THE VIGOR WITH WHICH THE U.S. Army pressed the Red River War, against not very many savages and in mostly inhospitable climes, suggests that the government was at last ready to play the endgame, finally and thoroughly. But they didn’t really do it effectively. The biggest battle—Custer’s—was won by the eventual losing side.

If one takes a literary rather than a historical view of the great battle one might suggest that the Battle of the Little Bighorn is the point at which the narrative of American settlement ends.

That the settlement had been successful was never seriously questioned again, not as the Indians contested it that hot day, June 25, 1876, by a little river slicing through the rolling plains of southern Montana. The army chased Indians around the plains for another two years with few serious confrontations. Mackenzie had already whipped the Comanches in the Palo Duro Canyon. In Arizona both Crook and Miles had some trouble with the Apaches, but when Geronimo finally came in he had only eighteen warriors with him, a few more than Custer slew on the Washita. Geronimo might make a life in the mountains of Mexico, as he did for a time, but he was never going to win his war.

Whether one starts in the far northeast with Cabot, or in Virginia with John Smith, or in Mexico with Cortéz and Coronado, the natives, over and over again, are invaded and eventually lose their culture.

The wonder is that this one reversal—the Little Bighorn—in which the ultimate losers win, is so rare. It nearly happened to Lewis and Clark when they were braced by the Teton Sioux near the Mandan villages. Fortunately the captains had a cannon and were prepared to use it.

This provides an odd link to Custer, who, famously, was offered Gatling guns, but passed on them because he knew they would slow him down.

There is a huge amount of native prophecy about the arrival of these white people. Even as early as the sixteenth century native preachers were preaching about the destruction of the whites and the return to the paradise that had been theirs before they came.

Then the Little Bighorn happened and the Indians killed the arch-invader, and so ends the American settlement narrative, with dying men and horses on a dusty plain, a place far different from the places most Americans were by then living their lives.

A complex justice evolved on that battlefield, a justice that, years later, was still being debated. Custer’s comeuppance became America’s comeuppance, for three centuries of shabby treatment of the red man, the taking of the Black Hills being merely the latest and most striking example. Custer’s defeat was the nation’s defeat, and, ironically, the Indians’ defeat as well. For three centuries the Indians had mattered. They had a secure place in the American narrative.

And then they didn’t. It was very strange. Something was over, but neither the Indians nor the whites knew what.

People mourned, and yet could not say quite what they mourned.

So intense was the publicity following the Little Bighorn that when the famous gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok was shot down in Deadwood, South Dakota, the nation, usually attentive to gunfighters, scarcely noticed.