Teribus, I was referring to your and Custer's assumptions as being provincial eg. narrow in thought, culture and creed, with regard to any understanding of the first inhabitants of this land and the plains Indian buffalo culture. Perhaps that's what happens when military wankers and armchair generals get lost in their obsessive game and get hard-ons, nit picking their way through the minutia of historical battles as their primary way of sorting through things.

No one is arguing that sedentary agrarian culture did not eventually supercede that of the culture of the hunter gatherer in most places in the world. Regardless, Custer was ill prepared for what occurred on a number of levels at that specific time in history in spite of the ongoing decimation of the original inhabitants.

SRS, I also don't think Teribus quite understood the value of women in the plains Indian culture and he obviously hasn't chewed on enough pemican to understand the scale, preparation and value of their travel food that afforded them their mobility. LOL

The buffalo jumps of the Blackfoot in Alberta, for example, provided a setting for a massive scale of animal butchering and food processing in North America and did so for at least 8000 years. The scope of this slaughter was not superseded until the European took it up for sport and strategy.

Initially, and more so after the incorporation of the horse, the plains Indians were not a few ragged bands of scavengers, spending all their time eking out a meagre existence chasing a few rabbit or deer or dragging around a fly spattered rotting lump of fresh buffalo meat from place to place.

The fate of the plains Indian was not sealed primarily by military battle, but by their decimation by communicable diseases such as measles and small pox and the premeditated slaughter and subsequent extinction the North American Bison in the US. Eliminating the buffalo as the plains Indian's primary source of sustenance was a lot quicker, cheaper and a less dangerous means of getting rid of a "problem" than engaging troops to get rid of the "enemy" militarily.

" it is estimated that over 7.5 million buffalo were killed from 1872 to 1874. (General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy, p. 179)"