, the battle and Custer's actions there were events of minor importance. "That is to say, American history would presumably not have turned out very differently if the whites had won the fight or if it had never happened." It is true that popular sentiment against the Indians was strengthened and the will to support the cruel war against the Indians was increased by public perception of the battle. But the decision to remove the Sioux and the Cheyenne from their lands had been made in Washington and nothing was really going to stop this campaign. Thus it is important to try to understand why this particular battle has remained a central event in American history -- both for white Americans and Native Americans. It should be noted that much of the interest in and controversy over the battle has nothing to do with the conflict between European Americans and Native Americans. Custer's personality, even the Indians' possible perception of him as treacherous, are not important to this issue because he was merely a part of a genocidal campaign that has gone on without interruption long after Custer died.
The role of the Native American in the history of the United States has been strangely limited even by the standards of the winners who write history. But, as Reed notes, this is because it served the broader purposes of historians to define the Indians by limiting them to the narrow context of a "barrier" to the natural and inevitable Westward progress of Europeans in America. The Native Americans could be viewed as savages, even noble savages if it served a fleeting purpose, and were thus not due the consideration awarded to fully developed human beings. Yet there could be a surprising lack of interest in how that barrier was even dealt with. One approach was to pretend that the invaders had assimilated the spirit of the land which, incidentally, included the spirit of the people living there. An important historian, Fred...