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Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer
On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history. Outnumbered and exhausted, the Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of its 400 men, and every soldier under Custer’s direct command was killed.
It’s easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer’s life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way. Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America’s bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nation’s multicultural present.
“[Elliott] is an approachable guide as he takes readers to battlefields where Custer fought American Indians . . . to the Michigan town of Monroe that Custer called home after he moved there at age 10 . . . to the Black Hills of South Dakota where Custer led an expedition that gave birth to a gold rush."—Steve Weinberg, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“By ‘Custerology,’ Elliott means the historical interpretation and commemoration of Custer and the Indian Wars in which he fought not only by those who honor Custer but by those who celebrate the Native American resistance that defeated him. The purpose of this book is to show how Custer and the Little Bighorn can be and have been commemorated for such contradictory purposes.”—Library Journal
“Michael Elliott’s Custerology is vivid, trenchant, engrossing, and important. The American soldier George Armstrong Custer has been the subject of very nearly incessant debate for almost a century and a half, and the debate is multicultural, multinational, and multimedia. Mr. Elliott's book provides by far the best overview, and no one interested in the long-haired soldier whom the Indians called Son of the Morning Star can afford to miss it.”—Larry McMurtry
It’s easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer’s life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way. Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America’s bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nation’s multicultural present.
“[Elliott] is an approachable guide as he takes readers to battlefields where Custer fought American Indians . . . to the Michigan town of Monroe that Custer called home after he moved there at age 10 . . . to the Black Hills of South Dakota where Custer led an expedition that gave birth to a gold rush."—Steve Weinberg, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“By ‘Custerology,’ Elliott means the historical interpretation and commemoration of Custer and the Indian Wars in which he fought not only by those who honor Custer but by those who celebrate the Native American resistance that defeated him. The purpose of this book is to show how Custer and the Little Bighorn can be and have been commemorated for such contradictory purposes.”—Library Journal
“Michael Elliott’s Custerology is vivid, trenchant, engrossing, and important. The American soldier George Armstrong Custer has been the subject of very nearly incessant debate for almost a century and a half, and the debate is multicultural, multinational, and multimedia. Mr. Elliott's book provides by far the best overview, and no one interested in the long-haired soldier whom the Indians called Son of the Morning Star can afford to miss it.”—Larry McMurtry
344 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2007
8 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
Michael A. Elliott
23 booksMichael A. Elliott (B.A., Amherst, 1992; Ph.D., Columbia, 1998) is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in English and American Studies, Department of English, Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
He specializes in the literature and culture of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to American cultures and the place of Native Americans in the United States.
Elliott is a member of the editorial board of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
He specializes in the literature and culture of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to American cultures and the place of Native Americans in the United States.
Elliott is a member of the editorial board of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
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April 27, 2016
My obsession with General George Armstrong Custer began in August of 1991, when I was 11 years old. I was on vacation with my family in Rapid City, South Dakota. I can pinpoint the date because the only thing coming out of the radio was news of the August Putsch, an attempt by hardcore Communists to wrest control away from Mikhail Gorbachev. It made my parents nervous, and kids always remember the times their parents get scared.
While Boris Yeltsin was calming the waters in Russia, my dad and I wandered into a souvenir shop. I was paging through a rack of posters and came to a pen-and-ink sketch of Custer, done from a famous photograph. I knew Custer from They Died With Their Boots On and Custer of the West, but at the time, I was more interested in the Civil War and the Minnesota Twins. That was about to change.
As my dad and I pondered the Custer poster, a leather-clad biker came over to us and engaged my dad in conversation. He told my dad that the location of Custer’s battlefield was just a few hundred miles down the road, and worth the trip. Since there was nothing left to do in Rapid City, except visit more souvenir shops filled with pyrite and Sturgis shot glasses, it was easy to convince my dad to make the detour.
From that first visit to Custer’s Last Stand, now known as the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, I was hooked.
Since that day, I’ve dressed up as Custer on Halloween; I have a Custer action figure; I’ve watched practically every documentary, film and miniseries; I read every book I come across; I joined one of the historical societies; I donated some money so I could “own” one square foot of the battlefield; and I have a vial of Little Bighorn earth sitting on a bookshelf. My childhood sketch pads are filled with vivid and psychologically disturbing renderings of Custer’s demise. Also, I have that Custer poster somewhere, though I’m still in negotiations with my wife as to whether and where it will be hung.
Michael Elliott’s Custerology is a book that attempts to explain people like me. (Oh, who am I kidding? Compared to some of the people in Custerology, I’m a rank amateur). Its stated purpose is to explore the “enduring legacy” of Custer and the Little Bighorn.
