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What I’m Reading Now 22

Posted July 11, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

What I’m Reading Now: Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer by Michael A. Elliott published by University of Chicago Press (2008)
What I Just Finished Reading: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick published by Viking (2010)

When I was growing up in the early 1960s, George Armstrong Custer was already a joke. Our fathers were all World War II veterans, and they all hated the sort of publicity-hungry officers like Custer who sacrificed their men for “Glory.” On TV, Custer was often depicted as a delusional figure with an arrow through his hat. Ice cream stands named themselves “General Custard’s Last Stand.” He was hardly the revered figure he had been in my grandparents day.

Whenever the old movie about the Last Stand, They Died With Their Boots On, was broadcast, we would sit around and laugh at Errol Flynn’s flaming portrayal of our campiest general.

By the end of the 1960s, we were inclined to reevaluate Custer. He seemed like less of a joke, and more of a symbol of an American military leadership that consistently underestimated the fighting ability of non-white enemies and led our forces into disasters like Vietnam.

Just a few years later, we began to see bumper stickers with the slogan “Custer Died For Your Sins” on them. Custer was now viewed as an instrument of genocide in the attempted destruction of the Native American nations on the plains.

By the time I was 18, the Custer image had transformed three times in 13 years.

I decided that if the symbol was so changeable, it might be good to look at the man.

George Armstrong Custer led a multinational, multicultural force against Native peoples grouped around Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in June 1876, a few weeks before the American Centennial. Custer’s troops included Indians from three nations. Forty percent of his cavalry troopers were immigrants, 17 percent from Ireland and 12 percent from Germany.

Custer himself had written that if he was an Indian, he would resist living on a reservation.

Instead of wearing an army uniform, Custer dressed in Indian buckskin.

His commander, General Phil Sheridan had endorsed genocide with his remark that the only good Indian he had ever see was a dead Indian, but Custer was known as a negotiator when it came to the Lakota.

The Indians believed that Custer broke from his model of negotiation that election year because he hoped that a victory against heavy odds would propel him to the presidency. Custer, a Democrat, had attacked the Republican Grant administration right before the Battle of Little Bighorn.

In any event, Custer led his force of 600 men against an Indian army three times as large, and he divided his men into three different sections, each too far from the others to offer support.

Was he crazy? Perhaps not.

The United States Army had repeatedly captured civilians and used them as “human shields.” Many historians believe that Custer hoped to capture non-combatant women and children and use them as human shields to force Sitting Bull’s surrender. He had done this before at the Washita, and it is significant that most of the Native Americans killed in the first phase of the fighting at the Little Big Horn were precisely women and children.

At the Washita, Custer had captured a number of Indian women and the Indian warriors refused to attack him to protect the lives of the women. Custer’s officers reportedly later apportioned the women among themselves and boasted later that “Indian women rape easy.”

But, of course, we will never know what exactly Custer’s plans at Little Big Horn were.

Nathaniel Philbrick is a great writer, but The Last Stand is not a great book. His sea books, and Mayflower are all better. There is little new in here, and the reflections he offers are not as insightful as those he has given in his other excellent works. But if you are looking for a serviceable narrative of an iconic event, this is useful.

Podcast of Philbrick on The Last Stand

What I’m Reading Now are occasional blogs that I post when I start a new book. They are not always immigration related. Here are some other notes I’ve written on books I’ve finished since September 2009:

22. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Littlebighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick

21. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent Cannato

20. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

19. Roger Williams: The Church and the State by Edmund Morgan.

18. Night by Elie Weisel.

17. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.

16. Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer.

15. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson by Eve LaPlante.

14. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson.

13. Einstein by Walter Isaacson

12. The Possessed by Elif Batuman.

11. Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew