Judging from the book lists, America’s fascination with Custer is far from over. Two new biographies from major publishers have just been released, ““The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer’’ by Jeffrey D. Wert (462 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27.50) and ““Touched by Fire: The Life, Death and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer’’ by Louise Barnett (540 pages. Henry Holt. $30). Next month Doubleday will reprint Stephen Ambrose’s ““Crazy Horse and Custer.’’ Evan S. Connell’s splendid ““Son of the Morning Star’’ has been in print since 1984.
All the recent books on Custer share one important trait: they attempt a balanced portrait of a man who for more than a century has been viewed dimly through a dust cloud of rhetoric. We’ll see if Hollywood follows suit next year when a new $65 million epic on Custer goes into production. Brad Pitt has expressed interest in following the path blazed by Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda and Ronald Reagan, to name just three of the 30-odd movie Custers.
Why is the disaster at the Little Bighorn an endless source of fascination? Is it the spectacle of a civilized army being overwhelmed by a horde of so-called savages? Or does it stem from the romance surrounding the great chiefs, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull? (Crazy Horse gets his own TV movie next month on TNT.)
The fact is that mythmakers are a fickle bunch, who fasten on heroes and villains without benefit of perceptible logic. As the writer Milan Kundera once noted, some wars are ““symbolically mute.’’ Not Custer’s. In 1876, and for several decades after, Custer’s death was seen by many as a sacrifice to America’s westward movement; even the great liberal icon Walt Whitman celebrated him in a poem. By 1942, in the film ““They Died With Their Boots On,’’ he was portrayed by Errol Flynn as a buckskin cavalier tragically caught up in a conflict between the noble red men (his spiritual kin as fellow Westerners) and the despoilers of the coming 20th century, the bureaucratic Indian agents. (There is some faint justification for this view, as Custer was an admirer of the Plains Indians, at least by the standards of his 19th-century military colleagues.) By the 1970s, the Custer legend reached a low point. In ““Little Big Man,’’ he was a ranting megalomaniac; in Vine Deloria’s book, ““Custer Died For Your Sins,’’ he was ““the Eichmann of the Plains.''
The victors at Little Bighorn have undergone transformations, too. The currently popular notion of the Plains Indians as New Age Eagle scouts with a natural bent for ecology is an American variation of what Bertrand Russell called ““The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed.’’ According to Russell, conquering nations (or ruling classes) build comforting myths around the subjects of the oppression in order to assuage their guilt.
Like armed conquerors, mythmakers impose themselves on history and its players. For all the conventional wisdom these days about exploitation of the frontier, the Anglo-American settlers had a different view of themselves. As historian Patricia Nelson Limerick writes, the dominant motive for moving West was ““improvement and opportunity, not injury to others. Few white Americans went West intending to ruin the natives and despoil the continent… Innocence of intention placed the course of events in a bright and positive light; only over time would the shadows compete for our attention.’’ American Indians weren’t simply the only frontier people on earth to give way to encroaching civilization. But they were among the first to have their defeat recorded in detail, and the very first to become subjects for Hollywood.
As long as Americans are ambivalent about their past, Custer will be available for duty. He stands both as a martyr to the settling of the West and as a warning about the limits of our national ambition. The battle of Little Bighorn has never really ended.
