"Vengeance" Reviewed by William Winkler

This June marks the 150^th anniversary of George Armstrong Custer’s overwhelming defeat at the battle of the Little Bighorn.

Tom Clavin is a New York Times reporter and prolific documenter of the post-Civil War American West. His most recent book, “Vengeance,” details the history of the U.S. government’s interactions with the Native American nations that led up to the massacre of the U.S. Army’s seventh cavalry on the banks of the river in what is now southeastern Montana.

Drawing extensively on previously published history, and on primary sources such as diaries and letters, Clavin documents the beliefs, philosophies, and actions that led to the battle and the consequences of the years beyond it.

Early in the 19^th century the newly-born United States was outgrowing its territory near the Atlantic coast. Belief in the nation’s exceptionalism, as well as chauvinistic conviction that the indigenous people who lived in the lands beyond those territories were merely savages incapable of comprehending or living the life of “civilized” Americans, led to the conviction that these people were an impediment to the nation’s growth. President Andrew Jackson championed the removal of southeastern tribes to inhospitable lands farther to the west, beginning a pattern of relocation, isolation, and neglect of those tribes, a pattern leading directly to the Sioux Wars of 1876 and numerous other encounters.

The American Civil War generated a host of professional military officers, of whom George Custer was one. Such a class of officers was instrumental in the subjugation of the Native Americans believed to be obstructing the country’s westward expansion.

Clavin describes the wars between tribes of the west as well as their alliances, pointing out that the tribes warred not only with the United States but also with one another in equal measure. These internecine wars led to the kind of unity between the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe that lead to their overwhelming rout of the Americans in 1876.

In the final chapters Clavin points out that this defeat so incensed the American press, and thus the populace, that all-out war was declared on all Native American nations, culminating in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, ending any possibility for indigenous people’s independence.

“Vengeance” depends heavily on previously published accounts of the events of the nineteenth century west, but paints memorable portraits of the participants in those events, both U.S. and Indigenous.

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