Custer Quotes

“WHILE HANCOCK MAINLY DITHERED, CUSTER marched his troops to exhaustion in pursuit of very elusive foes. He clearly knew that the Hancock expedition was a colossal wash. He did his duty for a while, and then reformulated his duty, left his command, and went in search of his wife. Libbie Custer had been rather gently raised; she must have been shocked by the coarseness of the frontier. Her books were written many years after the events they describe, and maintained throughout a tolerant and almost bouyant tone.”
― Larry McMurtry, Custer

“BY 1876, THE YEAR THE Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought, the United States had become a nation of some forty million people, the vast majority of whom had never seen a fighting Indian—not, that is, unless they happened to glimpse one or another of the powerful Indian leaders whom the government periodically paraded through Washington or New York, usually Red Cloud, the powerful Sioux diplomat, who made a long-winded speech at Cooper Union in 1870. Or, it might be Spotted Tail, of the Brulé Sioux; or American Horse, or even, if they were lucky, Sitting Bull, who hated whites, the main exceptions being Annie Oakley, his “Little Sure Shot,” or Buffalo Bill Cody, who once described Sitting Bull as “peevish,” surely the understatement of the century. Sitting Bull often tried to marry Annie Oakley, who was married; he did not succeed.”
― Larry McMurtry, Custer

“We rarely hear the names of these early Western photographers now, though they were quite important: Carleton”
― Larry McMurtry, Custer

“The play may actually have profited from having an unworthy hero: Custer, for all his early brilliance,”
― Larry McMurtry, Custer

“The Western photographers also managed to put the people in scale with the landscapes, to the amazement of Easterners.”
― Larry McMurtry, Custer

“Crazy”
― Larry McMurtry, Custer