More Little Bighorn

From Killing Custer:

Nor does this picture change. Whether Custer is portrayed as a hero, as Errol Flynn did it in the World War II-era They Died with Their Boots On, or as a genocidal nut, as in the Vietnam-era Little Big Man, he is still the center of attention. The recent miniseries Son of the Morning Star depicted Custer as a naughty, hot-blooded, fratboy type-but he is still the character that the cameras follow, the man whose death has always been the point of telling the story. No matter that in fact his famous hairline was beginning to recede, that his remaining hair was cut short, and that it was too hot to wear buckskin that summer day. Or that the Lakotas and the Cheyennes had no idea who had attacked them or which particular army commander they were fighting. More than a century after his death, Custer has the kind of name recognition that would make any aspirant for national political office jealous.

But if you switch the focus, the story becomes infinitely richer. Late on a cold November night, with the wind howling outside his trailer on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Johnson Holy Rock began talking to us about Crazy Horse. Nearly eighty, Johnson is a former tribal chairman whose father was a young boy in Crazy Horse’s camp at the Little Bighorn. “Traditional history tells us that Crazy Horse could ride in front of a line of soldiers and they could all take a potshot at him and no bullet could touch him,” Johnson said, moving his arms back and forth for emphasis. “He’d make three passes, and after the third pass, then his followers were encouraged to make the charge. ‘See, I haven’t been wounded. I’m not shot.’ We would charge.”

I was intrigued, not by Crazy Horse’s ability to ward off bullets in the story, but by Holy Rock’s use of the term “traditional history.” Traditional history according to whom? Not the folks who wrote the history textbooks I read at Glen Rock Junior/Senior High School back in northern New Jersey. Amid George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and even George Custer, figures like Crazy Horse-and, in fact, centuries of Native Americans-rated barely a mention. Traditional history.

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks

From The Week Newsletter:

A Massachusetts couple wants to open a Starbucks in the house where Lizzie Borden hacked her parents to death in 1892. Donald Woods and Lee-ann Wilber have already turned the home into a bed and breakfast. The coffee shop, said Woods, would help them transform the site from an attraction based on “blood and guts” to one about “an American family tragedy.” Stefani Koorey, a Borden historian, said a murder scene was a strange place to sip lattes. “It’s such a symbol of yuppie commercialism,” she said.

Lizzie was acquitted. NewMexiKen undestands she then moved to Florida to play golf and look for the real killers.

The Week Quiz

NewMexiKen scored nine correct out of ten this week on The Week Quiz. Second guessed myself, or I would have aced it.

How well can you do?

The Battle of Little Bighorn

was fought on this date in 1876. Dee Brown wrote the following for The Reader’s Companion to American History:

In 1876, under command of Gen. Alfred Terry, Custer led the Seventh Cavalry as one force in a three-pronged campaign against Sitting Bull’s alliance of Sioux and Cheyenne camps in Montana. During the morning of June 25, Custer’s scouts reported spotting smoke from cooking fires and other signs of Indians in the valley of the Little Bighorn. Disregarding Terry’s orders, Custer decided to attack before infantry and other support arrived. Although scouts warned that he was facing superior numbers (perhaps 2,500 warriors), Custer divided his regiment of 647 men, ordering Capt. Frederick Benteen’s battalion to scout along a ridge to the left and sending Maj. Marcus Reno’s battalion up the valley of the Little Bighorn to attack the Indian encampment. With the remainder of the regiment, Custer continued along high ground on the right side of the valley. In the resulting battle, he and about 250 of his men, outnumbered by the warriors of Crazy Horse and Gall, were surrounded and annihilated. Reno and Benteen suffered heavy casualties but managed to escape to a defensive position. Since that day, “Custer’s Last Stand” has become an American legend. The battle site attracts thousands of visitors yearly.

Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star is generally regarded as the finest book on the battle; indeed, one of the finest on western American history. James Welch’s Killing Custer tells the story more from the Indian perspective.

Cheney supports intra-sexual behavior

Sounds like the Vice President is coming around on sexual morality issues. Yesterday he encouraged Senator Leahy to engage in sexual behavior not routinely endorsed by the evangelical crowd.

Here’s the background.

Heavy lifting

One person’s story doesn’t win a class-action suit, but if this is typical I would think Wal-Mart has a multi-billion dollar problem. From the Denver Post �

For Mary Henderson, an assistant store manager at the Wal-Mart store in Trinidad, a class-action sexual discrimination lawsuit against her employer is about one thing: equal pay.

Henderson, 49, has been with the company for six years and makes $32,000 a year. She claims that a male assistant manager at the same store, with less experience, makes $9,000 more than she does. She said that he showed her his W-2 form.

…

Henderson started out in 1998 making $5.75 an hour as a sales floor associate in the sporting goods department at the La Junta Wal-Mart.

“The man who started right across from me started $1.50 higher,” she recalled. “I was told it was because he had to do more lifting.”

Henderson said it took three years to earn her first promotion. When she first applied for the assistant manager’s position, she said her store manager told her, “You have a husband that can support you. You don’t need to be an assistant manager,” and that another man deserved the position because “he’s the head of a family.”

She said that she told the manager that he was comparing apples and oranges.

“I asked him what was the difference, was it something that I was born without?” she said, referring to her gender. “He actually turned white and walked away.”

As plastic surgery seems to appeal to NewMexiKen’s audience…

Awful Plastic Surgery

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others

Eric Blair was born in Bengal, India, on this date in 1903. We know him as George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. This from The Writer’s Almanac �

By then he was already dying of tuberculosis. He spent the last years of his life writing 1984 (1949), about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known only as Big Brother. He knew he didn’t have much time left to write the book, so he wrote constantly, even when his doctors forbade him to work. They took away his typewriter, and when he switched to a ballpoint pen, they put his arm in plaster.

When he finished it, he told his publisher that 1984 was too dark a novel to make much money, but it became an immediate bestseller. He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into sixty-two languages and has sold more than ten million copies. With all of his work still in print in so many different languages, critics have estimated that every year one million people read George Orwell for the first time.

The Commonwealth of Virginia…

ratified the Constitution on this date in 1788, thereby becoming the tenth state.

You’re so vain
You probably think this blog is about you
Don’t you

Carly Simon is 59 today.