June 25th was the 150th anniversary of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn. Col. George S. Custer and 267 US soldiers were massacred by thousands of outraged Indian warriors on the plains of eastern Montana.

In 1969, as a twelve-year-old traveling to a Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho, I visited the Custer Battlefield National Monument. I was riveted by the scene of the best-known showdown between the US Army and savages who were resisting the spread of civilization. I jotted a note from one of the plaques that the Seventh Cavalry’s “heroic defense made the nation yearn for details that no white man lived to tell.” My view of the battle was heavily shaped by They Died with Their Boots On, the 1941 Hollywood movie that featured Erroll Flynn as the heroic Custer who met a tragic fate.

Decades later, I recognized that Custer was tied to a long series of atrocities. In 1864, as a Union cavalry commander fighting under Gen. Phil Sheridan, Custer sent his troops on burning sprees that utterly desolated the barns, farms, homes and towns in the Shenandoah Valley where I was raised a century later. Stephen Starr, author of Union Cavalry in the Civil War, wrote, “The deliberate planned devastation of the Shenandoah Valley has deservedly ranked as one of the grimmest episodes of a sufficiently grim war. Unlike the haphazard destruction caused by Sherman’s bummers in Georgia, it was committed systematically, and by order.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with the Union army reported, “Hundreds of nearly........

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