threat from the south remained unresolved. (And it wasn't like there wasn't a whole third company, I Co., that could have been deployed.) L Co., under fire from both front and left flank, and with C Co. already panicked, themselves panicked in turn, and the panic spread like a fire. All three companies fled north, putting up little to no resistance against the Native Americans who were quick to close in. Fox's research suggests that very few of them made it to Custer Hill.

At Custer Hill, E and F Cos. scrambled back to defend, but they were already off balance, and they had (maybe 20) panicked survivors of the right wing of their battalion rushing up on them, and more and more Sioux and Cheyenne were being drawn away from Reno to attack Custer. The soldiers bunched up (which Fox says is the most natural and most fatal of reactions when tactical stability starts to disintegrate) and died. The last few survivors made a desperate flight west (trying to reach the river?) but were trapped in the aptly named Deep Ravine and killed.

The whole thing took less than two hours.

The book began as Fox's Ph.D. dissertation, and you can see the long cold fingers of his thesis committee in the attempts to "make a wider argument" and "explain why archaeology matters." Ignoring those bits will do you no harm, and otherwise this book provided more answers to the why and how of Little Bighorn than I thought I'd ever have.





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