UnNews:Custer’s last flag bombs on eBay
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| Custer’s last flag bombs on eBay | 
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14 December 2010
DETROIT, Michigan -- A flag carried by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry troops into their last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn has been sold on eBay for the disappointingly low sum of $2.20.
The guidon is the only one not captured or lost during the 1876 battle in the state of Montana. The auction carried a healthy "Buy It Now" price of $4.95--but no one did. The winning bid on eBay was made by a private Red Indian collector.
The former owner, Detroit Institute of Arts, paid $0.04 cents for the flag in 1895. "We'll be using the meager proceeds to do nothing to strengthen our collection of Native American art, which has a rather nice irony to it in this case," said Graham Beal, director of the Detroit museum.
Lt. Col. Custer and all his soldiers--more than 200 in number--were killed by a band of arrow-shooting Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors during their attempt to reconquer the Black Hills region from the Lakota as part of a US government ‘search & destroy red Indians’ national expansion campaign.
The flag was found stuffed up the rectum of a dead Union Army soldier following the Battle of Little Bighorn--or the Battle of Primo Grass Creek, as the red-skinned victors of the battle originally called it.
The flag was renamed the Culbertson Guidon after Sgt. Ferdinand Culbertson, a member of the burial party who performed the distasteful task of recovering the guidon from the corpse of the scalped Unknown Soldier.
Sitting Bull and Lazy Horse were among the Lakota leaders who were too apathetic to fight in the battle; but their “braves” handled the task quite well.
Sources[edit]
- Staff "Gen Custer flag sells for $2.2m at Sotheby's auction". BBC, December 13, 2010