How Did Beer Help Sell the Myth of Custer's Last Stand?

advertising campaign. The company produced one hundred and fifty thousand copies of a chromo lithographic print called Custer's Last Fight, and they plastered it in saloons and taverns across the

United States. The print, based on an eighteen eighty eight painting by Cassiley Adams, depicts a chaotic battle scene on the Montana Territory plains, with some dozen blue uniformed cavalrymen laying dead or wounded on the ground as war painted American Indians finished them off with clubs, spears, and rifles. In the center of the violent scrum is a long haired Custer, addressed in fringed buckskin, raising his saber skyward to dispatch one last enemy warrior before succumbing to the

overwhelming force of his attackers. For the article, this episode is based on how stuff works. Spoke with Tim Lahman, a professor of history and political science at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. He said, more people learned about what they think happened at Custer's Last Stand from this Anheuser Busch lithograph, and probably after a few Budweisers. Even today. In American mythology, the popular notion of Custer's Last Stand

echoes the story told in this much reproduced painting. Custer's Down to the Last Defeat ranks with the Alamo as a tale of white heroism in the face of Native aggression, of patriotic martyrs dying with their boots on to protect colonists moving westward. But the real story isn't nearly so cut and dried. Today, let's talk about what was really

going on with Custer's Last Stand. On June twenty fifth of eighteen seventy six, the Civil War cavalry hero known as the Boy General George Custer led a US army attack on a Native village in the Black Hills in violation of a treaty promising those lands to the Lakota people. A Custer and his seventh Cavalry were clearly the aggressors, and if the Battle of Little Bighorn was anyone's last stand, it was that of a group of Plains Indians defending

their very way of life. Layman said it was crystal clear to sitting bull in the Lakota that they would be attacked that summer, and they saw the confrontation as one last great fight for their free way of living before they had to submit to agencies and reservations and federal domination. Custer was a complex and controversial figure even

in his day. A brash troublemaker at West Point who graduated last in his class a, Custer earned fame during a series of heroic cavalry charges at the Battle of Gettysburg, which landed him on the cover of Harper's Weekly and propelled him to becoming the youngest general in US military history. After the Civil War, Custer chased further glory on the Western frontier and rebranded himself as an and I quote Indian hunter, a complete with buckskin suits cut in European

styles with fringe on the callers and sleeves. In dispatches that Custer wrote for newspapers and magazines back east, he sold himself as a veteran frontiersman with intimate knowledge of indigenous ways, but in reality, Custer didn't speak a lick of Lakota or Cheyenne languages and had very little understanding

of the peoples he fought. After the eighteen sixty eight Battle of Washida River, Custer bravely or foolishly went to a Cheyenne encampment, nearly alone, to negotiate the relief of hostages. The Cheyenne invited him to a pipe ceremony to settle the agreement, which Custer took as a sign of respect, but that wasn't the intended message. Layman explained. They understood that Custer promised never to attack the Cheyenne again, and

if he did, he would be rubbed out. They took the pipe, dumped out the ashes, and rubbed them into the dirt as a sign of what would happen to him.

In eighteen sixty eight, Fort Laramie Treaty created a reservation of land for the Lakota people in the Black Hills region of modern day Montana, But when gold was discovered in the Black Hills in eighteen seventy four, Congress decided it was time to rewrite that Treaty, Custer and the seventh Cavalry were sent to Montana Territory under the pretense of convincing resistance leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to come to the nego otiating table, but the real

intention was a colonist takeover of the lucrative Black Hill's gold deposits. In June of eighteen seventy six, Custer was given orders to engage with the Lakota at the head of the Rosebud River, but Custer decided to follow tracks to the nearby Little Bighorn River. The preferred US Army tactic was a dawn raid on Native villages, but Custer worried that waiting for morning would sacrifice the element of surprise, so he split his forces in three and ordered the

attack on Sitting Bull's encampment in mid afternoon. Under Custer's battle plan, Major Marcus Reno led a direct charge into the village while Custer and one hundred and twenty men occupied a ridge where they could round up any escaping women and children to hold his hostages. This was a charming tactic Custer had used before to force surrender. Unfortunately

for Custer, the plan fell apart almost instantly. Arino's men were easily repulsed by the Lakota and Cheyenne fighters, and a contingent of Ogla La Lakota, led by Crazy Horse, circled back on Custer's forces and trapped them on what's now known as Last Stand Hill. A. Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses for

a makeshift bunker, but it was hopeless. The end captured in paintings like Custer's Last Fight show Custer and his men bravely fighting until their last breath, but the archaeological record and contemporary Native accounts say otherwise. Olayman said the evidence suggests tactical disintegration, which is a nicer way of saying that they got really scared and started to run once the panic set in. Indian combatants said it was like hunting buffalo. We just rode down and killed them.

The shocking news of Custer's death spread like wildfire, and the newspapers immediately cast him as a martyr for manifest destiny. The New York Herald published a wholly fictional account of the battle's final moments, quote in that mad charge up the narrow ravine with the rocks above, raining down, led upon the faded three hundred, with fires spouting from every bush ahead, with the wild swarming horsemen circling along the heights like shrieking vultures, waiting for the moment to sweep

down and finish the bloody tale. Every form, from private to general, rises to heroic size. They died as grandly as Homer's demigods. Success was beyond their grasps, so they died to a man. It's unclear where the particular phrase Custer's last stand was first coin, but the mythology of a last stand was well entrenched at this point in the American Indian Wars. Custer himself had used the same poetic language in a letter to the father of a soldier whose company was by a Native ambush in eighteen

sixty seven. In the decades after Custer's death, the last stand myth was popularized, and not only in beer advertisements, but in Buffalo Bill Cody's immensely popular Wild West show, in which the real sitting Bull actually participated for a time. And Custer's widowed wife, Libby, spent the next fifty two years of her long life writing books and giving lectures

about her heroic husband that cemented his legacy. This fictional concept of Custer's heroism and his last stand was used to justify unbridled westward expansion, despite the fact that there was already a civilization there. It just didn't look like what European Americans expected, and it had resources that they wanted.

Layman said. It created the image the Custer in a last stand was simply defending himself, and that European Americans more broadly, were defending themsel from these aggressive hordes of Indians. People created the death that they wanted to imagine had happened to their hero. It turned out that the last stand story spread by the pro Custer press had its

intended effect. The army experienced a rush of recruitment of so called Custer Avengers, who waged a series of brutal campaigns over the following year that defeated the holdout Lakota and Cheyenne resistance. Today's episode is based on the article Beer Ads and wild West Shows hyped the myth of Custer's heroic last Stand on how stuffworks dot com, written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuffworks dot com and is produced

by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.