The Battle of Little Big Horn
Uploaded by Admin on Jan 22, 1999
When I think back of the stories that I have heard about how the Native American Indians were driven from their land and forced to live on the reservations one particular event comes to my mind. That event is the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It is one of the few times that the Oglala Sioux made history with them being the ones who left the battlefield as winners. When stories are told, or when the media dares to tamper with history, it is usually the American Indians who are looked upon as the bad guys. They are portrayed as savages who spent their time raiding wagon trains and scalping the white settlers just for fun. The media has lead us to believe that the American government was forced to take the land from these savage Indians. We should put the blame where it belongs, on the U.S. Government who lied, cheated, and stole from the Oglala forcing Crazy Horse, the great war chief, and many other leaders to surrender their nation in order to save the lives of their people.
In the nineteenth century the most dominant nation in the western plains was the Sioux Nation. This nation was divided into seven tribes: Oglala's, Brule', Minneconjou, Hunkpapa, No Bow, Two Kettle, and the Blackfoot. Of these tribes they had different band. The Hunkpatila was one band of the Oglala's (Guttmacher 12). One of the greatest war chiefs of all times came from this band. His name was Crazy Horse.
Crazy Horse was not given this name, on his birth date in the fall of 1841. He was born of his father, Crazy Horse an Oglala holy man, and his mother a sister of a Brule' warrior, Spotted Tail. As the boy grew older his hair was wavy so his people gave him the nickname of Curly (Guttmacher 23). He was to go by Curly until the summer of 1858, after a battle with the Arapaho's. Curly's brave charged against the Arapaho's led his father to give Curly the name Crazy Horse. This was the name of his father and of many fathers before him (Guttmacher 47).
In the 1850's, the country where the Sioux Nation lived, was being invaded by the white settlers. This was upsetting for many of the tribes. They did not understand the ways of the whites. When the whites tore into the land with plows and hunted...