Born in 1839, George Custer was a noted cavalryman during the Civil War. Despite graduating last in his class at West Point, he became a major-general in his early-twenties, and earned renown for his daring charges and audacious uniform. After the Civil War, he muddled through Reconstruction duties in Texas, before heading to the Plains where he had mixed success as an Indian fighter. He scored one major victory at the Washita, a controversial encounter that resulted in the deaths of noncombatant women and children. During his time out west, Custer was also court-martialed and twice removed from command. All in all, had Custer lived to pluck gray hairs, it is likely he would be remembered today by only a few students of the Indian Wars (comparable contemporaries who did not die on a Montana hillside include Nelson Miles and George Crook; both men were fine soldiers who are not exactly household names in the 21st century).
Unfortunately for Custer (though fortunate for his legacy), he died young, in that rarest of fights: a battle of annihilation. On June 25, 1876, Custer and around 210 men of his immediate command were killed while fighting Lakota and Cheyenne warriors near present-day Hardin, Montana. This death gave Custer unending life.
When you think about it, Custer deserves to be forgotten. He was just a blip on the stage of history. He had success in the Civil War, to be sure, but he was a brigade commander, not a leader of vast armies. His actions after the Civil War deserve even less acclaim. The biggest encounter he had with the Indians resulted in a disastrous defeat. Moreover, the Little Bighorn was strategically unimportant; in terms of casualties, it would compare to about five minutes at Cold Harbor during the Civil War.
Yet Custer abides.
History moves on, and washes away the totems of the Indian Wars. Most of the famous battle sites have given way to private ranches or farmland. All that remains are scattered roadside markers, darkened by wind and rain. Most people have never heard of Tecumseh and Tippecanoe, Pontiac’s Rebellion, Chivington at Sand Creek, or Harney’s attack along the Bluewater. But everyone’s heard of Custer, or at least some joke about his Last Stand.
Elliott wanted to know why.
The framework he uses to explore this question is an exploration of modern-day observances of Custer’s life and death. To that end, Elliott travels to Monroe, Michigan, where Custer once lived with his wife, Libbie. In Monroe, he meets Steve and Sandy Alexander, who live in the restored Custer residence, and who spend their free time pretending to be George and Libbie Custer. Next, he visits the Washita, where in 1868, Custer attacked the sleeping village of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne. The discussion here centers on how the Washita should be presented to the American public: as a battle or as a massacre; as an interpretive site or a holy site. Elliott also goes to the Black Hills where he visits the unfinished Crazy Horse monument and gathers modern Indian perspectives on Custer (hint: they’re not charitable).
And of course, Elliott spends a lot of time at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. He pays close attention to the different ways the battle is commemorated, and how that commemoration has changed over time. When I first visited, back in 1991, the battlefield was called Custer Battlefield National Monument (the name was changed just a few months later, by a law signed by George H.W. Bush) and featured a very Anglo-American-centric view of the struggle. The memorials all belonged to the white soldiers. If you visit the site today, you will notice a memorial to the Indian participants, as well as a couple of Indian gravesites. Elliott uses this evolving interpretation of the battlefield to discuss history and memory and the underlying purpose for invoking each. It’s actually quite fascinating to think about. After all, this place is a National Battlefield meant to commemorate federal troops; yet the park pays homage to the warriors of the sovereign tribes that killed those federal troops. It really goes to show you the competing impulses of pride and shame that animate American history.
Custerology is certainly not the book I expected when I picked it off the shelf. Based on the cover and description, I thought I was getting one of those travelogue/memoir hybrids in the vein of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. In this, my expectations were disappointed. Michael Elliott could not be further from Sarah Vowell. Indeed, as I was reading, I kept thinking of the Joker’s line from The Dark Knight: “Why so serious?”
This is an overly-sober book, with long, solemn discussions about heady topics. It is learned, it is erudite, and it is heavily footnoted. All this is great. I learned a lot, and I knew from the bibliography that Elliott wasn’t totally full of s**t. At the same time, I just wanted him to lighten up already. I mean, the humor is already there, for the mining; all you had to do was give the material a defter touch.
For instance, Elliott goes into great detail describing the various reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand that take place near the National Monument. One of these reenactments occurs on the Crow reservation, features a brisk recap of Anglo-Indian relations from the time of Lewis & Clark, and finishes with Custer dying beneath a hail of blanks, fired by Crow Indians pretending to be Lakota and Cheyenne. Even with Elliott’s reserved, evenhanded retelling, this reenactment sounds fantastically and hilariously confusing. It is a celebration of Indians killing whites, yet the Indians are Crows, who actually fought with Custer, and who ended up getting all the land, and the whole thing starts off with the Pledge of Allegiance. Amazing! I am left to wonder how devastatingly entertaining these passages could’ve been in the hands of someone like Sarah Vowell.
