Finding Crazy Horse: The Battle of the Little Big Horn in Context

The Killing Fields: and The Almanac of the Dead

Photo by J. Amill Santiago on Unsplash

Originally Posted at “Old Ones Dream” February 12, 2014 and updated here.

---

The total casualty count for the Battle of the Little Bighorn, according to the estimates of historians, seems to cluster around a probable median death toll for all Americans of around 500 soldiers and civilians. The European American toll was certainly around 260 and the Native American toll was probably, but not certainly, between 200 and 300. The battle became a symbol for psycho-logical justification of European American desires for westward expansion of railroads, ranching, farming and mining; at the expense of the lifestyle, lands, and lives of the Native American inhabitants. That being somewhat similar to the way that The Alamo instantly became a rallying cry for Texas freedom.

We have also discussed Battles of Sharpsburg (1862) and Gettysburg (1863). Sharpsburg (also known as the Battle of Antietam Creek) was the bloodiest day in American history, with 23,000 American casualties, and included the bloodiest hour in American history. Gettysburg is considered to be the bloodiest battle in American history with 51,000 American casualties over three days. It is estimated that 750,000 American men died as a result of The American Civil War.

In World War I, during the first Battle of the Somme in 1916, more than a million British, French and German soldiers were killed.

Total human losses attributed to World War II are variously estimated as between 50 million and 80 million souls. In World War II, loss of military and civilian life is estimated as follows: the United States lost around 460,000, the Germans lost almost 8 million, the Japanese over 2 million dead, and the Russians lost around 27 million dead.

The death toll from the U.S. fire bombing of Dresden and of Tokyo, and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was eclipsed later by the carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, which, by some counts, killed approximately 600,000 people.

In their American War, the Vietnamese lost 2 million civilian lives and 1 million soldiers fighting for their freedom. There were 58,220 U. S. armed services personnel killed in this conflict.

As to historic invading armies and resulting rape and pillage, the standard for comparison is Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes. According to Ian Frazier in Travels in Siberia, "By the time of Genghis's death in 1227, the Mongols had subdued northern China, middle Asia, the Crimea, and the northern Caucasus; their empire stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific. In the process, they had killed tens of millions of people--more than eighteen million in China alone, over one and a half million in the Central Asian city of Herat, according to contemporary historians."

On the rape score, Frazier states further that "A Persian historian writing about the Mongols in 1260 said that by then the Mongol leader had twenty thousand descendants living," and that DNA testing of males in Central Asia conducted recently by geneticists from Oxford University revealed that 8 percent of the men "indicated descent from a single common ancestor about a thousand years ago." They concluded that this equivalent of 1/2 of 1% of the world's male population is descended from Genghis Khan.

But back in America, Leslie Marmon Silko states in her 1992 book, The Almanac of the Dead (conspicuously published 500 years after Columbus' "discovery") "Sixty million Native Americans died between 1500 and 1600". Silko has her sources but European American researchers cannot agree.

If a single being perishes without living out a full life, it is a tragedy? Does it really matter where we place the decimal in any of these preceding numbers?

It is all simply unspeakable.