Red Sunday: The Battle of the Little Bighorn

by G. Jack Urso

 

From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.

Red Sunday (1976), produced by the Montana and North Dakota Historical Societies' Bicentennial Commissions, is a 30-minute documentary profiling the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the battle. In the course of my research into the battle in the past (see Aeolus 13 Umbra: The Mystery of the Little Bighorn Battlefield), I reviewed a lot of documentaries and this one of the best. Using archival photographs, Native illustrations, location footage, excellent writing, and narration provided by John McIntire, an actor best known for his roles on The Virginian and Wagon Train, all these elements combine to create a compelling narrative of the events that led up to the battle.

The battle itself was a disaster entirely of the U.S. government’s own creation. It wanted the gold-laden Black Hills of Dakota, ceded to the Sioux in the Red Cloud treaty of 1868 (following a war in which the United States lost). The Sioux refused to sell the Black Hills, so in December 1875 the government issued an order for all non-reservation Natives living on ceded land, where they had a right to be, to return to their reservations by January 31, 1876, when the harsh Dakota winter will have already settled in — provided word even got to all the tribes, which was unlikely for the wildly scattered tribes living in their winter camps. 

For people who traveled by horse and foot, this was impossible, and that was part of the plan. Any tribes who did not obey the command gave the government an excuse to declare the tribes hostile and use military force to compel them to return, no congressional approval needed. It was ethnic cleansing by administrative fiat. Despite the Sioux and Cheyenne victory that day, the government eventually defeated the tribes, seized the Black Hills, and then carved the faces of four presidents on it. For the Sioux, it was, and remains, a sacrilege.

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of revaluation of the way we treated the Native American. Still, America then was split on how it regarded George Armstrong Custer, with the tug between hero worship in the 1967 TV series The Legend of Custer and insanity in the 1970 film Little Big Man. While the truth is often somewhere in between the two extremes, and 150 years of research has brought us closer to the truth of what happened on June 25, 1876, the last 30 minutes of the battle largely remains a mystery.

A relic from the gift shop at the battlefield.

I discovered this film during my visit in 1990 to what was then still known as the Custer Battlefield (since renamed the Little Bighorn National Battlefield). One can see the production style that would later be reflected in Ken Burns’ documentaries, and the writing, combined with John McIntire’s stentorian narration, captures the mystery and legacy of the battle and comes together to create a powerful and sublime ending.

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