The truth is, it’s more enjoyable to read a polemic than a judicious, balanced book. Here, Elliott strives for judiciousness and balance. He is out to give everyone a fair hearing. In many ways, it’s quite laudable. Even though I’m a huge Custer fan, there’s no way I could’ve written about Steve Alexander without mercilessly making fun of him. I mean, come on! The guy pretends he’s Custer! Elliott doesn’t do the easy thing, which is to mock the crap out of Alexander. I suppose that makes him a better person than me.
Elliott does disclose a slight bias in favor of the Indian point of view. That is, he may be polite and respectful of those who love Custer, but he doesn’t agree with them. Still, his disapproval is so polite, and so tactfully stated, that it barely registers.
In the end, Elliott cannot give a definitive answer for why so many people (myself included) remain interested in George A. Custer. His best guess has to do with the complicated, oft-tortured relationship between the United States and Native Americans, and with the latent national guilt we harbor for the way things played out.
America’s dealings with the Indians has been a blot on our reputation to rival our original sin of slavery. From the time we were English colonies to the turn of the 20th century, we were in a state of almost constant warfare with one Indian tribe or another. In a sense, the Indian Wars were an extended, centuries-long insurgency that dwarf Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Things might have been different if the first English colonists had flatly declared their intentions to take the Indians’ land by force. In theory, at least, everybody would’ve been on the same wavelength. It would’ve been a clash of civilizations, bloody but honest.
Instead, from Plymouth Rock to Wounded Knee, we took the Indians’ land by hook or by crook. We came like the Greeks, bearing gifts. We used treachery and deceit; we made treaties and broke them; then we made new treaties. We underpaid for the land, if we paid at all. When we couldn’t get one tribe to sell their land, we found another that would, and called that square. When the Supreme Court sided with the Indians, we ignored the Supreme Court. When we found gold on an Indian reservation, we sent in soldiers to protect the miners who were illegally on the reservation. We slaughtered game in the millions and cut down trees and swarmed over the land like locusts. When we fought them, we came at their villages in the dawn, trampling the very old and the very young and the women along with the rest.
It is uncomfortable to think about this. When we ponder America, we like to imagine bald eagles and fireworks and new ways to insult the French. We like to imagine Minute Men sniping at British redcoats outside Concord, or Rangers scaling Point du Hoc in Normandy, or the US Hockey Team defeating the commies in Lake Placid. We don’t like the think of rotting buffalo carcasses, burned villages, displaced peoples, or dead children. In short, we don’t like to think about an American genocide.
I have an abiding interest in the history of the American West. Also, I tend to drink. When I drink, I like to talk about my abiding interests. Accordingly, I often drink and talk about the American West. In doing so, I’ve noticed that people get defensive about the manner of our westward expansion. Just a few weeks ago, when I was talking with my brother about this book, he hotly informed me that the Indians were warring with each other long before the first Europeans arrived. The intense, irrelevant nature of my brother’s argument got me thinking that Elliott might’ve been on to something.
(As an aside, I’ve seen my brother’s contention mimicked online, usually on book reviews for works with a “pro-Indian” slant such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It’s a non-sequitur posing as insight. I’m not even sure what it means. Am I supposed to believe that the fact that the Indian tribes in North America existed within a complex, interrelated, sociopolitical context completely absolves the United States from all treaty obligations? I am? Well, then. Sounds like they really deserved that smallpox!).
Elliott posits that it is difficult for Americans to square their concepts of the United States (liberty, funnel cakes, roller-coasters) with the historical realities of the United States (slavery, imperialism, crushing force). It’s hard to cheer the past when the past is so checkered. But Custer provides a loophole. We can cheer Custer because Custer was defeated. Since the Indians won and the soldiers died, we can pretend that the US-Indian conflict was a contest of equals. It’s like a little league soccer game where no one keeps score. The Indians lost the war, but they sure tried hard. And the US won, but was magnanimous in victory. Now we can all go out to pizza after the game as one nation, glossing over those prickly details concerning moral, ethical, and legal rights.
Now I’m the one sounding too serious.
Which is odd, because my main criticism of Elliott’s well-argued answer to Custer’s allure is that it escapes the far simpler reality: learning about Custer is fun. We will never know exactly what happened at the battle of the Little Bighorn. But we have a ton of evidence: forensic evidence; topographical evidence; participant testimony. Some of this evidence is corroborative; some is conflicting; some of it may be untrue. That’s the appeal. It’s the world’s biggest cold case, and anyone can become a detective.
This aspect of Custer-mania, the fun of it all, is the main thing missing from Custerology.
