MovieChat Forums > Dirty Dingus Magee (1971) Discussion > Little Big Horn

Little Big Horn

posted 12 years ago by magolding
2 replies | jump to latest

In a Branded episode General Custer rides out and shows a river to Jason McCord, or so I've read. Custer predicts that a great battle will happen at that river, the Little Big Horn.

If Custer has some kind of psychic power to predict the future, why can't he use it to avoid getting killed with over two hundred comrades, friends and relatives?

In an episode of F Troop, set around 1865-1867, Captain Permenter went to officers school and came back a tough martinet like his hero, General Custer. The other characters plotted to return him to his normal easy going self for the rest of the episode. In the last scene, General Custer, who has visited Fort Courage, gets on the stagecoach and Parmenter wishes him "Good luck in your new assignment at the Little Big Horn".

And in Dirty Dingus Magee the madame of a town in the Southwest, Belle, looks at a map belonging to General George (is that his first or last name?) and asks about the Little Big Horny River. The General tells her it is the Little Big Horn River and if he can get there before General Custer (starting from the Southwest?) he will gain undying fame.

The 1951 movie Little Big Horn has a cavalry troop learning that thousands of hostile warriors are massing at the Little big Horn and racing to warn General Custer of the danger in time.

Apparently the idea in Dirty Dingus Magree was that General George also somehow learned of the location of the hostiles at the Little Big Horn River (but apparently not how many there were) and planned to race to the Little Big Horn and defeat the hostiles and steal all the glory before Custer could find them. But events in the movie delayed him and so Custer found the hostiles first and got all the glory with his last stand. If anyone making the movie thought about the joke that much.

But in real life life nobody in the army knew where the hostiles would be and they had to look for them in a hundred thousand square miles of Sioux territory. I found that out though my reading while I was still a child before I ever saw any of those episodes or movies, so the idea of the Little Big Horn as an assignment or target for Custer just seems too non historic and unrealistic for me to enjoy!

[–] magolding 12 years ago

A number of internet sources say that the town of Yerkey's Hole "is" in New Mexico, fictionally speaking.

The good news is that it is possible for a place in New Mexico to be directly south of the Little Big Horn River, which would make the distance just a straight north-south line and as short as possible.

The bad news is that the Little Big Horn River extends from about 45 degrees North to about 45 degrees and 40 minutes north, while New Mexico extends from 31 degrees 20 minutes north to 37 degrees north.

So even if Yerkey's Hole is directly south of the Little Big Horn and not a hundred miles east or west of it, the distance between the town and the nearby fort and the Little Big Horn would be about 550 to 950 miles as the crow flies. And it would be much more as the trail winds!

The real columns in the Great Sioux War started in May from points only about 300 miles from the Little Big Horn, and it took them nearly a month to find and battle the hostiles on June 17 and June 25 to 26. So how could General George hope to reach the Little Big Horn before Custer if George started from two or three times as far away?

Actually I just thought of a way that it might have been plausible in real life. If General George was stationed in northern New Mexico he might have been "only" two or three hundred miles away from the nearest railroad, which had just reached Pueblo, Colorado.

So General George could have marched to the nearest railroad station in Colorado, and then taken a thousand mile detour which would turn out to be a shortcut, taking the railroad east to get a northward connection to the Union Pacific Railroad which would taken them west to a station almost due south of the Little Big Horn. From There General George could march his men hundreds of miles north toward the little Big Horn and glory - glory of one kind or another.

If General George marched north from the line of the Union Pacific railroad at about the time that most of General Crook's troops did, and if his command was undetected by General Crook's command or by the hostiles, they could reach the Little Big Horn before General Custer did and General George could hog all the glory of victory or heroic defeat and not share it with anyone.

But if General Crook's scouts detected General George's command it would be all over for his Custer-like glory hunting. If Crook had seniority he would take command of General George's column and unite them with his column and march north to seek the Sioux. Hundreds of Crook's best fighting men had left his command temporarily and would not be back for weeks. Until they returned Crook would not risk seeking out the hostiles with the mere nine hundred cavalrymen he had left, since a much larger force had been just been barely adequate to hold off the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Rosebud on June 17. General George's men would be welcome reinforcement.

And if General George had seniority and refused to unite with Crook, Crook would simply march his own command close to general George's men, knowing that General George would desperately need Crook's aid if he found the hostiles.

Or perhaps General George planned to take his men by railroad and riverboat to the spot on the the Missouri River closest to the Little Big Horn and march due west toward the Little Big Horn, hoping to avoid any entanglement with General Terry's forces.

Or General George might have rented riverboats to take his men up the Yellowstone River close to the mouth of the Big Horn River leaving just a short march to the Little Big Horn.

So it would have been theoretically possible for General George to try to race General Custer to the Little Big Horn, in real life and thus I guess even more so in the movies. Especially if somehow General George was the only commander who knew that the Sioux were on the Little Big Horn ahead of time. And thus when Belle tried to keep General George's men at Yerkey's HoOle by faking an Indian uprising she was not only endangering the lives of those local Indians, she may also have doomed Custer''s men to death and perhaps saved the lives of General George's men.

So in Dirty Dingus Magee it looks like Belle was responsible for Custer's Last Stand.

[–] The_Dying_Flutchman 12 years ago

And all of both yer messages are meaningless trivia. I live in Montana where the real story took place and we don't care about any of this drivel.

Reference is inscrutable because there is nothing to scrute.