NewMexiKen

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.

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.