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Battle of Little Big Horn

As the craze for playing cowboys and Indians ebbs, Waddingtons introduce a game for boys to re-enact the famous Sioux and Cheyenne victory.

1965 1 mins

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Overview

When almost every boy, and not a few girls, donned a western gun belt, holster and six shooter, Waddingtons appear to have come up with a real winner in 1964 with this board game of cavalrymen and β€œRed Indians.” Using some striking action sequences from an unknown Western, boys (most probably) are inspired to imaginatively deploy the lifelike plastic figures to reconstruct their own battle scenes of "Custer's Last Stand."

By 1964 some twenty feature films had been made depicting General Custer – one with Ronald Reagan. On television too, westerns like Rawhide and Bonanza were popular at the time. Apparently the object of the game was to try to reverse the bloody victory of the Sioux and Cheyenne in 1876 against the US cavalry’s attempt to force them onto reservations – which they soon succeeded in doing. But by the mid-1960s, at the height of the civil rights protests, the racist attitude towards Native Americans, as seen in films like the Searchers of 1956, was beginning to change. 1964 was the year of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s β€˜Now That the Buffalo's Gone’, while Marlon Brando supported protests by the National Indian Youth Council.

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