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In 1896, 20 years after General George Armstrong Custer was killed alongside 261 of his cavalrymen at the Battle of Little Big Horn,

the beer company, Anheiser Bush, brewed up a wildly popular advertising campaign.

The company produced 150,000 copies of a chromo lithographic print called Custer's Last Fight, and they plastered it in saloons and taverns across the United States.

The print, based on an 1888 painting by Cassidy Adams, depicts a chaotic battle scene on the Montana Territory Plains, with some dozen blue-uniformed cavalrymen

laying dead or wounded on the ground, as war-painted American Indians finish them off with

clubs, spears, and rifles. In the center of the violent scrum is a long-haired custer,

addressed in fringed buckskin, raising his saber skyward to

dispatch one last enemy warrior before succumbing to the overwhelming force of his attackers.

For the article this episode is based on, How Stuff Works spoke with Tim Lehman, a professor of

history and political science at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana.

He said, more people learned about what they think happened at Custer's Last Stand from this Anheiser

Bush lithograph, and probably after a few Budwisers. Even today, in American mythology, the popular notion of Custer's last stand echoes the story told in this much-reproduced painting.

Custer's down to the last defeat ranks with the Alamo as a tale of white heroism in the face of native aggression, of patriotic martyrs dying with their boots on to protect

colonists moving westward. But the real story isn't nearly so cut and dried.

Today, let's talk about what was really going on with Custer's last stand.

On June 25th of 1876, the Civil War cavalry hero, known as the Boy General, George Custer,

led a U.S. Army attack on a native village in the Black Hills, in violation of a treaty promising

those lands to the Lakota people. A Custer and his 7th cavalry were clearly the aggressors, and if the Battle of Little Big Horn was anyone's blast stand, it was that of a group of Plains Indians defending their very way of life.

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