How was the Battle of the Little Bighorn important in the destruction of the way

Question: How was the Battle of the Little Bighorn important in the destruction of the way of the Plains Indians!?

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At the conclusion of the American Civil War the Federal Government began to expand the 'settlement' of the West!. It sent troops to push the Native Americans into smaller and smaller areas, with a goal of complete elimination of the Indian way of life!.

Native American's resisted, but their efforts were hampered by internal conflicts that stemmed from tribal differences!. In the mid 1870s Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and several other notable native leaders were able to bring the tribes together to stand up to the US Army!. In 1876 the US Army enacted a campaign to force a final conflict that would destroy the Plains Indians ability to wage large scale warfare!.

General Custer found the Indians encampment and attacked with the 7th Calvary!. Massively outnumbered, the 7th was outflanked and overwhelmed!. The defeat was termed a massacre by the Eastern Newspapers and helped spur funding to eliminate the Native Americans!.

While the Battle of Little Bighorn is often referred to as Custer's Last Stand, it could also be fairly referred to as the Indians last stand!. Crazy Horse's tactical victory turned out to be pyrrhic in nature!. Too many men died, it was too hard to feed all the people, and the coalition fell apart!. The Battle of Little Bighorn is the last time the Native American's were able to engage American forces in large unit engagements such as had been the norm for the "Indian Wars" that had spanned the previous two hundred years!.

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Remember: The Battle of Little Big Horn was considered a massacre by the American army, and the indians were to blame!. This galvanized the politicians of the day and the army to call the indians murderers, and deserved of nothing but death!. Up to this time, the army was not very big in the west, having just fought the Civil War!. Now the army general, Phillip Sheridan, who was in command of the armies in the west, had an excuse to increase army numbers and kill indiscriminately, and force the indians to the reservations, where life wasn't much better!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

It was an event that drew more US troops onto the plains and made the treatment of plains tribes more difficult!. Before the Little Bighorn, while the US was determined to conquer the plains tribes, they did not think that the tribes were truly much of a threat and let small numbers of US army units, using mostly Civil War surplus equipment pacify the region!.

After the Little Bighorn and the destruction of the 7th Cavalry as a fighting force, the US government saw the plains indians as a true threat to their security and flooded te entire midwest with soldiers!. Efforts by Sheridan and Sherman were also stepped up to starve and wear down the tribes and shortly after the Little Bighorn, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche were all thoroughly pacified by large numbers of US troops and winter campaigns which they were not prepared to deal with!. Only Apache rebels under Geronimo kept fighting after that, but by the 1890s, they were a spent force!.Www@QuestionHome@Com