Posts
Six months after the Battle of the Little
Bighorn (June 25, 1876), Frederick Whittaker’s A Complete Life of General George A. Custer was published. Whittaker’s book made no pretense to
objectivity, this was a canonization which presented Custer as a dashing and
brilliant military leader abandoned to his fate by lesser, disloyal,
treacherous, and cowardly men. Whittaker
borrowed generously from Custer’s own book My Life on the Plains, as
well as on his own imagination, which was fulsome, since Whittaker was a
professional writer of nickel and dime novel fiction for a leading publisher.
Whittaker quoted (or manufactured) the
testimony of one of the Indian scouts, Curly, who claimed to have escaped from
the field of battle. When Curly saw that
the party with Custer was about to be overwhelmed, he begged Custer to let him
show him a way to escape. “…Custer
looked at Curly, waved him away and rode back to the little group of men, to
die with them.” Why, Whittaker asks, did
Custer go back to certain death?
“Because he felt that such a death as that which that little band of
heroes was about to die, was worth the lives of all the general officers in the
world….He weighed, in that brief moment of reflection, all the consequences to
America of the lesson of life and the lesson of heroic death, and he chose
death.”
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.
This book presents portraits of Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn as
they have appeared in print over successive decades and in the process
demonstrates the evolution of American values and priorities.
Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:
The best reading experience on
your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry,
or Windows Phone.
No comments:
Post a Comment