DECEMBER 10:

Jacques-René de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville 1637-1710 soldier, governor, was born on this day at Denonville, France, in 1637; died there Sept. 22, 1710. Denonville was appointed Governor General of New France in 1685; arrived at Quebec Aug. 01 during attacks by the Iroquois, backed by the English; 1686 sent de Troyes overland to attack Hudson's Bay Company posts on James Bay; 1687 led punitive expedition against the Seneca north of New York, burning villages and crops and sending Iroquois prisoners to France to serve as galley slaves; 1689 abandoned and destroyed Fort Frontenac after Iroquois Five Nations attacked Lachine; recalled for military service in Europe.

December 10, 1890: Miles orders Ft.Yeates to "secure" Sitting Bull.

December 10, 1991: The Custer Monument name is changed to the Little Big Horn Battleground Monument.

1948 United Nations, New York - United Nations General Assembly adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Canada a signatory; proclaims a 'common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms'.
 
 
 

BACKGROUND:
 

Ed's Note:  An interesting and informative narrative - albeit told from a non-native perspective, follows ...
 

Excerpt from http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/0897/9708custer.html
 

No Surrender
 

In the summer of 1876, Custer and Sitting Bull squared off at the bloodbath known as Little Bighorn. For the descendents of those who died or walked away scarred - and for those who squabble over the battleground generations later - there continues to be No Surrender.
 

By Frederick Turner
 

One recent gray morning, I stood on the grounds of what had once been the largest encampment of militant Indians in the recorded history of North America. At my feet the brown and turbid waters of the Little Bighorn River, swollen with runoff from the season's last snowstorm, swirled past me in a wide bend through cottonwoods, box elders, and wild rosebushes.

Above the tangled branches on the opposite bank, I could see the high bluffs the river had cut through time, and then the beginnings of the undulating hills leading to the ridge where George Armstrong Custer and his fatally divided portion of the Seventh Cavalry made their last stand on a scorching June day 121 years ago.

Up on Battle Ridge, of course, there are all manner of official memorials to the fallen white men. Down here by the river, however, where the engagement actually began, I saw no historical markers, no plaques. That this site is not part of the 765-acre Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument - the land surrounding the battlefield has been part of the Crow Indian Reservation since 1868 and remains generally off-limits to visitors - is no accident. The contrast between the uncommemorated ground on which I stood and the groomed and managed hills above, with their sacred grove of graves, reflects the historic imbalance of interpretation that existed for nearly a century after the last soldier went down on June 26, 1876.

In recent years, though, there has been a momentous shift toward correcting this imbalance at Little Bighorn, and a simmeringly open controversy over how best to do it. National Park Service officials in charge of the battlefield have been trying, they say, to make the site itself - the land, the hills, the markers, the tour guides - tell the complete and bloody story of the battle. Which means including the victors' side of the hostilities. That there were always two sides to the engagement may seem obvious enough now, but the halting moves toward historical reassessment have faced steadfast opposition from a platoon of Custer buffs and military-minded traditionalists. These critics have been crying that the emphasis, once so staunchly pro-white, has swung to the opposite extreme. Some of them would like to return to the old days - to dreams of Custer, the blond Indian fighter in dazzling white buckskin, hacked down by red-skinned savages. But many less-rabid buffs now understand that the secular myth of Custer's Last Stand never did full justice to the complexity of the battle. As the debate rages - Who won? Who lost? Who's to blame? - Little Bighorn has once again become an arena of high drama, a drama that some combatants argue goes far beyond the quarrel at hand and reaches to our understanding of ourselves as a people.

On that gray morning, I made my way carefully along the riverbank through low, interlacing branches, watching where I put my feet. THIS IS RATTLESNAKE COUNTRY, advised signs up on the battlefield proper. Up ahead, six Canada geese flared out ahead of me, circled back to see what I was, and honked away toward the Bighorn Mountains. Then there was only the sound of the river gnawing away at the skin of the globe.