While Boris Yeltsin was calming the waters in Russia, my dad and I wandered into a souvenir shop. I was paging through a rack of posters and came to a pen-and-ink sketch of Custer, done from a famous photograph. I knew Custer from They Died With Their Boots On and Custer of the West, but at the time, I was more interested in the Civil War and the Minnesota Twins. That was about to change.
As my dad and I pondered the Custer poster, a leather-clad biker came over to us and engaged my dad in conversation. He told my dad that the location of Custer’s battlefield was just a few hundred miles down the road, and worth the trip. Since there was nothing left to do in Rapid City, except visit more souvenir shops filled with pyrite and Sturgis shot glasses, it was easy to convince my dad to make the detour.
From that first visit to Custer’s Last Stand, now known as the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, I was hooked.
Since that day, I’ve dressed up as Custer on Halloween; I have a Custer action figure; I’ve watched practically every documentary, film and miniseries; I read every book I come across; I joined one of the historical societies; I donated some money so I could “own” one square foot of the battlefield; and I have a vial of Little Bighorn earth sitting on a bookshelf. My childhood sketch pads are filled with vivid and psychologically disturbing renderings of Custer’s demise. Also, I have that Custer poster somewhere, though I’m still in negotiations with my wife as to whether and where it will be hung.
Michael Elliott’s Custerology is a book that attempts to explain people like me. (Oh, who am I kidding? Compared to some of the people in Custerology, I’m a rank amateur). Its stated purpose is to explore the “enduring legacy” of Custer and the Little Bighorn.
Born in 1839, George Custer was a noted cavalryman during the Civil War. Despite graduating last in his class at West Point, he became a major-general in his early-twenties, and earned renown for his daring charges and audacious uniform. After the Civil War, he muddled through Reconstruction duties in Texas, before heading to the Plains where he had mixed success as an Indian fighter. He scored one major victory at the Washita, a controversial encounter that resulted in the deaths of noncombatant women and children. During his time out west, Custer was also court-martialed and twice removed from command. All in all, had Custer lived to pluck gray hairs, it is likely he would be remembered today by only a few students of the Indian Wars (comparable contemporaries who did not die on a Montana hillside include Nelson Miles and George Crook; both men were fine soldiers who are not exactly household names in the 21st century).
Unfortunately for Custer (though fortunate for his legacy), he died young, in that rarest of fights: a battle of annihilation. On June 25, 1876, Custer and around 210 men of his immediate command were killed while fighting Lakota and Cheyenne warriors near present-day Hardin, Montana. This death gave Custer unending life.
When you think about it, Custer deserves to be forgotten. He was just a blip on the stage of history. He had success in the Civil War, to be sure, but he was a brigade commander, not a leader of vast armies. His actions after the Civil War deserve even less acclaim. The biggest encounter he had with the Indians resulted in a disastrous defeat. Moreover, the Little Bighorn was strategically unimportant; in terms of casualties, it would compare to about five minutes at Cold Harbor during the Civil War.
Yet Custer abides.
History moves on, and washes away the totems of the Indian Wars. Most of the famous battle sites have given way to private ranches or farmland. All that remains are scattered roadside markers, darkened by wind and rain. Most people have never heard of Tecumseh and Tippecanoe, Pontiac’s Rebellion, Chivington at Sand Creek, or Harney’s attack along the Bluewater. But everyone’s heard of Custer, or at least some joke about his Last Stand.
Elliott wanted to know why.
The framework he uses to explore this question is an exploration of modern-day observances of Custer’s life and death. To that end, Elliott travels to Monroe, Michigan, where Custer once lived with his wife, Libbie. In Monroe, he meets Steve and Sandy Alexander, who live in the restored Custer residence, and who spend their free time pretending to be George and Libbie Custer. Next, he visits the Washita, where in 1868, Custer attacked the sleeping village of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne. The discussion here centers on how the Washita should be presented to the American public: as a battle or as a massacre; as an interpretive site or a holy site. Elliott also goes to the Black Hills where he visits the unfinished Crazy Horse monument and gathers modern Indian perspectives on Custer (hint: they’re not charitable).
And of course, Elliott spends a lot of time at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. He pays close attention to the different ways the battle is commemorated, and how that commemoration has changed over time. When I first visited, back in 1991, the battlefield was called Custer Battlefield National Monument (the name was changed just a few months later, by a law signed by George H.W. Bush) and featured a very Anglo-American-centric view of the struggle. The memorials all belonged to the white soldiers. If you visit the site today, you will notice a memorial to the Indian participants, as well as a couple of Indian gravesites. Elliott uses this evolving interpretation of the battlefield to discuss history and memory and the underlying purpose for invoking each. It’s actually quite fascinating to think about. After all, this place is a National Battlefield meant to commemorate federal troops; yet the park pays homage to the warriors of the sovereign tribes that killed those federal troops. It really goes to show you the competing impulses of pride and shame that animate American history.
