I've had some trouble being fair to Custer because he's connected to Sheridan - who has no good place in my mind! Very lopsided there and apt to stay that way. To me, Custer had help messing up at the Little Big Horn and historians have, until recently, all but tied themselves in knots to make sure it didn't appear that an American general and CW hero had been wiped out by savages. You had Sherman, who had declared the Sioux were worthless and were going to be kept as a 'species of pauper' if not wiped out - Sherman didn't have much use for the Sioux... And this all influenced what an ambitious subordinate like Custer did. The Washita was a despicable act of betrayal by the Federal government but it was one of scores worse - it was not considered a dastardly deed of bloody murder by the people who read of it in the town newspapers but a job well done. The LBH was part of the campaign to clear the Plains of the tribes, be they peaceful or warlike they were in the way of the dang railroad! In this light, then, Custer was doing his job and being a soldier like all the other Army men out there - Crook, for example. However, Custer was also the guy who declared there was gold in them thar Black Hills, caused a rush and broke the treaty of Ft Laramie and every place else all to heck and gone. Custer is responsible for the treaties being broken, no doubt of that. You might say, with good cause, the people were gunning for him. The details of what exactly happened have been revealed to be less one-sided than they used to be, lots of new information has come out in newer studies. At the time it happened, it was the year of the centennial of the United States - 1876. That was really, really bad timing for the Sioux! The papers had to make Custer out to be a vainglorious idiot or acknowledge the fact that Indians weren't inferior. Kind of an echo of that surprised statement by Cobb about if blacks made good soldiers then all the notions of slavery were wrong.