General #Custer was killed here in 1876. His decisive defeat was dubbed as his ‘last stand,’ though all accounts point to him being discovered in a state of permanent recline. The titling of his death strikes me as the nineteenth century’s equivalent of a late night all-caps tweet, a recasting of defeat as something that it wasn’t. Custer’s demise was not operatic. Captain Frederick Benteen, a man who surveyed the bodies left on the battlefield just two days after the last shots were fired, reported as much. It was running chaos, he concluded. “It was a rout, a panic, until the last man was killed.” In any telling of the story, it’s worth noting that the Indian Wars didn’t end until 1924 —twelve years after my own grandmother was born to a family homesteaded on the very land for which the wars were being waged. By that time, estimates place the war’s toll as tantamount to a genocide having eliminated 80-98% of the targeted populations from the American interior.
By the measure of history, it’s safe to say that the connective tissue that stretches between generations is not atrophied by millennia; its memory is recent and its consequences are neither static nor trapped in a vacuum. The inertia that launched Manifest Destiny didn’t just roll off and slowly come to a rest at the bottom of the Pacific. It ricocheted about, fueling new people with its surplus of old gas. This is how broken ideas stretch forward through history, touching us from time to time as a cudgel that implores us to turn backwards. We can feel it when our collective whole seeks itself in memes that discard any countervailing truths that would otherwise introduce ripples into our Narcissus reflection. In the pinball trajectory that began long before we were all born, there comes a point where the emptiness that was once transversed intersects with the course of things present and, for a split second, the abyss is left to stare back into itself.