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George Armstrong Custer
In 1874, Custer published My Life on the Plains, an account of his
career as an Indian fighter to that time.
This book gives us important insights into the kind of man Custer was
and the type of tactics he habitually used.
Like many professional Victorian era soldiers, Custer saw war as a great
adventure, he reveled in the freedom of the frontier, “I had several English
greyhounds, whose speed I was anxious to test with that of the antelope….Taking
with me but one man…and calling my dogs around me, I galloped ahead of the
column as soon as it was daylight, for the purpose of having a chase after some
antelope.” While war might be the greatest game of all, Custer respected the
Indian as an opponent, “I had an opportunity to witness the Indian mode of
fighting in all its perfection. Surely no race of men, not even the famous
Cossacks, could display more wonderful skill in feats of horsemanship than the
Indian warrior on his native plains, mounted on his well-trained war pony….” (G.A. Custer, 136) He also showed that he knew what
defeat meant when writing about the fate of
“…poor Kidder and his party, yet so brutally hacked and disfigured as to
be beyond recognition save as human beings….Every individual of the party had
been scalped and his skull broken….even the clothes of all the party and him
carried away, some of the bodies were lying in beds of ashes with partly burned
fragments of wood near them, showing that the savages had put some of them to
death by the terrible tortures of fire. The sinews of the arms and legs had
been cut away, the nose of every man hacked off, and the features otherwise
defaced so that it would have been scarcely possible for even a relative to
recognize a single one of the unfortunate victims. We could not even
distinguish the officer from his men. Each body was pierced by from twenty to
fifty arrows, and the arrows were found as the Savage demons had left them,
bristling in the bodies.” (G.A. Custer, 77)
Indian warfare was irregular warfare. The central problem was catching the
hostiles, and Custer laments, “Many of (our) men and horses were far from being
familiar with actual warfare, particularly of this irregular character. Some of the troopers were quite inexperienced
as horsemen and still more inexpert in the use of their weapons, as their in
accuracy of fire when attempting to bring down an Indian within easy range
clearly proved.” (G.A.
Custer, 137) Custer recounts how he whipped the Seventh Cavalry into
shape and prepared it for the Army’s proposed winter campaign, designed to
catch the Indians in camp during the supposedly impassable winter snows.
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. 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.
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.
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