I'd been here before, in 1970, on the anniversary of the Last Stand, when you could still walk all around what was then called the Custer Battlefield National Monument. I'd hiked down to the riverside and had just started to strip for a ritual immersion when suddenly the air was split with a chorus of cries - "Yi! Yi! Yi! Yi!" - and beneath it the drumming of hoofbeats. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I looked wildly about. For a moment, history was suddenly too much alive, and I felt a muffled echo of the panic that beset those cavalrymen, raw recruits many of them, who had blundered into that huge village of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. Then I saw across the river a bunch of Crow kids on ponies, galloping along the bank and whooping in the high glee of youth and a summer's day. They'd come down to the river from some of the ranches that lie along the flats west of the Little Bighorn. They were wearing bathing suits, and while I watched they jerked their ponies to a halt, jumped off, and ran down to the riverside to plunge in. A hundred yards downstream the current eddied about the mostly submerged wreck of an old car, and the boys swung expertly about it and made their way to the bank. They clambered out of the water, their skin shining in the sun, and ran back up to their starting point, where they began their swift downstream glide all over again. My neck hairs relaxed, the momentary kinship with the doomed cavalrymen fell away from me, and I became once again just another tourist, safely protected by all the history made since the battle.

One of the peculiarities of Little Bighorn is the way that the battle is perpetually refought, just as it has been in more than a thousand books, in more than 40 movies, and in countless other forms of reenactment. Among historians, virtually every statistic of the actual event remains in dispute: how many troopers rode with Custer, how many soldiers and Indians died in the engagement, how long the battle lasted. As for the numbers in the encampment, some say there may have been as many as 15,000 Indians spread out for miles along the river they knew as the Greasy Grass, and there may have been more than 2,000 fighting men on the Indian side, some armed with Winchester repeaters or Henry rifles, most with bows and arrows. In his superb 1984 book Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell notes that some survivors of the Reno and Benteen detachments, who watched from a bluff four miles south of the Last Stand as the tribes slowly moved out late in the afternoon of June 26, thought the departing column was five miles long. Captain Frederick Benteen - whose failure, or inability, to come to Custer's aid remains hotly controversial - said that it was three miles long and half a mile wide. Private Charles Windolph, who lived until 1950, recalled looking through the lifting smoke of the campfires at the withdrawal of thousands of Indians with their ponies, their camp gear, their packs of dogs, slowly flowing southward. It was like some biblical exodus, Windolph said, "a mighty tribe on the march."

Beyond the facts, of course, it's the meaning of Little Bighorn that has been most passionately contested in recent years. What did the engagement really mean, and what should be commemorated here? Should the battlefield be a monument to heroic defeat, a memorial to the end of the old Wild West? Or should it be a guilt trip, on which visitors are compelled to contemplate one of the final acts of a genocidal campaign?

For almost a hundred years these were not even questions, and the legend of Custer's heroic martyrdom stood unchallenged. It was born the day after the Indians withdrew, when troopers under General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon arrived at the deserted encampment, its campfires still warm.  They were to have formed the other arm of a pincer designed to crush the tribes and convey the remnants to their reservations. In a baffled effort at reprisal, Terry ordered everything left in the encampment burned. Then the soldiers went about the grisly business of inspecting what lay above them in the beaten grass of the ridge, where the mutilated bodies of the soldiers lay stripped and blazing in the sun like white boulders. Here and there the green bills of their last-issued pay fluttered about in the wind as if trying to find a pocket.

At the time, the terrible things that had been done to the corpses were attributed to the savagery of the Indians. But Connell, in Son of the Morning Star, has offered a more forbearing view: "The mutilation of Custer's troops may be explained partly by the grief and bewilderment these Indians felt. They could not understand why soldiers pursued them when all they ever wanted was to be left alone so that they might live as they had lived for centuries: hunting, fishing, trailing the munificent buffalo. They failed to see why they should be in one place all year, why they should become farmers when they had been hunters. They did not see how the land could be divided, allotted, owned."

Among the dead lay Custer, who in the preceding days had persistently ignored the signs that there was a huge band of Indians traveling in the region and who might have been court-martialed (for a second time) if he had survived his blunder. But with his death, Custer became our Roland, slain by the numberless dark host, his Anglo-Saxon soul instantly transported to heaven. Artists, poets (including Whitman and Longfellow), playwrights, and biographers set about enlarging his reputation. In 1886, Anheuser-Busch began the mass distribution of its famed lithograph of the doomed general, surrounded by hordes of fiends. Buffalo Bill reenacted the Last Stand thousands of times in villages and cities all over the country, and the movies started to take over the job even before the old showman made his final farewell. Through all this, Custer - the Civil War gallant and politically ambitious Indian fighter whose one notable military victory on the Plains entailed the killing of 11 Cheyenne warriors, 92 women, children, and old men, and 875 ponies - was invariably the stainless white knight.

