Ancient Web: A 1997 Web Book Reconsidered Sitting Bull and Canada’s Border

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is often introduced as a military disaster for George Armstrong Custer. Todd D. Sauvé wanted to ask a larger question: what did American expansion mean for Indigenous peoples and the neighboring Canadian territories?

Read A Tale of Two Countries.

The webpage identifies itself as Chapter I of Manifest Destiny and Western Canada, Book One, a study of Sitting Bull, the Little Bighorn and the North-West Mounted Police. It carries a 1997 copyright notice and opens with the news of Custer's defeat reaching American officials during the country's centennial celebrations.

Sauvé's opening narrative ranges widely: the 1876 battle, United States Indian policy, buffalo destruction, Canada’s 1867 confederation, and disputes over the Oregon boundary. It uses numbered notes and extended paragraphs rather than the brief summaries associated with modern reference pages.

The argument belongs to its author

The book's subtitle announces a 'critical re-evaluation' of the geopolitical objectives of the United States government. Sauvé portrays western expansion as a conflict involving settler ambition, Indigenous resistance, and competition between imperial powers. Some passages present strong interpretations of individual actors' motivations.

Those interpretations should not be mistaken for uncontested historical fact. The value of the page is that it preserves a particular author's sustained, sourced argument in a form that visitors can read and challenge. Its 1997 date is a date of the web document, not a promise that every historical claim meets current scholarship.

The old page also reveals its publishing context. A compact search form offers searches across dickshovel.com and tolatsga.org, and the chapter is set up as part of a larger online book. Before contemporary e-book platforms, a writer could simply publish chapters as individual HTML documents and connect them by links.

The account preserves place names, treaty disputes and specific dates in enough detail to reward further source checking. Where it quotes or summarizes Indigenous experiences, researchers should additionally consult tribal histories and primary records.

As an Ancient Web artifact, it is an example of a self-published historical book with an identifiable author and date, not a substitute for a complete modern historiography.

Explore the original 1997 chapter.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.