The Real Custer (61 page)

George's admirer Walt Whitman wrote “A Death Sonnet for Custer,” which appeared in the
New York Tribune
four days after news of the battle broke.
²⁹
In this “trumpet note for heroes,” he wrote,

            
Thou of sunny, flowing hair, in battle,

            
I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in

            
front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand,

            
Now ending well the splendid fever of thy deeds . . .

Years later Whitman sat for an hour viewing John Mulvaney's wall-sized, twelve-foot-high mural,
Custer's Last Rally
, as he said, “completely absorb'd in the first view.” Whitman cast the “painfully real, overwhelming” scene in terms of his thesis of the superiority of the American over the European, even in tragedy. The “muscular, tan-faced men, brought to bay under terrible circumstances,” face “swarms upon swarms of savage Sioux, in their war-bonnets . . . like a hurricane of demons.” Custer “stands in the middle, with dilated eye and extended arm, aiming a huge cavalry pistol” as the men wring out “every cent of the pay before they sell their lives.” Whitman said the scene was dreadful, “yet with an attraction and beauty that will remain in my memory.”
³⁰
A more-well-known depiction was Otto Becker's wholly imagined
Custer's Last Fight
, which was distributed as a promotional lithograph by the Anheuser-Busch brewing company and seen for years in bars and saloons across the country.

Articles, books, poems, and paintings such as these elevated the Custer legend in the decades after his death. Other works emerged that just as fiercely denigrated it. More than 135 years of these efforts have produced Custers for every taste and fancy, from the heroic to the demonic, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

“My every thought was ambitious,” George wrote. “I desired to link my name with acts and men, and in such a manner as to be a mark of honor, not only to the present, but to future generations.” Was this what he achieved? Custer wrote these words in the spring of 1867, shortly
before the failed Hancock expedition and his court-martial. But the letter continued with a note of humility. “I find myself, at twenty-seven, with contentment and happiness bordering my path,” he wrote. “My ambition has been turned into an entirely new channel. Where I was once eager to acquire worldly honors and distinctions, I am now content to try and modestly wear what I have, and feel grateful for them when they come, but my desire now is to make of myself a man worthy of the blessings heaped upon me.”
³¹

George Custer grew up a boy of modest means who asked little of the world but much of himself. He quickly achieved the greatness he sought, then spent the rest of his short life trying to live up to it, not always successfully. It was a very American life, self-created, boundary breaking, energetic, and with all his imperfections he never ceased to strive, create, and overcome. Custer lived on his own terms, and died on them.

“Life is worth living for—or it would be—if it abounded more in such types,” wrote Charles Godfrey Leland, a folklorist, soldier, and scholar, after he visited George and Libbie at Fort Riley in 1869. “There was a bright and joyous chivalry in that man, and a noble refinement mingled with constant gaiety in the wife, such as I fear is passing from the earth.” Leland said that he worried “there will come a time when such books [as Libbie's] will be the only evidences that there were ever such people—so fearless, so familiar with every form of danger, privation, and trial, and yet joyous and even reckless of it all.”
³²

A NOTE ON SOURCES

S
ome of the primary sources used in
The Real Custer
are found in the United States Military Academy Special Collections. They include,
inter alia
, the George Armstrong Custer papers and papers of other graduates as cited, particularly documents in the files compiled by George W. Cullum for his
Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy
(3rd ed., 3 vols., 1891), also known as the “Cullum files”; the “x-files” of cadets who did not graduate; the Annual Reports of the USMA Association of Graduates; the 1952
Register of Graduates and Former Cadets
; the
Register of Delinquencies, Staff Records, Post Orders, Special Orders
; and other sundry records. Other sources include records and documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Elizabeth Bacon Custer papers, and other collections as cited. All Custer letters are from the United States Military Academy Special Collections unless otherwise indicated.

Additional biographical details are from Francis Bernard Heitman,
Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, from its Organization, September 29, 1789, to March 2, 1903
, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office (1903).

Civil War–era after action reports, correspondence and other such records are from
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), unless otherwise indicated.

Some of the secondary sources consulted are
The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth
, Marguerite Merington, ed. (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950);
The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer: Reconstructed from Her Diaries and Notes
, Arlene Reynolds, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Frederic F. Van de Water,
Glory-Hunter: A Life of General Custer
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1934); D. A. Kinsley,
Favor the Bold
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967–68); Jay Monaghan,
Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1959); Stephen E. Ambrose,
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975); Louise K Barnett,
Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer
(New York: Henry Holt, 1996); James Welch,
Killing Custer
(New York: Penguin Books, 1995); and Thom Hatch,
The Custer Companion
(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002).
The Real Custer
expands and is partly based on the account of Custer in the author's
Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point
(New York: Encounter Books, 2006).

Special thanks to Michael Donahue, chairman of the Art Department at Temple College and longest-serving seasonal park ranger at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, for his generous assistance and invaluable comments.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
.
      
Frederick Whittaker,
A Complete Life of General George A. Custer
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), first published in December 1876, 609–10. Whittaker is often faulted for not being accurate, to the point where, like Herodotus, historians avoid his work for fear of repeating a dubious tale.

2
.
      
Philip Quilibet (George Edward Pound), “Luck,”
Galaxy
, October 1876, 555.

3
.
      
Data from Google Ngrams show a reader was over one hundred times more likely to see a reference to “George Custer” in a book in the year 2000 than in 1876, and the greatest growth in Custer references came after 1966.

4
.
      
Ronald Reagan, in a letter to Custer biographer David Humphreys Miller, June 21, 1984.

5
.
      
John McClelland Bulkley,
History of Monroe County Michigan
, vol. I (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 236–7.

CHAPTER 1

1
.
      
Warren Jenkins,
The Ohio Gazetteer and Traveler's Guide
(Columbus: Isaac N. Whiting, 1837), 334.

2
.
      
Charles B. Wallace,
Custer's Ohio Boyhood
(Cadiz, OH: Harrison County Historical Society, 1993), 46. Emmanuel Henry Custer, born December 10, 1806, in Cresaptown, MD; died November 17, 1892, in Monroe, Michigan. On August 7, 1828, he married first Matilda Viers (March 4, 1804–July 18, 1835). Children: Hannah, Brice, William, and John A. He married his second wife, Mrs. Maria Ward Kirkpatrick (May 31, 1807–January 13, 1882), on February 23, 1836. Children: James, Samuel, George Armstrong, Nevin Johnson, Thomas Ward, Boston, and Margaret Emma.

3
.
      
All Nevin Custer reminiscences from “Custer as His Brother Remembers Him,” newspaper article, Topeka, Kansas, June 1910. Accessed from the Monroe County Library (MI).

4
.
      
Louise Barnett, “Early Days,” chapter 1 in
Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer
(New York: Henry Holt, 1996).

5
.
      
Ibid.

6
.
      
“Michigan's Tribute to General Custer,”
Shreveport (LA) Caucasian
, May 31, 1910, 2. Whether he knew it or not, he was quoting lines attributed to Cherokee leader Tuskenehaw when his people were facing banishment on the Trail of Tears. “My voice is for war,” he said. “I have killed all the whites I could find. . . . I, and all the brave warriors of my town, will die and be buried alongside of their fathers. Those who are afraid, like squaws, will let the white man come and drive them off. My voice is for war.” “The West Fifty Years Hence,”
Southern Literary Messenger
4, 1838, 467.

7
.
      
The Indians later massacred the American prisoners.

8
.
      
John McClelland Bulkley,
History of Monroe County Michigan: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People, and Its Principal Interests
, vol. 1 (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 421–22.

9
.
      
Ibid., 422.

10
.
    
Ibid.

11
.
    
Ibid., 233.

12
.
    
“Custer as a Boy,”
New York Times,
July 29, 1876, 2.

13
.
    
Willard Glazier,
Ocean to Ocean on Horseback
(Philadelphia: Edgewood Publishing, 1899), 277–78. Glazier was a lieutenant in the 2nd New York Cavalry regiment before being captured and sent to Libby Prison in October 1863.

14
.
    
“Some Reminiscences of the Boyhood Days of General Custer and Bishop Simpson,”
Belmont Chronicle (OH)
, March 4, 1880, 1.

15
.
    
Ibid.

16
.
    
Ibid.

17
.
    
Ibid.

18
.
    
Ibid.

19
.
    
GAC December 12, 1856.

20
.
    
Harrison County had also shifted districts as Ohio grew, being previously part of the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Eleventh Districts.