Custerology is certainly not the book I expected when I picked it off the shelf. Based on the cover and description, I thought I was getting one of those travelogue/memoir hybrids in the vein of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. In this, my expectations were disappointed. Michael Elliott could not be further from Sarah Vowell. Indeed, as I was reading, I kept thinking of the Joker’s line from The Dark Knight: “Why so serious?”
This is an overly-sober book, with long, solemn discussions about heady topics. It is learned, it is erudite, and it is heavily footnoted. All this is great. I learned a lot, and I knew from the bibliography that Elliott wasn’t totally full of s**t. At the same time, I just wanted him to lighten up already. I mean, the humor is already there, for the mining; all you had to do was give the material a defter touch.
For instance, Elliott goes into great detail describing the various reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand that take place near the National Monument. One of these reenactments occurs on the Crow reservation, features a brisk recap of Anglo-Indian relations from the time of Lewis & Clark, and finishes with Custer dying beneath a hail of blanks, fired by Crow Indians pretending to be Lakota and Cheyenne. Even with Elliott’s reserved, evenhanded retelling, this reenactment sounds fantastically and hilariously confusing. It is a celebration of Indians killing whites, yet the Indians are Crows, who actually fought with Custer, and who ended up getting all the land, and the whole thing starts off with the Pledge of Allegiance. Amazing! I am left to wonder how devastatingly entertaining these passages could’ve been in the hands of someone like Sarah Vowell.
The truth is, it’s more enjoyable to read a polemic than a judicious, balanced book. Here, Elliott strives for judiciousness and balance. He is out to give everyone a fair hearing. In many ways, it’s quite laudable. Even though I’m a huge Custer fan, there’s no way I could’ve written about Steve Alexander without mercilessly making fun of him. I mean, come on! The guy pretends he’s Custer! Elliott doesn’t do the easy thing, which is to mock the crap out of Alexander. I suppose that makes him a better person than me.
Elliott does disclose a slight bias in favor of the Indian point of view. That is, he may be polite and respectful of those who love Custer, but he doesn’t agree with them. Still, his disapproval is so polite, and so tactfully stated, that it barely registers.
In the end, Elliott cannot give a definitive answer for why so many people (myself included) remain interested in George A. Custer. His best guess has to do with the complicated, oft-tortured relationship between the United States and Native Americans, and with the latent national guilt we harbor for the way things played out.
America’s dealings with the Indians has been a blot on our reputation to rival our original sin of slavery. From the time we were English colonies to the turn of the 20th century, we were in a state of almost constant warfare with one Indian tribe or another. In a sense, the Indian Wars were an extended, centuries-long insurgency that dwarf Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Things might have been different if the first English colonists had flatly declared their intentions to take the Indians’ land by force. In theory, at least, everybody would’ve been on the same wavelength. It would’ve been a clash of civilizations, bloody but honest.
Instead, from Plymouth Rock to Wounded Knee, we took the Indians’ land by hook or by crook. We came like the Greeks, bearing gifts. We used treachery and deceit; we made treaties and broke them; then we made new treaties. We underpaid for the land, if we paid at all. When we couldn’t get one tribe to sell their land, we found another that would, and called that square. When the Supreme Court sided with the Indians, we ignored the Supreme Court. When we found gold on an Indian reservation, we sent in soldiers to protect the miners who were illegally on the reservation. We slaughtered game in the millions and cut down trees and swarmed over the land like locusts. When we fought them, we came at their villages in the dawn, trampling the very old and the very young and the women along with the rest.
It is uncomfortable to think about this. When we ponder America, we like to imagine bald eagles and fireworks and new ways to insult the French. We like to imagine Minute Men sniping at British redcoats outside Concord, or Rangers scaling Point du Hoc in Normandy, or the US Hockey Team defeating the commies in Lake Placid. We don’t like the think of rotting buffalo carcasses, burned villages, displaced peoples, or dead children. In short, we don’t like to think about an American genocide.
I have an abiding interest in the history of the American West. Also, I tend to drink. When I drink, I like to talk about my abiding interests. Accordingly, I often drink and talk about the American West. In doing so, I’ve noticed that people get defensive about the manner of our westward expansion. Just a few weeks ago, when I was talking with my brother about this book, he hotly informed me that the Indians were warring with each other long before the first Europeans arrived. The intense, irrelevant nature of my brother’s argument got me thinking that Elliott might’ve been on to something.
