How newspapers described the battle of Little Bighorn?

Answer 1

The Tribune Extra published in Bismarck, Dakota Territory on 6 July 1876 ran the headline: "Massacred. Gen. Custer and 261 men the victims."

This instantly demonstrates an obvious prejudice in the report, since Custer was not a general (he had held that rank temporarily during the Civil War) and he was only called that by those people who blindly admired him; furthermore, if the native Americans had all been killed the report would not have described them as victims. Dead soldiers are victims, dead Indians are not.

The lengthy article repeatedly calls the natives "red devils" while portraying the US soldiers as noble and brave (which many of them were certainly not). The article makes no mention of the role played by the Crow and Arikara scouts who were with Custer (presumably because they too were counted as red devils), nor does it mention their repeated warnings to various officers about the immense size of the enemy camp and the dangers of splitting the command.

It ends with a full list of the soldiers and scouts who died.

As a piece of journalism it would today be considered biased, prejudiced, racist and inflammatory.

The link below takes you to an images of this news report; the controls at top left allow you to zoom in and move around the page: