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George Armstrong Custer
Since his death along the bluffs overlooking the Little Bighorn River, in Montana, on June 25, 1876, over five hundred books have been written about the life and career of George Armstrong Custer. The earliest works portrayed Custer as a romantic, knightly figure, a paragon of virtue and chivalry. Custer was the valorous paladin killed in the cause of Christian civilization and American Manifest Destiny.
Views of Custer have changed over succeeding generations. Custer has been portrayed as a callous
egotist, a bungling egomaniac, a genocidal war criminal, and the puppet of
faceless forces. For almost one hundred
and fifty years, Custer has been a Rorschach test of American social and
personal values. Whatever else George
Armstrong Custer may or may not have been, even in the twenty first century, he
remains the great lightning rod of American history.
The broader importance of the controversy that rages around the Battle of
the Little Bighorn centers on the nature of truth. The battle (which by modern standards would
be classified as little more than a frontier skirmish) lasted at most six
hours, and yet, after almost one hundred and fifty years, we cannot agree upon
what happened, why, or who was responsible.
This roiling controversy forces us to ask, “How do we know what we know,
and how do we know if it is true?”
Last Stand Hill
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