(As an aside, I’ve seen my brother’s contention mimicked online, usually on book reviews for works with a “pro-Indian” slant such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It’s a non-sequitur posing as insight. I’m not even sure what it means. Am I supposed to believe that the fact that the Indian tribes in North America existed within a complex, interrelated, sociopolitical context completely absolves the United States from all treaty obligations? I am? Well, then. Sounds like they really deserved that smallpox!).
Elliott posits that it is difficult for Americans to square their concepts of the United States (liberty, funnel cakes, roller-coasters) with the historical realities of the United States (slavery, imperialism, crushing force). It’s hard to cheer the past when the past is so checkered. But Custer provides a loophole. We can cheer Custer because Custer was defeated. Since the Indians won and the soldiers died, we can pretend that the US-Indian conflict was a contest of equals. It’s like a little league soccer game where no one keeps score. The Indians lost the war, but they sure tried hard. And the US won, but was magnanimous in victory. Now we can all go out to pizza after the game as one nation, glossing over those prickly details concerning moral, ethical, and legal rights.
Now I’m the one sounding too serious.
Which is odd, because my main criticism of Elliott’s well-argued answer to Custer’s allure is that it escapes the far simpler reality: learning about Custer is fun. We will never know exactly what happened at the battle of the Little Bighorn. But we have a ton of evidence: forensic evidence; topographical evidence; participant testimony. Some of this evidence is corroborative; some is conflicting; some of it may be untrue. That’s the appeal. It’s the world’s biggest cold case, and anyone can become a detective.
This aspect of Custer-mania, the fun of it all, is the main thing missing from Custerology.
November 20, 2009
I smirked when I read the title, but a few sampled pages were more than enough to convince me that Custer is indeed his own sub-discipline. His military career and idiosyncratic self-fashioning during life, and his thorough incorporation into collective memory after death, are enough to nourish a range of contemporary parties, from Native Americans whose yearly reenactments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn provide a stage for tribal self-definition and American patriotism, to white male veterans, military antiquaries and Custer impersonators (“living historians”) who identify with Custer’s dandy-dragoon persona and who wish to honor his bravery and dash as virtues separate from the brutality of his mission.
I feel for people in this last group, if only because people are only just learning to do without uncomplicated military heroism. A famous warrior is the traditional cynosure and model for men, and it’s hard to do be ambivalent. The mass mobilization, slaughterhouse-like mechanization and political virulence of “modern war” have made soldiers objects of pity and politicians suspect (the American Civil War is one exception to this malaise: Lincoln, though so doggedly committed that he could accept attrition and scorched-earth as keys to victory, commanded an eloquence powerful enough to dignify the bloodletting by linking it to the nation’s highest ideals, to a “new birth of freedom,” and so great-souled as to come out of the war disposed towards reconciliation rather than embittered vengeance). So, despite the fact that many of what Elliott calls the “Custerphiles” ignore the patently obvious (that Custer was a inspired leader of shock troops, but out of his depth in independent command; that 1876 America was not a simpler time and place, that it was economically depressed, politically rotten, violent and terrifying, even for white males), I sympathize with their search for that mythic beast, the Apolitical Solider, the fighting man cleansed of the politics that bade him fight. I think it’s important that the policies for which soldiers fight should not wholly define the actions or being of those soldiers, but trying to separate the two completely requires a cognitive dissonance of gymnastic agility.
And really, the Apolitical Soldier, the Unconsciously Political Soldier does exist, but he’s often too gross and unprincipled in his love of violence to be acceptable to those looking for an honorable old-fashioned hero. Custer was apolitical in the sense that he was so enamored of battle that the why of it all didn’t receive much of his identification beyond the application of a few catchphrases about civilization’s inexorable march. Some men just like to fight. It’s sport to them. They’ll maul whatever’s placed before them, once the leash is taken off. Custer was descended from a Hessian mercenary and almost became a solider of fortune himself; and he showed no hesitation, let alone soul-agony, when it came to fighting West Point friends who had joined the Confederacy. I like that Elliott emphasizes how by making Custer’s defeat their focal point, Americans have been able to see their society “as a victim of the violence of the frontier that, while shocking, was also comforting because it offered the United States a stance of moral righteousness in the face of a victorious foe”—-a neat trick, one that would be harder to pull off if we were forced to commemorate Custer’s vicious victories rather than his dramatic, glorified defeat. The nickname “Creeping Panther,” conferred by the Southern Cheyenne for Custer’s display of patient ruthlessness in a successful ambush of one of their villages, gives us a better sense of why he was valuable to the US Army than all that sentimental cavalier stuff (same with Camelot: I admire the expensively educated imagination, the sure feeling for myth that Jackie had, but the story of reckless gangster scions becoming the champions and martyrs of American liberalism is just more interesting than her myth). The Custers of the world are almost never genteelly admirable (that Custer and his widow made him so shows a mastery of PR and the codes of class), but if you’re empire building, waging multiple wars of consolidation and conquest, a Jacksonian class of war lovers, bravoes and gamecocks is a resource you cannot afford to do without.
In contrast to “cultural historian,” Elliott affirms his orientation as a “presentist”--“someone whose interest in history is focused on how that history, including prior acts of historical commemoration, is experienced in our current age”--and indeed his chapter on the complexity of contemporary Indian responses to (and really, their leading role in) the battle’s commemoration and reenactment is the best in the book. Elliott is fantastic on the self-fashioning, the dandyism of Custer (“the aesthetic quality of the military glory he sought”), on the commemorative complexities of the Washita battle/massacre, on the emotional motivations of the white Custerologists--but the portrayal of Native communities defining themselves at once as proud Indians, American citizens, veterans and patriots against a past of colonization and dispossession forms the book’s most moving commentary on contemporary America.
The image of Indian veterans unironically enunciating both tribal pride and imperial loyalty, in a setting saturated with Lee Greenwood (Elliott calls his song “God Bless the USA (I’m proud to be an American)” the theme song of Little Bighorn reenactments), may not present a instance of anything so cinematic as “brainwashing,” as Elliott quotes one native artist, so much as the fluidity of identity that’s the norm among Americans. And assimilation through military service is a fact of successful empires. Gibbon’s pages are sown with sonorous lament of the love of luxury that allowed the Italian nobles to pass their martial mantle to the sinewy races of the newly conquered. The 18th and 19th century British army was full of Irishmen. Men left the economically stagnant post-Civil War south to put on the blue coat and advance the stars-and-stripes across the West and into the Caribbean (during the Spanish-American War, these demographics caused friction between army units and their allies the anti-Spanish Cuban insurgents, many of whom were black). Even an empire as short-sighted, suicidal and politically unsophisticated as Hitler’s managed to recruit racist Danes and Frenchmen and bolster the Eastern front with a few legions of vengeful Ukrainians, Latvians, even Bosnian Muslims. Poverty and lack of opportunity (together with the traditional hope among American immigrants and minorities that loyal service will shame the mainstream into ameliorating that poverty and lack of opportunity), also play a part; in America as in Rome, service leads to citizenship. The inseparability of soldiering and politics may be another tie that binds Indians to American patriotism: just as America initially found it difficult to celebrate its soldiers’ bravery and sacrifice in a politically unpopular war, so too would an Indian veteran of one of America’s twentieth century wars find it all but impossible to emotionally separate his pride or pain or sacrifice from the imperial idea in whose defense or expansion he fought. It’s asking too much of a man to insist, purely for the sake of a nebulous authenticity, that he loathe the political order for which he has bled.
I feel for people in this last group, if only because people are only just learning to do without uncomplicated military heroism. A famous warrior is the traditional cynosure and model for men, and it’s hard to do be ambivalent. The mass mobilization, slaughterhouse-like mechanization and political virulence of “modern war” have made soldiers objects of pity and politicians suspect (the American Civil War is one exception to this malaise: Lincoln, though so doggedly committed that he could accept attrition and scorched-earth as keys to victory, commanded an eloquence powerful enough to dignify the bloodletting by linking it to the nation’s highest ideals, to a “new birth of freedom,” and so great-souled as to come out of the war disposed towards reconciliation rather than embittered vengeance). So, despite the fact that many of what Elliott calls the “Custerphiles” ignore the patently obvious (that Custer was a inspired leader of shock troops, but out of his depth in independent command; that 1876 America was not a simpler time and place, that it was economically depressed, politically rotten, violent and terrifying, even for white males), I sympathize with their search for that mythic beast, the Apolitical Solider, the fighting man cleansed of the politics that bade him fight. I think it’s important that the policies for which soldiers fight should not wholly define the actions or being of those soldiers, but trying to separate the two completely requires a cognitive dissonance of gymnastic agility.
