I spotted Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Crazy Horse and Custer remaindered at a bargin bookshop in Dublin a few weeks back and picked it up with an armful of other random bargins. Ambrose is famous as the author of Band of Brothers which was serialised into a hit TV show and other second world war histories. So I was curious as to what angle he was likely to take on the American – Lakota Sioux war of the 1860’s and 1870’s
I spotted Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Crazy Horse and Custer remaindered at a bargin bookshop in Dublin a few weeks back and picked it up with an armful of other random bargins. Ambrose is famous as the author of Band of Brothers which was serialised into a hit TV show and other second world war histories. So I was curious as to what angle he was likely to take on the American – Lakota Sioux war of the 1860’s and 1870’s
About half of my reading time is carefully planned, consisting of a large number of selected books on a particular topic which I take detailed notes from as I read. And the other half is random bargins that catch my eye, generally of a historical and often miltary history bent. I’ve a stack of those on my reading shelf including histories of the English Civil War, Belgian imperialism in the Congo, the Irish Feminist movement of the 1970’s and others.
Until the point that I moved for a while to North America in 2007 I’d taken very little interest in the Native American population of North American apart from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Federation) and this only because of the influence they had on Edward Fitzgerald and the United Irishmen. I’d discovered this in 1988 when researching the article The 1798 rebellion and the origins of Irish republicanism for the 200th anniversary of the rebellion. For the curious the thread United Irishmen and the Iroquois over on Anarchist Black Cat introduces some of these links.
On the other hand in the 1990’s I took considerable interest in the indigenous population of Southern Mexico. This was because of the huge influence of indigenous practise in Chiapas on the Zapatista rebellion. In any case between 1994 and 1998 when I published "What is it that is different about the Zapatistas?" I read intensively about the historic Maya civilisation, including the core archelogical study ‘The Ancient Maya’, visited the achelogicial sites at Palenque & Chichen Itza as well as the Aztec sites at Tenochtitlan and the much older site at Ticholatan the identity of whose builders is disputed. I also read every Zapatista communique and interview that was translated into English (a very high percentage in those years) and travelled to Chiapas twice, the first time to take part in the Intergalatic encounter, the second time to conduct interviews with observers and Zapatista’s about the nature of their movement, many in the Zapatista community of Diez de Abril where the Irish Mexico Group maintained a presence over a period of years.
A little earlier in 1992 I’d written the article 1492 – 1992 Christopher Columbus slaver and thief which I added to the article archive a while back. That was one of those articles I’d written to order based on a very limited knowledge and while the material on Columbus and the Spanish conquest is similar to what I’d write today it ends with vast over simplification of pre-Columbian societies that I wouldn’t repeat. Yes the Aztecs were military societies and the Lakota and others practised a form of ‘primitive communism’ but there were other examples chiefly the Rotinonshón:ni who constructed an advanced, densly populated, multi nation society whcih did not "develop into a hierarchically stratified society, with a centralized state and an exploitative economic redistribution system." Stephen Jones has written an excellent anarchist introduction to that society under the title of ‘Where License Reigns With All Impunity,’ Of my 1992 article I’d say I was still clearly under the influence of the simplistic orthodox marxist approach to the question of the development of human society.
During the months I spent in Canada I was fairly close to Brantford, Ontario which is the site on an ongoing conflict between the Kanien’kehá:ka / Mohawk of the 6 Nations and the Canadian government as part of the Six Nations struggle to reclaim the land given to them in the Haldimand Proclamation. It was maybe 50km away but as I didn’t drive I never actually got up there although I did meet supporters of the struggle in the nearby cities of Toronto and Hamilton. That rather thin experience along with some research did lead me to pen the article ‘First Nations in Canada – When Property Law Does Not Apply‘ for Common Cause but really as much to try and start a more critical debate around indigenous soverignty in the Canadian context then as a worked out position.
Anyway after that long diversion back to the book at hand. Overall I was impressed. Ambrose is quite strong on the advantages of life in Lakota society as compared with American society at that point in time. Although he is a military historian he spends quite a bit of time sketching our how Lakota society worked, looking at the gender relationships within Lakota and American society, mostly through looking at how his protagonists related to the women in their lives. Ambrose uses the term Sioux rather than Lakota Sioux or just Lakota throughout the book, the preferred term is generally Lakota so it’s the one I’ve used with a couple of exceptions.
One of his core arguments is that the Lakota could have won in the medium term and imposed a much better settlement but the level of centralisation, discipline and militarisation this would have required would have destroyed what was worth defending about Lakota society. In the longer term the railways were coming and with them the destruction of the buffalo herds around which the Lakota way of living had come to depend. He shows that many of the American military commanders understood this, and saw that this meant time was on their side. All the same a large-scale defeat of the US Army would have halted construction and perhaps forced the USA to conceded a very large parcel of territory in which part of that way of life could have been maintained.
He argues that in order to inflict this level of defeat the Lakota would have had to replace their horizontal methods of organising in which warriors only followed a leader so long as they wanted to and where there was no real central command with one where there was a clear chain of command. This was how the US army operated, men who refused to obey orders could be punished up to and including execution. The movements of several different armies could be co-ordinated across a large area and all were clearly part of a chain of command stretching back to the US President.
Of course there is much that is worrying about Ambrose’s argument form an anarchist perspective as it seems to suggest that the authoritarian society must always defeat the libertarian one. However in his books on World War Two Ambrose goes to considerable pains to argue that greater authoritarianism does not necessarly gurantee military victory. From the point of view of organisational anarchism it is quite possible to sketch an alternative method of organisation that the Lakota could have followed to overcome some of the disadvantages they faced. This alongside the fact that they did inflict two significant defeats, the first of which resulted in holding back the expansion for several years suggests that an alternative ‘what if’ to the one Ambrose offers could be constructed that would retain many of the features of the society being fought for.
Ambrose makes a considerable effort to be fair to Custer both in terms of placing him within the context of the time he lived and the fact that he came from a relatively lowly position in that society. But he comes across as vain glorious character who won his reputation during the Civil Way by taking huge gambles with the lives of his men, gambles which sometimes paid off for him turned him into the darling of the papers. The only thing that could be said in Custer’s defence was that he took the same risks he forced his men into. During the Civil War he would lead from the front the dangerous cavalry charges he ordered that often resulted in large numbers of dead and wounded on his side. The Union was very much stronger in both men and equipment then the confederacy and like the British war generals of the First World War the Union commanders were prone to frontal confrontations that would result in huge losses on both sides as they believed in the long run the Union was more able to sustain such losses. Ambrose points out that this sort of approach would never have been acceptable in Lakota society and that any leader who fought battles like this would have seen his army melt away.
It is apparent from Ambrose’s book that the Lakota recognised very early on that contact with the expanding US empire and in particular the railway was bringing their way of life to an end. Two distinct but sometimes overlapping strategies were developed to preserve what was possible. The more famous was that followed by Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and many others, to retreat to the areas beyond the easy access of the army and resist the encroachment for as long as possible. By doing this they suceeded in maintaining the Lakota way of life in a fairly complete form for a couple of extra decades. The second strategy followed by Red Cloud (who has also intially fought the army) and others was a partial adoption to the demands of the empire, in particular to set up camps where they were instructed around the army forts and the agencies.
One of the most interesting aspects of Ambrose’s book was that as presents it few Lakota choose one or the other of these strategies. Instead, for as long as it remained possible, individuals and groups would switch back and forth between them. The Lakota army at the Little Big Horn was overwhelmingly composed of Lakota warriors who had spent the previous winter in the agencies. This was not exceptional, every spring large numbers of Lakota would leave the agencies to join the ‘wild Sioux’ for the hunting and raiding periods of the warmer seasons and avoid the winter season in the increasingly inhospitable areas the ‘wild Sioux’ were being forced to retreat to. Sitting Bull led the last attempt to keep that lifestyle going by crossing the border into Canada but most refused to go with him, considering the winters up there so hard as to make life impossible. Most of those who went including Sitting Bull gave up the attempt after five years and returned to the US to surrender.
There are some controversies around Ambrose’s account but these mostly revolved issues that are in themselves controversies, like the exact circumstances of Crazy Horses murder in captivity and the role of other Lakota leaders in this. Ambrose’s book is written as a story rather than an exact history so he seldom offers more than one version of events. I don’t have a particular problem with this as that narrative style makes it easy to read (and hence will inspire some to look at the other more detailed works he recommends). He certainly raises some interesting questions of interest both to any reader, and in terms of what he says about progress, warfare and hierichy to anarchists in particular.
In updating my blogs on my North American speaking tour of 2007-8 one of the things I ended up doing was adding accounts of what the pre-Columbian population of the various stops were and what I could find out about what happened to them. Ambrose in his account notes that those Native American nations that worked with the army against the Lakota from an early date ended up in no better position then the Lakota who resisted both in this period and later on. The American Revolution had an enormous impact on the creation of a radical republicanism in Ireland, its sobering to be reminded that many of the limits that would become obvious in that republicanism were present when you look at the attitude of American revolutionaries to both the Native American and African American populations of their time.