The place where he fell became a sacred spot on the national map in 1879, when a congressional decree established Custer Battlefield National Cemetery on land later purchased from the Crows. Some 220 soldiers, Indian scouts, and civilians who died at Little Bighorn were laid to rest there, but Custer's body was returned to the East and buried at West Point. Then, starting ten years after the battle, in 1886, a series of grand reunions was held here, culminating in a huge patriotic 50th anniversary commemoration held in 1926 and attended by elderly Seventh Cavalry survivors, two nephews of the Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull, and the silent movie star William S. Hart. In 1946, President Truman declared the site a national monument, and a few years later, not long after the grand 75th anniversary ceremony, came the dedication of the battlefield museum and visitor center. For another two decades, Custer remained secure in the national memory, an icon of martial virtue, the country's fallen champion of Manifest Destiny.

At the battlefield the official interpretation of Little Bighorn was similarly pious, centering on what had happened to the general and the men he had led to their deaths. There, several hundred thousand visitors came each year and stood on the crest of the hill at the obelisk to the fallen, looking across the waving grasses and the slim white stones that marked where the bodies had been found, to the trees along the river bottom at the boundary of the site. The musing attitude of the visitors seemed perpetually to ask, "How could this have happened?"

The first significant sign of the changes to come was a novel. In Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (1964), Custer was portrayed in a way many had seen him during his career: as a rash and vainglorious man who willed his own destruction. Even more consequential was the dissemination of the largely unknown Indian perspective on Little Bighorn in such popular history books as Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971). Then, quickly moving beyond words, militant members of the nascent American Indian Movement turned their attention to Little Bighorn.

In 1972, AIM activist Russell Means led a small group of protesters to the battlefield and demanded increased recognition of the Indian role. The demonstrators, many of them from the Crow Reservation, installed a homemade plaque honoring the Indians who had fought there and heard Means call for the creation of a permanent Indian monument. There was an even more dramatic AIM protest at the Little Bighorn centennial in 1976. Indian activists had threatened to vandalize the visitor center and disrupt the commemoration, which featured a ceremony in which U.S. Army Colonel George Armstrong Custer III was to lay a wreath in honor of his ancestor. To the accompaniment of solemn drumbeats, several hundred AIM protesters, many wearing red berets, marched into the monument past phalanxes of heavy security behind leaders dragging an upside-down American flag along the ground. Means mounted the speakers' platform and commandeered the microphone, once again demanding an Indian memorial. National Park Service historian Robert M. Utley, who was the principal speaker at the centennial, recalls that a number of participants in the official ceremony later demanded to know why law enforcement officers were not ordered to open fire on the Indians who were desecrating the flag.

However lawless and sometimes violent AIM was in its heyday, the movement did much to rearrange the political landscape of the American West and eventually that of the battle site along with it. Change was slow in coming, however, partly because of the entrenched influence of several groups of Custer partisans and buffs. The Custer Battlefield Historical and Museum Association, an organization of amateur historians, had run the small bookstore at the Custer Battlefield for decades, and it steadfastly refused to sell Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Nevertheless, by the mid-1980s, under park superintendent Jim Court, the official interpretation of the battle had been revised from a simple account of a military engagement to the story of a clash between cultures, and Indians became a more prominent and visible component of the battlefield's staff. Court was forced to resign in 1986 after he tangled with higher-ups in the National Park Service and is now running a travel agency in nearby Hardin, but he's proud, he says, of the changes accomplished during his tenure. "People were always very pleased to hear Indians tell the story of what happened," Court recalls. Still, there was no monument to the tribes at Little Bighorn.

In 1989, another major change came to the battlefield with the appointment of Barbara Booher as superintendent. She was not only the first woman to hold the position, but the first American Indian. (She is of mixed Cherokee and Northern Ute descent). Subsequent to Booher's appointment came a host of other changes that made the old-line Custer buffs feel a bit like those bewildered troopers who followed the Boy General into the valley and were quickly surrounded. Booher established a close relationship with the neighboring Crows and Cheyennes and with the Lakotas and Arapahos, and welcomed their participation in commemorative events, usually held in late June, that had previously been devoted largely to the memory of the Seventh Cavalry. And the offerings on the book racks in the visitor center began to include works expressing the Indian view.

By the early nineties, the debate over the meaning of Little Bighorn reached the halls of Congress. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado sponsored legislation that proposed changing the name of Custer Battlefield National Monument to the more neutral Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. At the same time, the bill called for the creation and installation of a monument acknowledging the Indian stake in the past and future meaning of the battle. Many critics decried the legislation as a surrender to political correctness, but in 1991 it passed unanimously in both the House and Senate and was signed into law by President Bush.