Killing Custer Reflection

First off, I enjoyed “Killing Custer” a great deal. Welch’s righting style and the stories told by the Indian’s point of view were very captivating and heartbreaking. It really shed a lot of light on the incidents and massacres that occurred during the Indian wars. What I found intriguing was how pushed aside the Indian stories were during this time and even in today’s society.

When reading the numbers of how 6 million Indians inhabited the contiguous United States when Columbus arrived and by 1900, less than 250,000 thousand remained, I couldn’t help but think of the World War Two genocide. I realize that the Indian Wars were a “War”, but it is hard to believe that the white men at the time merely wanted to be victorious. Throughout the book, people of high power used words such as Annihilate to describe how they wanted the Indians to be dealt with. Also, on multiple occasions, the whites wouldn’t make a treaty with the Indians because they knew they would just wipe them out of the territory such as the Black Hills.

I also found it interesting that there were multiple Indian groups that took different sides of the issues. From growing up and learning about the Indian wars in public school, I imagined that all of the Indians were working together to fight back against the incoming whites. What I learned from reading the book was that there were tribes that tried to work with the whites through treaties, tribes that didn’t want any part of American treaties and wanted to be left alone (Sitting Bull), and Indians that even worked a long side the whites such as Custer’s scouts.