The tremendous news value of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the magical allure of the name Custer make the topic an excellent vehicle for studying the state of the American press in the mid-1870s. This paper attempts to add to the existing body of knowledge of this era by examining a source that has hardly been studied in depth in the voluminous scholarly and popular writing on Custer and the Little Bighorn: Kansas newspapers.
Previous research has suggested the American press was moving toward political independence during the 1870s. This study concluded Kansas newspapers split along party lines in their coverage of the battle. Most Kansas newspapers were Republican and tended to attribute Custer’s defeat to his own rashness. Democratic Kansas newspapers tended to blame the Grant administration for stationing troops on Reconstruction duty in the South instead of on the Frontier. The study also compared coverage in the Kansas press to that in the Texas press and found that Kansas newspapers, while partisan, were generally less vehement than their Texas colleagues in their written attacks on both their political opponents and Native Americans. A number of Kansas editorials expressed sympathy for the treatment of Native Americans at the hands of the government and argued that the battle could have been avoided if not for the greed of white miners.
Dr. Kittrell Rushing or Dr. David Sachsman 311 Frist Hall Communication Department The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403-2598 http://www.utc.edu/commdept/conference/
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