No, of course it's shameful. However, Custer would have gotten a medal and maybe a chance at the presidency someday if he had managed such a massacre of the encamped Indians at Little Big Horn...and the nasty details would have been overlooked by a delighted and grateful nation. ;-)

In the eyes of most of the Indian fighters back then, no Indian was a "civilian". Read the accounts of the time, and that is plain.

To put it in General Sherman's immortal words to an Indian at one of the negotiations he did with the embattled tribes of the West: "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead." This later got changed a little in the common vernacular to the much-repeated saying: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

That's very politically incorrect now. In 1876 it was American gospel. The USA was built upon the deliberate genocide of most of its original inhabitants. When I was a kid in the 50's and early 60's, those inhabitants were routinely shown at the movies as simply murderous, screeching savages, gun fodder for another generation of American heroes to blast into eternity..."Another Injun bites the dust! Yee-Haw!"

That facade began to crack in the mid-60's...along with the whole general facade of Eisenhower's suburban Ozzie and Harriett American dream where the good guys all wear white hats, shoot straight, and salute Old Glory at 7 AM every day when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance.