I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that there were ex-Confederates on the Sioux side at the battle of the Little Big Horn. After all, Indian tribes had fought on the side of the South during the war. They knew that a giant, monolithic, militaristic American state wasn't exactly good news for Indians.
I'm still annoyed when I hear people who claim to be some kind of "classicla liberal" chime in in favor of the naked aggression shown by the United States against the plains Indians following the Civil War. Just because the Left these days tends to be in league with Indian tribes doesn't mean we should defend their near-extermination in the 19th Century as anything other than utterly reprehensible.
Historian Hunt Tooley recently delivered an excellent paper at the Mises Intitute on "Last Stands" of imperial aggression, and one of the topics was on the myths spread by American expansionists in the wake of Custer's defeat. The Sioux and their allies, of course, were eventually completely destroyed (women and children and infants included), but leave it to the empire to portray one of its few defeats as some great virtuous struggle against evil. In real life, Custer was a megalomaniacal murderer, but in many cases, the knee-jerk conservative reaction is to defend him and the rest of the gang of butchers such as Phil Sheridan, Bill Sherman, and the rest. Blood drenched ghouls were the whole lot, and I don't see why defending them under any circumstances is "pro-American" or "patriotic" or anything we could possibly define as Christian or decent.
