George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer’s reputation goes in and out of fashion more quickly than the length of hemlines. He has been praised as one of the most daring officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and damned for leading the most disastrous military campaign in the history of the American West.
The truth, as it is in most instances with larger-than-life figures such as Custer, lies somewhere in between hero and rogue. He is a mirror-image of his own times; his personality was comprised of the exact ingredients that had prompted America’s rise to prominence in the world. Custer was self-assured to the point of arrogance, colorful to the point of flamboyance, ambitious, courageous, conceited, and undisciplined.
His almost adolescent adoration for his wife, Libbie, didn’t preclude him from fathering a child by an Indian captive. His aptitude for battle didn’t mean that he wasn’t willing to pursue a peaceful resolution if it was possible. His fervor for self-advancement didn’t deter his publicly insulting the president of the United States when he felt like it. Custer projected an aura of invincibility that shone like the brass buttons on his coat. Such men can have an extremely detrimental effect on the people around them.
The similarity between Custer and the country that spawned, nurtured, and idolized him was probably the reason that his death, along with the deaths of every single man in his company, on June 25-26, 1876 alongside a meandering stream in the Black Hills of the Montana territory was so traumatic and why the name Little Bighorn is still spoken in tones of hushed reverence well over a century later. He was everything that America aspired towards…and he failed spectacularly.
Nathaniel Pilbrick’s The Last Stand, to be published by Viking in May, is the second of two recent major accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. James Donovan’s meticulous recreation of the event, A Terrible Glory, was released in 2008. The earlier book gives the reader a more introverted picture of a conspicuously extroverted figure and a more intricately detailed account of an extremely chaotic event. Pilbrick emphasizes the more colorful aspects of his subject’s nature and presents a less complex recreation of the battle itself. (One of the problems that both authors faced was the fact that no one in Custer’s unit of the Seventh Cavalry lived to tell the tale.)
Neither author places the blame for the massacre squarely at George Custer’s feet. They both acknowledge, however, that Col. Custer (his rank as General was a brevet) vastly — and fatally — underestimated the strength of his enemy. He compounded the mistake by splitting the Seventh into three separate units, giving command of the first to Major Marcus Reno, whose alcoholism seemed to be exacerbated when he felt threatened, and the second to Captain Frederick Benteen, who despised Custer. Neither was inclined to spring to Custer’s aid when the deafening roar of the battle began and the clouds of dust rose into the hot summer sky. Both men later claimed not to have been aware that any battle was taking place at all.
The Donovan book delves into the ramifications of the Little Bighorn in greater detail while Philbrick’s examines more closely the character and military prowess of Sitting Bull, the Lakota chief who adamantly refused to surrender to the white man’s claims of Manifest Destiny. Both works are fascinating recreations of a pivotal — and horrifyingly brutal — event in the history of the West.
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