THE PRAIRIE EDITOR: A Forgotten Story From U.S. History

It was a tragedy within a tragedy, but the latter became so
iconic in 19th century U.S. history that the former was
forgotten in the 20th and 21st centuries.

“Custer’s Last Stand” became a synonym for hopeless
defeat in battle, and its eponymous commander, the
colorful and impetuous Col. George Armstrong Custer
became a household name for every schoolboy and
schoolgirl in America --- as familiar almost perhaps as
Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.

On June 26, 1876. on a remote Montana hillside known
as Little Bighorn, Col. Custer and more than 250 U.S.
troops were ambushed by bands of warriors from
various Native American tribes who lived in the area,
and all the soldiers perished. It was a Pyrrhic
victory for the tribes, however, because when news of
the massacre reached the U.S. settlements in the East,
the popular outrage was so great that a new military
campaign was ordered that eventually led to the end of
armed Native American resistance in the West. (Today,
public revulsion to the massacre would probably be
accompanied by much more sympathy to the Native
Americans whose ancestral lands were then being
taken over mostly by force.)

Many parents received official notification of their
son’s death in the days following, but none were more
devastated than Emmanuel and  Marie Custer in
Michigan when Army telegrams informed them that
not only had their son George died at Little Bighorn,
but that two of his brothers, Thomas and Boston,
their son-in-law James Calhoun, and their grandson
Henry Armstrong Read (age 18) had died in the battle
there as well.

Thomas, in fact,was the most decorated Union soldier
of the then recent Civil War, having won two medals of
honor for battlefield bravery.

During the Civil War, several  Bixby brothers reportedly
died in separate battles, and this is remembered
primarily for the eloquent letter President Lincoln
wrote to their mother in Boston.

Other multiple same-family losses in various other U.S.
combat actions have been recorded.
 
In recent years, a widely-distributed Hollywood film
“Saving Private Ryan” was made as a fictional story,
based on the experience of a real family, about four
World War II soldier brothers, and the efforts
of the U.S. Army to prevent the loss of a fourth
brother then in combat. (A third brother, reported lost
in Burma, turned up alive in a prisoner-of-war camp
at the end of the war.)

Grievous as all combat deaths are, as were the losses
of other same-family members in those and other 
military combat occasions, no other immediate family
seems to have suffered a greater tragedy than did the
Custers at that Battle of the Little Bighorn on that June
day in 1876.

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Copyright (c) 2021 by Barry Casselman. All rights reserved.