To understand the present, we must confront the ghosts of 1876. They still haunt the American soul.

After Custer’s defeat in 1876, the steamboat Far West made a mad dash to carry the wounded of the Seventh Cavalry on a 710-mile journey to Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory. The Far West, pictured here in port a few years after the battle, sank near St. Charles, Missouri, in 1883. (Photo by the Montana Historical Society Research Center)

I’ve spent much of my life in the bloody summer of 1876.

Those months are beyond the memory of any living individual, but as a writer I’ve dwelled in that long-ago season through research. I’ve written novels in which the events of 150 years ago were a backdrop for my imagination, from the killing of Wild Bill Hickok in a Deadwood saloon in Dakota Territory to the James-Younger Raid on Northfield, Minnesota. My boots have trod the bricks in Dodge City where Wyatt Earp walked, and I’ve stood overlooking the Montana hills where George Armstrong Custer was killed at the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

I’ve created characters inspired by real-life figures who are poorly remembered today, including the spiritualist and feminist Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president decades before women won the right to vote. Most of my novels have been set in Kansas or Missouri, not only because those are the states I have called my own, but also because they have proved a natural channel for the flow of American history.

If there’s a symbol for the summer of 1876, it isn’t a gallant last stand. Instead, it is the steamboat Far West, its decks loaded with wounded soldiers, in a mad dash down the Little Bighorn, Yellowstone and Upper Missouri rivers to Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakotas. Along with the wounded, the steamboat brought news of Custer’s stunning defeat.

Lately I’ve come to think of 1876 as among the years in American history that most closely compares to our own. Historical comparisons are tricky, because nothing is ever an exact match. My wife, Kim, who has read more American history than anybody else I know, warns me of the danger of analogizing the past. The here and now is not the there and then. But there is a mood to the country that seems in tune with that summer 150 years ago.

It is a disquiet in the air.

Others have noted how pivotal 1876 was to American history, and contemporary authors owe a debt to Dee Brown. In 1966, Brown — an Arkansas librarian and novelist whose most famous work was “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” — produced a nonfiction book that recognized America’s centennial year as a chaotic spectacle of power, politics, prejudice and promise. It was also America’s Gilded Age — a term coined by an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner — in which the gulf between the rich and the poor became ever wider, culture became shallower, and graft and corruption ruled.

In “The Year of the Century,” Brown mixed the events even casual students of history know, such as the Northfield robbery and the death of Custer, with lesser-known elements that offered a deeper clue to the struggle to define our national character. Chief among these is the killing of six Black men by a white supremacist group called the Red Shirts at Hamburg, South Carolina. Taking place during the last federal election cycle of the Reconstruction era, the violence aimed to suppress the district’s majority Black vote.

The changes rocking the nation in 1876 were a result not just of social and political shifts, but technological advance. The telephone was exhibited by Alexander Graham Bell at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The phonograph would follow a year later and, three years later, Thomas Edison’s incandescent lightbulb.

“The centennial arrived in an era when human beings were experiencing the greatest changes in their history,” Brown writes in the introduction. “For Americans the changes were so sweeping and came with such speed that few were aware of their meaning for the future.”

A more recent work is “The Summer of 1876,” by Chris Wimmer, who began his career as a podcaster on Old West themes. His 2023 book covers much of the same territory as Brown’s, but it is narrower in scope. It is also largely driven by Custer, Hickok and the James-Younger gang.

“A full understanding of the effects of that summer, and the whole of 1876, would only be possible many years later when they could be viewed in full historical context,” Wimmer writes in the preface. “But the gravity of at least one event, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was obvious in its own time. The American military had never suffered a loss to a Native American army like it did at the Little Bighorn. And the American psyche had never suffered a blow like it suffered when it learned that one of its heroes had been killed in such disastrous fashion.”

I will argue with Wimmer here on three counts: his narrow definition of the American psyche, his use of the white man’s name for the battle, and his presumption that our understanding of these events is now complete.

Let’s review the three spectacular events from summer 1876.

On Sept. 7, 1876, the James-Younger Gang ventured outside of its usual Missouri territory and robbed the First National Bank of Northfield. The gang was composed of brothers Frank and Jesse James; brothers Bob, Jim and Cole Younger; and a few others. The gang’s principals were former Confederate guerillas who had fought along the Missouri-Kansas border during the Civil War and later took up train and bank robbing.

When the townspeople realized the Northfield bank was being robbed, they armed themselves with guns from the local hardware store and began shooting. Two robbers were killed, and most of the rest were captured after a two-week manhunt. But the James brothers escaped to Missouri.

Jesse James, living under an assumed name at St. Joseph, would be shot dead six years later. Frank James would be tried twice for murder, acquitted each time, and die at age 72 of natural causes.

On Aug. 2, 1876, James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickock was playing poker at Nutall & Mann’s No. 10 Saloon at Deadwood in Dakota Territory when Jack McCall, a young gambler whom Hickok had humiliated at cards the day before, walked in and fired a fatal shot to the back of his head.

Down on his luck, Hickock had made his way to the notoriously wicked goldrush town of Deadwood with the intent of making his fortune. Reputation Hickok already had.

He became famous in 1865 when he faced off with Dave Tutt over a pocket watch and, possibly, a woman, across the town square at Springfield, Missouri. It was one of the rare cases in which a quick-draw showdown, a staple of later dime novels and countless television westerns, actually happened. Hickok killed Tutt with a single shot from his Colt Navy pistol.

Hickok became a lawman in Kansas, in Hays and Abilene, and by turns was an actor, an exhibition marksman and a professional gambler. He suffered eye trouble, but the nature of the affliction is unknown. His assassination took place only six weeks after Custer’s June 26 defeat, about 200 miles northwest in Montana Territory.

Custer was a flamboyant cavalry hero of the Civil War, having been promoted to the rank of brevet general at age of 23. He was known for his long blond hair (although in 1876 it was cut short for battle), his eccentric buckskin jackets and red tie, his impetuousness, and his ambition. He was last in his class at West Point, was court-martialed for abandoning his post to visit his wife, and had once shot his own horse out from under him while buffalo hunting in Kansas. Despite or perhaps because of these flaws, his fame as an Indian fighter continued to grow. His tactics, exemplified at the Washita in Indian Territory, included burning villages and taking captives.

Custer’s assignments included Fort Riley in Kansas and Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory. But in 1876, Custer had been relieved of command by Ulysses S. Grant for testimony that implicated the president’s brother in a political scandal. Custer was reinstated, however, in time for the spring campaign against the nations of the northern plains. He was a lieutenant colonel in charge of the Seventh Cavalry Division.

The Lakotas were at war because the United States broke a treaty granting them the exclusive right to their sacred Black Hills. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, sparking an influx of treasure seekers and the eventual government seizure of the land. Tribal leaders such as war chief and mystic Sitting Bull and the melancholic Crazy Horse had resisted being confined to the reservation system and, by 1876, had the support of several thousand warriors.

A U.S. force led by Gen. Alfred Terry, and consisting of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, mounted an exploratory effort to find the village of the nomadic Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies. The village was not expected to contain more than 1,500 individuals. The search eventually led the cavalry to a valley of the Little Bighorn River, while Terry commanded at a remove from the steamboat Far West. The steamboat had followed the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in a wide loop on the northern plains, serving as supply depot and headquarters, while Custer and his column of 1,200 men cut through the Badlands of South Dakota, likely the least-mapped area in the American interior.

The Far West was a sternwheel mountain packet, built in 1870 at a cost of $24,000. She was 188 feet long and 33 feet wide, with three decks, a pilot house and two tall smokestacks. Her boilers were fired with wood cut from surrounding terrain. The boat’s most unusual feature was two steam-powered capstans, attached to tackle and spars to help free her from sand bars. The Far West’s pilot and captain was Grant Marsh, who had learned his trade on the Mississippi, where he had known Mark Twain.

On June 25, Custer’s column located a large village in the Little Bighorn valley. He ordered an immediate attack. But Custer had badly underestimated the size of the village. It held 8,000 individuals.

Custer and about 270 of his men were killed in the two-day battle.

Estimates of Indian losses vary but likely were under 100.

“Exactly what happened to Custer’s command never will be fully known,” according to a description of the battle by the National Park Service. “From Indian accounts, archeological finds, and positions of bodies, historians can piece together the Custer portion of the battle, although many answers remain elusive.”

The Far West made its way to the mouth of the Little Bighorn River, where it took on wounded soldiers. Inexplicably, Terry dwelled there for days, perhaps to compose an account of the battle that might relieve him of responsibility. Finally, the Far West made a 54-hour, 710-mile dash to Bismarck, in Dakota Territory. From there, the world learned of the battle via telegraph.

For the best nonfiction account of the battle, I recommend Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2011 book, “The Last Stand.”

Never again would the Lakota and their allies enjoy victory. The bloody military campaign against them progressed steadily, year after year, until the 1890 massacre of 250 to 300 Lakota people by the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, marked the end of the Indian wars.

Custer’s defeat cast a long shadow on American culture, mostly being depicted as a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds. But the truth seldom leaves heroes standing, and the more one understands about the Indian wars, the less romantic Custer becomes.

“On the night of July 3, 1876, as the Far West sped down the Yellowstone River in the dark, a quarter of a million celebrants gathered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia,” notes Philbrick in his book about the battle. “At the stroke of midnight, the Liberty Bell rang thirteen times as the band struck up ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

In 2026, we’re all on the Far West, plunging through the darkness with our wounded around us while elsewhere are distant fireworks and celebration. The American defeats of our present summer, militarily and culturally, cannot be easily numbered.

The war with Iran has been humiliating for the United States.

Voting rights at home are again under assault. American culture, thanks to AI-generated slop at nearly every level of expression, has hit a new low. We have entered a supercharged Gilded Age, in which tech oligarch Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire while working Americans cope with rising prices, especially at the gas pump and the grocery store.

“The explosion of wealth at the very top,” observes the New York Times, “is without precedent in U.S. history.”

A full accounting of our time may be decades away.

History, at least, provides some comfort in its connection to the physical world. While we may never know everything about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, we can be certain of the fate of the steamboat Far West.

After her usefulness as a packet on the wild Upper Missouri ended, the Far West was sold by her owners. She ended her years in local trade on the lower Missouri. She sank in five feet of water after hitting a snag Oct. 20, 1883, near St. Charles, Missouri. Her boilers and other fittings were sold at auction and her hull was left in the river.

In 2018, what might be the remains of the Far West were located by an underwater archaeological team supported by the Missouri Humanities Council. If the end of the Far West was “ignominious,” as the team suggests in its report, it is at least an ending we can understand.

For 150 years, Custer has remained a central figure in American history and has been venerated for much of that time in white culture as a hero. To Native Americans, he was the weapon of colonial oppression and the dispossession of their homeland.

Custer was vain, incompetent, flouted norms, escaped meaningful punishment for his transgressions, and was careless with the lives of those around him. In other words, he was the kind of character that would have thrived in the 2026 political environment.

We must choose better heroes.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.