Washita

[Diane Merkel]

I always preferred Xavier . . . IF there really is an Xavier!

[bubbabod]

Tricia, it's not so much that my digital camera is "disposable" as it is that it might cost more to repair it than to buy a somewhat upgraded one with a nice zoom.

[Tricia]

You're right, BB ... I didn't word it correctly. My bad. Fixing things is a concept no longer en vogue ...

[yksin]

Hurrah! We achieved a great victory over at Wikipedia, and the Battle of the Washita's protection-level has been changed (now at semiprotection), so edits can be done. I've already changed a buncha things. Lots of work to go, but the article is finally beginning to improve again. Of CSS (who we know there as "Custerwest"), nothing has been seen nor heard.

-- Mel

[Tricia]

Mel--

I did have a question, however, regarding one of the notes about the fictional accounts of the battle on the (now thankfully saved) Wikipedia page ... I thought Tom Cruise's character in The Last Samurai, whilst a member of the Seventh, only went through--and was haunted by--Little Bighorn, not the Washita. Of course, I thought the movie was so inaccurate, I only watched the beginning and might have missed any later allusions to the 1868 battle in Oklahoma ... though I'm pretty sure my late husband would have told me about such a reference.

A bunch of us girls are planning a road trip out there one of these months ... but it's too darn hot now!

--t.

[yksin]

ricemclean said:

I did have a question, however, regarding one of the notes about the fictional accounts of the battle on the (now thankfully saved) Wikipedia page ... I thought Tom Cruise's character in The Last Samurai, whilst a member of the Seventh, only went through--and was haunted by--Little Bighorn, not the Washita. Of course, I thought the movie was so inaccurate, I only watched the beginning and might have missed any later allusions to the 1868 battle in Oklahoma ... though I'm pretty sure my late husband would have told me about such a reference.

That Tom Cruise movie crap predates my involvement with the article. We had discussion on the talk page about whether to even keep the movie/TV show gunk -- we decided to, if it can be expanded to an overall "modern reactions to the battle" (not just in TV/movies), but it has to be researched & expanded. So, being me, that means among other things that I've gotta watch a damn Tom Cruise movie... so I'll find out for sure.

I was just actually doing a bit of research. There seems to be at least somewhat said about the film version of "Little Big Man," discussing how the movie demonstrated consciousness of the Vietnam War by depicting Washita as a sort of My Lai massacre, even to the point of using Asian extras. Great movie, I don't mind seeing it again, not at all. Need to read the book too.

I was even able to find a bit about "Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman" which is a TV show I never saw -- but of course I'll get the episodes (Season 3 Disc 7) on DVD. I don't expect to be impressed, however much series fans liked it, because it sounds so completely divorced from history. I'm not exactly a social conservative, but I do get mighty sick of knee jerk liberalism that uses hugely complex & significant events just to push this or that agenda today. (Though come to think of it, social conservatives do that too. Guess we need the phrase knee jerk conservative too. Some people might want to leave out the "knee").

I just saw recently a weird movie whose name I can't remember about a modern day bounty hunter guy meeting up with some Cheyenne Dog Soldiers who somehow found a hidden Shangri-La kinda valley in Montana somewhere (but where, I ask you, where?!! it's not like my home state is that unpopulated) where they've been living in the old ways for a century with no one being the wiser. And seems to me that the archaeologist that our heroic bounty hunter finds along the way -- a woman, of course, who becomes a love interest, of course -- explains the whole thing as having begun with the Washita battle/massacre. Huh -- if it's Dog Soldiers, more likely the Summit Spring battle, really. Anyway, silly movie, can't remember its name. But my friend likes it & has a copy of the DVD so I'll borrow it again & check that detail out.

Oh what we do for Wikipedia articles. [hitting side of self's head, attempting to knock sense into it]

A bunch of us girls are planning a road trip out there one of these months ... but it's too darn hot now!

Oh I sympathize. I was down in Colorado & Kansas & Montana in summer of 2001 (just before 9/11), & the heat that trip just about killed me. Couldn't get a good night's sleep even once that trip. I can't take Lower 48 summers anymore. I'm just too northernized.

-- Mel

[BrokenSword]

re: The Last Samurai aka Risky Business Goes to Japan-

The Battle of the Washita is alluded to in a drunken guilt-dream sequence. Apparently, it was the actions there of Col. Bagley (Tony Goldwyn) that were the basis of Capt. Algren's (Tom Cruise) animosity and contempt toward him.

Cruise's character was based very loosely on Fredrick Townsend Ward, an American mercenary active in China's Taipei Rebellion between 1851 and 1864.

M

P.S. There actually was a Samurai rebellion for/against the Emperor of Japan in 1877.

[yksin]

brokensword said:

re: The Last Samurai aka Risky Business Goes to Japan-

The Battle of the Washita is alluded to in a drunken guilt-dream sequence. Apparently, it was the actions there of Col. Bagley (Tony Goldwyn) that were the basis of Capt. Algren's (Tom Cruise) animosity and contempt toward him.

Yes, good summary. I popped by Blockbuster last night & picked up the movie & watched it. Kind of a dorky movie really (no offense to anyone who liked it) -- your standard Hollywood romance about the heroism of dying in battle crap. Which ties in quite nicely with the discussion of "History in Presentation," which is a fascinating discussion I have a couple things to say about when I get a moment (mostly working on fixing the Washita Wiki article at the moment).

The Washita business wasn't directly named as Washita, but nothing else it really could have been given Cruise's character Algren was a captain in the 7th, was not at the Little Bighorn, and in one of the nightmare/flashback scenes was heard to protest to Col. Blagley just before they charged in for the attack something to the effect of, "But they weren't responsible for the raids!" -- an undoubted reference to the raids along the Solomon/Saline rivers that was one of the proximate justifications for Sheridan's winter campaign against the Cheyenne & Arapaho. Not a very accurate depiction of Washita, of course -- it commenced in what looked like pretty broad daylight, instead of at dawn; & the weather conditions were rather more temperate-looking than historically, warm & without an inch of snow on the ground, whereas in reality is was extremely cold with maybe 12 inches of snow, and crusty on top so that the troops had been worried about the Cheyennes being warned of their presence by the racket their horses made breaking through the crust. I'm not sure I even saw one Cheyenne man in the attack flashbacks -- mostly just women & children. And of course in truth lots of women & children were killed by the 7th & the Osage scouts, but so were at least a few warriors as well.

I was also confused about the fictional Col. Blagley's supposed role at the Washita, given that Custer was in command of the expedition as a Lt. Col. -- unless Blagley had been of lower rank at the Washita & achieved promotion since. But what rank would he then have been at the Washita? The only major there was Elliott, & as a captain he wouldn't have outranked Algren. Unless Algren was a lieutenant at the Washita & only achieved his captaincy later.

Well, who cares. It's not as if this was one of the better-written aspects of the movie. Which is not a movie I regard as particularly well-written to begin with.

-- Mel

[elisabeth]

Were you impressed that the San Francisco centennial fair already had a working model of Custer's Last Stand on July 4th, before the rest of the country had even heard of the battle?

A pretty dumb movie in almost all respects, really ...

[Tricia]

That is what got my goat and that's about the time I decided to pack it up and go read a book ... the dates didn't add up to anything approaching reality.

--t.

[elisabeth]

So unnecessary, too -- they only had to adjust the dates a bit, and nobody would have raised an eyebrow. But you can just hear the conversations in the meetings: "Who knows? Who cares?"

Depressing. So easy to make it faintly credible. Yet no-one can be bothered, even at no cost to themselves.

[Tricia]

Obviously ... someone's ears are burning. The Last Samurai is currently being run on FX ... as we are speaking!

--t.

[markland]

yksin said:

Hurrah! We achieved a great victory over at Wikipedia, and the Battle of the Washita's protection-level has been changed (now at semiprotection), so edits can be done. I've already changed a buncha things. Lots of work to go, but the article is finally beginning to improve again. Of CSS (who we know there as "Custerwest"), nothing has been seen nor heard.

-- Mel

Fantastic. It goes to prove that reasonable people can overcome those who feel that strident, selective screeching will always win out!

Congratulations to you and the other team members on the Wiki for resolving it in a fair (at least to my unbiased eyes) manner.

Billy

["Hunk" Papa]

yksin, the weird movie you mention is 'Last of the Dogmen' with Tom Berengerm boldly going where no man....
My brother & I visited the Washita site in June 06 and that was a sweltering day. Difficult to imagine the cold snow covered day in November 1868 when surrounded by red dust, dry plant life and a river with hardly any water in it. Thankfully 'Little Big Man' gave us an idea of how it might have been as every other depiction I have seen shows the battle being fought in summer.
We were shown round by Richard, a remarkable Park Ranger, who had fought back from a stroke at age 8 to become a Ranger. I think of him if my research resolve ever wavers and I am shamed back to my work.
As to the cultural centre, well they cut down the height of Custer's knoll for commercial reasons (since abandoned) and used the ponies bones to grind down and sell as fertiliser, so it is no surprise to see another commercial venture intruding into this page of history. I wonder if visitors to the new centre will bother to trek around the battlefield points of interest as we did with Richard? Not on a hot day when air-conditioning is available I wager.

Hunk

[yksin]

grichard said:

yksin, the weird movie you mention is 'Last of the Dogmen' with Tom Berengerm boldly going where no man....

Aaaah! thanks there, Hunk. Another dorky movie.

However, turns out that the massacre the Dog Men of the movie are supposed to have escaped from was Sand Creek, not Washita. Per the New York Times for Sep. 8, 1995 (& confirmed by a couple other newspapers in this database):

At the center is a provocative question that reaches back more than a century and is based on the massacre of Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek, Colo., in 1864. Several Cheyenne escaped into the woods and were presumed to have died. The film wonders whether that small band might have survived, leaving descendants hidden away even now.

Ah gee. I've been doing a little bit of reading on Sand Creek (wow did Background section of the Wikipedia article need some fixing -- they placed the Sand Creek massacre in Oklahoma!!!), & doesn't seem like there's much provocative really about the question of what happened to those Cheyenne (none of whom were Dog Soldiers, per George Bent, one of the survivors there): they made their way to the Dog Soldier camps along the Republican. But here we are with Hollywood again....

(The Wikipedia article until yesterday also said that John Chivington "led the 1st Colorado Cavalry into southeastern Colorado from Bent's Fort to supervise the movement of Arapaho and Cheyenne bands under Black Kettle that were in the process of relocating from their previous reservation along the Arkansas River to a new reservation in Indian territory in present-day Oklahoma." Um... no. There are some bad inaccuracies hanging out in some of these articles -- help!!!)

-- Mel