"DANCES WITH WOLVES and galvanized yankees" Topic

The film DANCES WITH WOLVES is in my view perhaps the worst film ever made about an event in American history, But of course it got rave reviews. Before I tell you why I think what I think, please evaluate it in terms of historical accuracy, especially in its portrayal of the Sioux during the Civil War.

Dances with Wolves (1990), directed by and starring Kevin Costner, is a landmark film in its sympathetic, detailed portrayal of a Lakota Sioux band in the mid-1860s Great Plains. It was praised for using the Lakota language extensively (with Native actors and subtitles), depicting daily life, material culture, family dynamics, and decision-making with care, and shifting away from earlier Hollywood "bloodthirsty savage" stereotypes. It drew visual inspiration from artists like George Catlin and photographers like Edward Curtis. The production design, costumes, and landscapes were widely lauded for authenticity, and it humanized Native characters in ways that resonated with 1990s audiences seeking multiculturalism and environmental themes.

However, as a work of historical accuracy—particularly regarding the Sioux (specifically Lakota) during the Civil War era—it is deeply flawed. It prioritizes a romantic moral fable over precise history, resulting in significant distortions, anachronisms, and idealizations. Below is a focused evaluation.
Timeline and Civil War Context

The film is set in 1863–1864 in the Dakota Territory (roughly South Dakota area), centering on a small Lakota band and an isolated U.S. Army outpost. Lt. John Dunbar, a disillusioned Union officer, is posted there after a Civil War wound and eventually integrates with the tribe.

This setting has partial plausibility but major problems:
• During the Civil War, the U.S. Army was heavily committed in the East, leaving many western posts undermanned, poorly supplied, and isolated—aligning with the film's depiction of a dysfunctional, skeleton-crew fort.

• However, the film largely ignores or sidesteps the actual major Sioux event of the Civil War years: the Dakota War of 1862 (also called the Sioux Uprising or Dakota Conflict) in Minnesota. This involved eastern Sioux (Santee/Dakota bands), not the western Lakota featured in the film. Triggered by broken treaties, delayed annuities, corruption, and starvation, Dakota warriors attacked settlers and agencies in August–September 1862, killing an estimated 400–800 civilians and soldiers. After defeat, military commissions tried hundreds; 38 Dakota men were hanged on December 26, 1862—the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Many survivors were imprisoned or forcibly removed from Minnesota.

• The Lakota (Teton/Western Sioux) were not the primary actors in the 1862 Minnesota events, though some Dakota refugees fled west into Lakota territory. In 1863–1864, U.S. expeditions under generals Henry Sibley and Alfred Sully pursued Dakota into Dakota Territory, clashing with combined Dakota and Lakota forces in battles such as Big Mound, Dead Buffalo Lake, Stony Lake, Whitestone Hill (1863), and Killdeer Mountain (1864).

• The film's Lakota band lives in relative isolation and harmony until threatened by whites or Pawnee. In reality, by the early 1860s the Lakota were a powerful, expanding military force on the northern Plains. They had migrated westward from the Great Lakes region in prior centuries and aggressively displaced or dominated other tribes (including Crow, Shoshone, and Pawnee) through warfare, raids, and control of buffalo hunting grounds. Major direct U.S.–Lakota wars (Red Cloud's War 1866–1868, Great Sioux War 1876–1877) came after the film's timeframe.
The Civil War serves mostly as Dunbar's backstory and a device to explain the weak fort. The film does not meaningfully engage the complexities of Sioux–U.S. relations in 1862–1864, including Native grievances, the brutality of the Dakota uprising on both sides, or the federal response.

Portrayal of the Lakota Sioux

This is where the film most deviates from history. It presents the Lakota as largely peaceful, family-oriented, spiritually attuned people living sustainably on the land—defensive when attacked but not initiators of conflict. They hunt buffalo traditionally (for meat), speak their language, and show humor, debate, and humanity.

Strengths in depiction:

• Serious effort at cultural and linguistic authenticity (Lakota dialogue, though Russell Means and others noted issues with gendered language forms—some actors used feminine forms inappropriately).

• Detailed material culture and daily life that feel grounded in historical sources.

Major inaccuracies and romanticization:

• Noble savage trope: The film largely replaces the old "bloodthirsty savage" stereotype with an idealized "noble savage" one. It downplays or omits key aspects of Plains Indian societies, including a strong warrior culture emphasizing raids, counting coup, status through warfare, intertribal conflict, and captive-taking (adoption, enslavement, or harsher treatment occurred across tribes). Lakota bands were not uniformly harmonious or pacifist; they were expansionist and formidable.

• Pawnee portrayal: The film depicts Pawnee as vicious, unprovoked attackers on the Lakota camp. Historically, the dynamic was often reversed or more complex. The Lakota were the dominant, aggressive power expanding across the Plains and frequently raided or displaced village tribes like the Pawnee (who were more agricultural/semi-sedentary). Pawnee sometimes allied with or scouted for the U.S. against the Sioux. The film inverts this for dramatic effect.

• Switch from Comanche origins: The source novel was originally about Comanche in the southern Plains. It was changed to Lakota for practical filming reasons (access to a large buffalo herd in South Dakota and more available Lakota actors/extras). Key plot elements (including a Spanish conquistador helmet anecdote) were not adjusted, creating mismatches with actual Lakota history.

• Buffalo hunting and "white barbarism": The film includes a traditional Lakota buffalo hunt (visually impressive; production used thousands of real bison with practical effects). However, it also features scenes of mass-slaughtered, skinned buffalo carcasses left to rot, attributed to wasteful white hunters. Large-scale commercial hide hunting for industrial leather boomed later (peaking in the 1870s after new tanning processes). In the early 1860s, hunting was more often for meat or subsistence; the timing and scale of hide-focused waste in the film are anachronistic.

• Guns and technology: By the 1860s, Lakota and other Plains tribes actively traded for, used, and valued firearms. Some accounts suggest the film underplays or inaccurately limits this.

• Integration and "white savior" elements: Dunbar's rapid, near-total acceptance into the band (including language learning and deep bonds) is highly romanticized. While captive adoption and cultural crossing happened (e.g., figures like Cynthia Ann Parker), full integration of a white soldier this seamlessly is fictional. The narrative centers a white protagonist who bridges and ultimately "saves" or elevates the story, which many critics label a white savior trope.

Overall Verdict on Historical Accuracy

Dances with Wolves is not a reliable historical depiction of the Sioux during the Civil War era. It is a well-intentioned myth that uses real elements (language, visuals, some cultural details) to tell a story about harmony with nature, the tragedy of inevitable displacement, and cross-cultural understanding. It improves on many earlier Westerns by treating Native characters as complex humans rather than faceless enemies. However, it distorts timelines, inverts intertribal power dynamics (especially Pawnee vs. Lakota), romanticizes tribal life by minimizing warfare, agency, and complexity, and sidesteps the actual violent events involving Sioux groups in 1862–1864.
Historians and some Native commentators (including Russell Means) have criticized it for these reasons, noting it treats specific tribal histories as interchangeable backdrops for a modern moral narrative rather than engaging them on their own terms.

It excels as cinema and cultural commentary for its era but falls short as history—particularly for the Sioux in the Civil War period, where it misplaces conflicts, softens realities, and prioritizes sentiment over precision. The "noble savage" lens it applies, while kinder than older stereotypes, is still a stereotype that flattens the historical record.

This sets a factual baseline. I'm ready to hear your specific reasons for viewing it as perhaps the worst film ever made about an American historical event. What aspects strike you most strongly?

Round two:

Yes, good. I was especially going to stress the "noble savage" myth, as well as the film's apparent ignorance of the bloody Dakota war. Your analysis is helpful. If John McBride were doing the film, I'd be tempted to torture history a little more and have the "white savior" army officer be a former CONFEDERATE officer now part of the "galvanized yankees"; the ironies would be delicious. But I don't think the timeline quite fits? and I'm not sure if any officers were included in the Confederate volunteers who served against the Sioux?

Yes, the "noble savage" myth and the film's near-total erasure of the Dakota War of 1862 are two of the strongest grounds for criticizing it as more myth-making than history. The movie swaps one reductive stereotype for another and conveniently sidesteps the bloodiest and most immediate Sioux-related event of the Civil War years—the uprising that killed hundreds of settlers, triggered the largest mass execution in U.S. history, and led to the expulsion of the Dakota from Minnesota. By focusing on a peaceful Lakota band in 1863–64 and framing the conflict as simple white encroachment on a harmonious people, it flattens a far more tangled and violent reality.

Your hypothetical tweak—making the white "savior" officer a former Confederate now serving as a Galvanized Yankee—is intriguing precisely because of the ironies it would layer on. Let me lay out the historical record on that idea so you can judge how far it could be stretched without breaking.
Timeline Feasibility

The Galvanized Yankee program (former Confederate POWs who took the Union oath and enlisted in U.S. Volunteer regiments) began in earnest in early 1864 after Lincoln approved it. The first significant units reached the northern Plains in summer/fall 1864. The 1st U.S. Volunteers, for example, arrived at Fort Rice in Dakota Territory in mid-October 1864 after a grueling river-and-march journey. They and other galvanized regiments garrisoned posts, protected trails and telegraph lines, and fought or deterred Lakota, Cheyenne, and Yanktonai attacks through 1865–66 (including a notable July 1865 defense at Fort Rice against a force led by Sitting Bull).

The original film is anchored in 1863 (Dunbar's wounding and posting). That is too early for Galvanized Yankees to exist. However, the film already plays loose with chronology (major Lakota–U.S. clashes like Red Cloud's War come later; the big buffalo-hide boom is post-1870). Shifting the story's timeframe forward by a year or so to 1864–65 would make a galvanized Confederate officer plausible in a Dakota Territory fort setting. The undermanned, isolated outpost atmosphere fits the real Fort Rice and similar posts perfectly.

Were There Confederate Officers Among the Galvanized Yankees?
This is the sticking point. The program was designed primarily for enlisted Confederate POWs. Roughly 5,600 men took the oath and filled six U.S. Volunteer regiments. They were deliberately sent west so they could not rejoin Confederate forces in the East. Union commanders had serious doubts about their reliability, which is why these regiments were almost always led by Northern/Union officers.

The most prominent example is Colonel Charles Dimon of the 1st U.S. Volunteers—a young, ambitious Union officer hand-picked by Benjamin Butler. There is little evidence of significant numbers of former Confederate officers being commissioned or even serving as enlisted men in these specific galvanized units. Confederate officers were generally held longer, exchanged under different cartel rules, or handled separately; the "galvanizing" pitch was aimed at rank-and-file prisoners desperate to escape prison camps. A handful of border-state or immigrant Confederates who had been enlisted men did serve, but a former Confederate officer taking the oath and then commanding or even serving prominently in a galvanized regiment on the Plains would be historically unusual.

In short: you could have a former Confederate enlisted man or junior NCO who had been an officer in the Confederate army before capture, but a commissioned Confederate officer serving as a galvanized Yankee officer is a stretch. For dramatic purposes in a film, however, it is not an impossible leap—especially if you frame him as a man who has already made a painful, self-interested choice to survive and is now enforcing federal policy on another people fighting for their own autonomy.

The Ironies Would Indeed Be Delicious

A former Confederate officer now wearing Union blue on the northern Plains in 1864–65 would let you explore several rich tensions that the actual Dances with Wolves mostly ignores:

• A man who fought for "states' rights" and against centralized federal power now helping extend that same federal authority over Indigenous nations asserting their own sovereignty and treaty rights.

• The post-Civil War "reconciliation" process beginning on the frontier, where ex-Confederates were used as expendable labor to secure the West while regular troops were still tied up or demobilizing.

• Competing notions of "civilization" and "savagery"—a former rebel who may have seen his own cause as defensive now confronting Lakota or Dakota warriors whose raids and resistance looked, from one angle, very much like the guerrilla warfare some Confederates had practiced.

• The moral ambiguity of the "white savior" figure: instead of a pure-hearted Union idealist, you get a compromised, possibly cynical survivor whose conversion to the tribe's cause carries the extra weight of having already switched sides once.
It would also let you nod at the real historical service of galvanized units in Dakota Territory without whitewashing the larger story. These men did fight and die in small actions against Lakota and Cheyenne parties; they also suffered scurvy, desertion, brutal winters, and the general misery of frontier garrison duty. Some performed competently; others were viewed with suspicion by their own commanders.

Bottom Line on Feasibility

• Timeline: Workable with a modest shift to 1864–65. The film's existing flexibility with dates gives you cover.

• Officers: The historical Galvanized Yankee regiments were commanded by Union officers and filled mostly with former Confederate enlisted men. A former Confederate officer in that role is not well-documented and would require some dramatic license.

• Dramatic payoff: High. The ironies around loyalty, federal power, and parallel struggles for autonomy are sharper and more historically grounded than the noble-savage idyll the movie actually gave us.

If you were scripting it, you could keep the sympathetic Lakota band (with all the same accuracy problems we discussed) but make the protagonist's journey from Confederate officer → Union "galvanized" soldier → cultural convert carry far more bitter historical resonance. It would still be a Hollywood story, but one that at least acknowledges the Dakota War's shadow and the messy, multi-sided nature of allegiance on the mid-1860s Plains.
Would you want to push this idea further—perhaps sketching how the opening or the fort scenes could establish his Confederate past without derailing the rest of the narrative? Or are there other specific historical tweaks you had in mind?

It occurs to me that in a very small and partial way we have my idea already done in the very fine OUTLAW JOEY WALES.

and GROK:

Yes, you're right — The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) does give us a partial, inverted version of the dynamic you're imagining.
Clint Eastwood's Josey is a Missouri farmer turned Confederate bushwhacker (loosely inspired by real figures like "Bill Wilson," a notorious guerrilla associated with Quantrill/Anderson-style raiders). After his family is slaughtered by Union irregulars ("Redlegs"), he fights on, refuses postwar amnesty under treacherous terms, and becomes a hunted outlaw. As he drifts west, he forms a makeshift family that includes the memorable Cherokee elder Lone Watie (Chief Dan George) and later a Navajo woman. The two men — former Confederate guerrilla and displaced Native — develop a genuine, wry, mutually respectful bond as fellow outcasts navigating a brutal postwar landscape. They fight side-by-side against bandits and corrupt authorities rather than against each other.
Parallels to Your Idea

Former Confederate on the frontier with Natives: Check. The film is explicitly set in the immediate post-Civil War years and uses the protagonist's rebel past as central to his identity and worldview.
More complex (for its era) Native portrayal: Lone Watie is no one-dimensional savage or pure noble savage. He's humorous, philosophical, pragmatic, and has his own grievances against federal power. The film lets Natives have agency and shows them as victims of the same expanding authority that crushed the Confederacy.
Irony of divided loyalties and postwar displacement: Josey carries the bitterness of a lost cause and broken promises; the Natives carry parallel experiences of dispossession. Their alliance carries an implicit critique of federal overreach.

Key Differences from Your Hypothetical
Where your version would heighten the irony, Josey Wales softens or redirects it:

Josey never "galvanizes." He does not take the Union oath or serve in the U.S. Army against the Sioux (or anyone else). He remains an outlaw rebel to the end. The dramatic tension comes from his refusal to reintegrate, not from the painful compromise of fighting for the very government he once opposed.
The Natives are allies, not the people he is ordered to fight or subdue. The film gives us the "former Confederate finds common cause with Indians" story rather than the sharper irony of a former Confederate officer now enforcing federal Indian policy against Lakota or Dakota bands in Dakota Territory.
The setting and tribal focus are different: more Missouri border warfare transitioning into a generalized southwestern/Indian Territory frontier, with Cherokee and Navajo characters rather than Lakota Sioux in the northern Plains during or right after the Dakota War years.
Tone and politics: The film has revisionist Western elements and some sympathy for the Southern guerrilla experience, but it also critiques brutality on both sides. (Its source novel was written by Asa Earl Carter under the Forrest Carter pseudonym — a former KKK leader and segregationist — which adds another layer of historical irony to its sympathetic treatment of a Confederate outlaw.)

In short, Josey Wales explores the "former Confederate + sympathetic Native alliance on the postwar frontier" territory you're interested in, but it takes the path of mutual outlawry and personal reconciliation rather than the more uncomfortable path of a galvanized former Confederate officer serving the Union against the Sioux. Your version would be darker, more historically specific to the Dakota/Lakota context of 1864–65, and richer in the particular ironies of federal power, competing sovereignties, and compromised loyalties.
It's a useful point of comparison precisely because it shows how Hollywood has already played with pieces of this idea — and where it pulled its punches. Dances with Wolves romanticizes the Native side while largely ignoring the Dakota War and Sioux agency; Josey Wales romanticizes the Confederate guerrilla side while giving Natives more dignity than most films of its time, but still avoids putting its hero in federal uniform fighting Plains tribes.
Would you say Josey Wales makes your proposed twist on Dances with Wolves more or less compelling? Or does it highlight exactly why the "galvanized Confederate officer" angle would cut deeper? I'm happy to keep unpacking either film or the historical record around bushwhackers, galvanized units, or the northern Plains in 1864–65.

and I will conclude unless and until a TMPer comments:

the nice thing about the AI is that it treats my ideas seriously -- whether they deserve to be or not! -- and will ANSWER quickly and to the point.

You are dead on with what you wrote Doc. I too have found the film to be seriously faulted. Don't forget the "wedding" ceremony that they did including what you would have to say was an Indian minister for the couple. The Sioux paid for a wife with horses and that was it. Boom they were married. No ceremony or 'minister" overseeing things.

I also loved the line about the Pawnee "They have been awfully hard on the Sioux." Right the 3,000 Pawnee were such a problem for the 30,000 Sioux nation. The movie totally fails to show how the Sioux were an aggressive conquering tribe that defeated and pushed other tribes off their land.

Ah yes, the 90s feminists were not into men buying wives!

Doc and Grattan

Correct. It is a fun movie to watch a few times. Soundtrack is excellent (you left that out;). I enjoyed it.

But I did not take it as Historical.

Outlaw Jose Wales was a fun movie to watch! Still enjoy it. Great one liners! Clint at his best.

But I did not take it as Historical.

There in lies the rub.

We don't take it as being historical.

BUT many who do not know history, DO. They base their beliefs and activism on what these movies portray and how they portray it.

You hear it all the time. You know this as well as I do. 🙁

Indeed, and that is a huge problem when general historical knowledge is minimal and most Americans get what they "know" from films.