And really, the Apolitical Soldier, the Unconsciously Political Soldier does exist, but he’s often too gross and unprincipled in his love of violence to be acceptable to those looking for an honorable old-fashioned hero. Custer was apolitical in the sense that he was so enamored of battle that the why of it all didn’t receive much of his identification beyond the application of a few catchphrases about civilization’s inexorable march. Some men just like to fight. It’s sport to them. They’ll maul whatever’s placed before them, once the leash is taken off. Custer was descended from a Hessian mercenary and almost became a solider of fortune himself; and he showed no hesitation, let alone soul-agony, when it came to fighting West Point friends who had joined the Confederacy. I like that Elliott emphasizes how by making Custer’s defeat their focal point, Americans have been able to see their society “as a victim of the violence of the frontier that, while shocking, was also comforting because it offered the United States a stance of moral righteousness in the face of a victorious foe”—-a neat trick, one that would be harder to pull off if we were forced to commemorate Custer’s vicious victories rather than his dramatic, glorified defeat. The nickname “Creeping Panther,” conferred by the Southern Cheyenne for Custer’s display of patient ruthlessness in a successful ambush of one of their villages, gives us a better sense of why he was valuable to the US Army than all that sentimental cavalier stuff (same with Camelot: I admire the expensively educated imagination, the sure feeling for myth that Jackie had, but the story of reckless gangster scions becoming the champions and martyrs of American liberalism is just more interesting than her myth). The Custers of the world are almost never genteelly admirable (that Custer and his widow made him so shows a mastery of PR and the codes of class), but if you’re empire building, waging multiple wars of consolidation and conquest, a Jacksonian class of war lovers, bravoes and gamecocks is a resource you cannot afford to do without.
In contrast to “cultural historian,” Elliott affirms his orientation as a “presentist”--“someone whose interest in history is focused on how that history, including prior acts of historical commemoration, is experienced in our current age”--and indeed his chapter on the complexity of contemporary Indian responses to (and really, their leading role in) the battle’s commemoration and reenactment is the best in the book. Elliott is fantastic on the self-fashioning, the dandyism of Custer (“the aesthetic quality of the military glory he sought”), on the commemorative complexities of the Washita battle/massacre, on the emotional motivations of the white Custerologists--but the portrayal of Native communities defining themselves at once as proud Indians, American citizens, veterans and patriots against a past of colonization and dispossession forms the book’s most moving commentary on contemporary America.
The image of Indian veterans unironically enunciating both tribal pride and imperial loyalty, in a setting saturated with Lee Greenwood (Elliott calls his song “God Bless the USA (I’m proud to be an American)” the theme song of Little Bighorn reenactments), may not present a instance of anything so cinematic as “brainwashing,” as Elliott quotes one native artist, so much as the fluidity of identity that’s the norm among Americans. And assimilation through military service is a fact of successful empires. Gibbon’s pages are sown with sonorous lament of the love of luxury that allowed the Italian nobles to pass their martial mantle to the sinewy races of the newly conquered. The 18th and 19th century British army was full of Irishmen. Men left the economically stagnant post-Civil War south to put on the blue coat and advance the stars-and-stripes across the West and into the Caribbean (during the Spanish-American War, these demographics caused friction between army units and their allies the anti-Spanish Cuban insurgents, many of whom were black). Even an empire as short-sighted, suicidal and politically unsophisticated as Hitler’s managed to recruit racist Danes and Frenchmen and bolster the Eastern front with a few legions of vengeful Ukrainians, Latvians, even Bosnian Muslims. Poverty and lack of opportunity (together with the traditional hope among American immigrants and minorities that loyal service will shame the mainstream into ameliorating that poverty and lack of opportunity), also play a part; in America as in Rome, service leads to citizenship. The inseparability of soldiering and politics may be another tie that binds Indians to American patriotism: just as America initially found it difficult to celebrate its soldiers’ bravery and sacrifice in a politically unpopular war, so too would an Indian veteran of one of America’s twentieth century wars find it all but impossible to emotionally separate his pride or pain or sacrifice from the imperial idea in whose defense or expansion he fought. It’s asking too much of a man to insist, purely for the sake of a nebulous authenticity, that he loathe the political order for which he has bled.
May 19, 2009
I liked how the author related the significance of reenactments and historical monuments as a reflection of history and that how things are remembered sometimes turn into myth but through that we gain a better insight of our culture and national identity.
July 25, 2012
This is not the typical book about Custer. Sure, the book describes Custer's life and accomplishments, but these are not the focus of the work. Reenactors, politics, popular culture, and collective memory all comprise a significant part of Elliott's book. For better or worse, George A. Custer still matters to modern America - as much because of what he represents (or can be made to represent) as for what he did in his own lifetime. Highly recommended!
December 18, 2012
The University of Chicago offered this book as a free download. Cool. I've been interested in the general subject of white/native conflict for nearly my entire life. And a couple years ago drove out to "that valley of Montana" my ownself.
February 19, 2010
Interesting idea... but 40+ pages in and I can't get any traction. The author is way too interested in his methodology & preconceived notions to be bothered with writing an interesting book.
May 26, 2016
This is a book that needed to be written. Thank you, Mr. Elliott.
May 22, 2014
mini read UofC press freE-book
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews