Custer [electronic resource] :

Title:

Author:

Description:

Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry crafts works synonymous with the grandeur and beauty of the American West. Here McMurtry turns his attention to George A. Custer, a complex man who has captivated historians for over a century. From graduating last in his class at West Point to leading the ill-fated 7th Cavalry in the attack at Little Bighorn, Custer forged a legacy- still very much alive today- as one of the West's most enduring historical figures.

Publisher:

Recorded Books,

Date:

2012

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY MP3

Language:

English

Summary

Reviews (4)

Kirkus Review

A Pulitzer Prize winner's idiosyncratic take on one of American history's great blunderers. Clearly well-read on the subject--McMurtry (Hollywood: A Third Memoir, 2011, etc.) generously refers readers to Evan Connell, Nathaniel Philbrick and others for more detailed information--once the owner of a vast collection of Custer-ology, twice a visitor to the Little Big Horn battlefield, the celebrated novelist offers not quite a history and barely the "short life of Custer" he proposes. Rather, this effort is best understood as an informed commentary on the dashing cavalry officer and on the Custer moment, the closing of "the narrative of American settlement," which featured an unusual twist: a dramatic victory by the ultimate losers, the Native Americans. A few of McMurtry's observations are not especially interesting (the author's own encounters with the Crow and Cheyenne tribes), and some wander off topic (Sitting Bull's passion for Annie Oakley), but many offer fresh insights on the Custer story. McMurtry fruitfully muses on the striking similarities between Custer and another overhyped western legend, John C. Fremont, the "confusion of tongues" that complicated the period of Western settlement, the willingness of Custer's Indian scouts to accompany their commander to a certain death, George and Libbie Custer's complicated marriage and the "modern" (in 1876) media mechanisms poised to supercharge Custer's fame. Many products of that publicity machine are spectacularly reproduced here, including photos, maps, paintings, lithographs, posters, magazine covers and newspaper headlines, all of which attest to the national fascination with this endlessly revisited story and with the man whose final message to his subordinate--"Come on, be quick. Be quick"--went tragically unheeded. The distilled perceptions of a lifetime of study, beautifully illustrated.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry continues to be an outstanding chronicler of western legend and lore. He has retained a long fascination with the myths surrounding General Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. This book is neither a comprehensive nor a conventional biography of Custer. Instead, McMurtry offers a series of vignettes and musings about various aspects of Custer's career, his personality, and the cultural milieu that led to his iconic status. Despite his interest in his subject, McMurtry often paints an unflattering and probably unfair portrait of Custer. He claims all of his officers despised him, which ignores his small but loyal core of supporters within the Seventh Cavalry. He suggests Custer lacked conscience, forgetting his principled but damaging (for him) testimony before Congress about corruption on Indian reservations. Still, newcomers to Custermania will find many of the tidbits very interesting, and that should encourage them to read more comprehensive biographies.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

A full 136 years after the last bluecoat in the Seventh Cavalry fell, the literary autopsy of the Battle of the Little Bighorn shows no sign of letting up, with fresh students drawn to the historical morgue every year. George Armstrong Custer - we can't quit you. What happened on that hot day of June 25, 1876, one of the last violent clashes in the mostly one-sided Indian wars, is an evershifting narrative, moving with the times. For quite a while now, Custer has been shorthand for hubris, ignorance and had-it-coming, but in earlier decades Custer was a hero. An iconic picture called "Custer's Last Fight" once graced the beery interior of nearly every saloon in the United States, courtesy of an aggressive bit of cultural imperialism by Anheuser-Busch. Larry McMurtry, the prolific Texas author, screenwriter and book collector, knows something about the fetish for the fallen commander, and confesses that "as a rare book dealer I once owned a collection of Custerology numbering more than 1,000 items: scrapbooks, diaries, trial transcripts, regimental histories, publications of learned societies, reprints of reprints, and so on." And he seems to have brought along every artifact to his latest book, "Custer," a brief, breezy tour of the man and the conflict, complete with an astonishing variety of photographs and artistic renderings. McMurtry, the author of too many books to count but known best for "Lonesome Dove," is short on words and long on illustrations here. For a writer of epics, "Custer" qualifies as haiku. But the reader is in good hands; it's as if McMurtry invited a customer to the back of his Texas bookstore to spend an afternoon going through his collection. And even though there is nothing new, from a scholarly perspective, in this account, a student of the American West will learn something in the margins. At least I did. Custer loved animals - dogs, horses, even a pet antelope. He liked fine dining, white linen under the Army tent. His men, fellow officers and subordinates alike, did not like him; many hated him. The only sympathy, of a sort, that he ever showed for the native people he pursued with mortal intent was in a passage of his autobiography, "My Life on the Plains," in which he says: "If I were an Indian I think that I would greatly prefer to cast my lot with those of my people who adhered to the free life of the plains rather than to the limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with the vices thrown in without stint or measure." As in the usual modern telling of this tale, McMurtry's Custer gets what he asked for, falling, along with at least 250 of his men, to an enormous tide of Cheyenne and Sioux, after pushing ahead of other officers in the hope of adding glory to a decidedly mixed career. He was, after all, court-martialed some years before the battle for, among other counts, abandoning his command. And his earlier claim to military fame in the Indian wars was the routing of a pathetic and bedraggled group of Cheyenne who were on their winter reservation, in the Battle of the Washita in 1868. The specific origins of the fight at the Little Bighorn date to an 1868 treaty giving the whole of the Dakota Black Hills to the Sioux in perpetuity - in this case, perpetuity being about five years. McMurtry cites Alex Shoumatoff's claim that the United States made more than 350 treaties with the Indians and broke them all. The pact with the Sioux was violated because gold was found on their land. Custer protected the trespassers. "We are goading the Indians to madness by invading their hallowed grounds," he told the press. The Sioux fought back, massed with the Cheyenne and eventually gave Custer the last surprise of his life: he always believed Indians would run if faced with an assemblage of well-trained troops. There are a handful of inconsistencies and somewhat lazy conclusions here. McMurtry says Custer was a teetotaler for most of his adult life, yet he has him "sampling two fine kegs of liquor" on the day of the battle. He says Custer "probably had no idea" that a subordinate, Maj. Marcus Reno, was being forced to retreat after ordered to make an initial attack across the river. Yet research from the time of the photographer Edward Curtis up to the present day suggests that Custer may even have watched Reno's rout, with amusement. McMurtry's best character is the formidable Libbie Custer, the widow and the keeper of the mythic flame, who outlived her husband by nearly six decades. She fought anyone who dared to write the truth of her beloved's last day. McMurtry compares the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the 9/11 attacks of 2001, "in that the whole nation felt it." We continue to feel it, and most likely will for as long as seasoned storytellers like Larry McMurtry decide to pass on the lasting lessons of that bloody day, when two worlds collided for nearly the last time. Timothy Egan's latest book is "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis." He writes for the Opinionator column on NYTimes.com.

Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) assesses the short life of Gen. George Armstrong Custer and Custer's ongoing role in shaping concepts of the American West. As a seasoned Western literary icon, McMurtry cuts through the immense body of Custer literature to write an engaging, often irreverent, biography for a 21st-century audience more familiar with pop culture than detailed academic accounts of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Contemporary documentary photographs and artwork (more than 150 color images) are used to great effect for providing historic context. McMurtry produces a balanced account of Custer's controversial life and death, keeping his comments relevant, succinct, and compelling. -VERDICT Strongly recommended for public and school libraries as a masterful and insightful biography, as well as a guide to the key historical sources about Custer. This text will be appreciated by both scholars and Custer enthusiasts, even though theories about whether the general's nature was inherently heroic, psychotic, or cowardly are not discussed here at any length.-Nathan E. Bender, Albany Cty. P.L., Laramie, WY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

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. The main purpose of this parading of Native American leaders--better not call them chiefs, not a title the red man accepted, or cared to use in their tribal life--was to overwhelm the Indians with their tall buildings, large cannon, and teeming masses, so they would realize the futility of further resistance. The Indians saw the point with perfect clarity, but continued to resist anyway. They were fighting for their culture, which was all they had. One white who recognized this was the young cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer himself, who, in his flamboyant autobiography, My Life on the Plains , makes this point: If I were an Indian I think that I would greatly prefer to cast my lot with those of my people who adhered to the free life of the plains rather than to the limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with the vices thrown in without stint or measure. Captain Frederick Benteen, who hated Custer and made no secret of it, called Custer's book My Lie on the Plains . Yet the book, despite its inaccuracies, is still readable today. Ulysses S. Grant, who didn't like Custer either, had this to say about the dreadful loss of life at the Little Bighorn: I regard Custer's massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary. . . . He was not to have made the attack before effecting the juncture with Generals Terry and Gibbon. Custer had been notified to meet them, but instead of marching slowly, as his orders required, in order to effect that juncture on the 26th, he entered upon a forced march of eighty-three miles in twenty-four hours, and thus had to meet the Indians alone. That comment made Custer's widow, Libbie Custer, an enemy of Grant for life. Thinking back on a number of important issues, Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux made this comment: "The Whites made us many promises, more than I can remember," he said. "But they only kept one. They said they would take our land and they took it." RED CLOUD ADDRESSING A NEW YORK AUDIENCE. Crazy Horse, now thought by many to be the greatest Sioux warrior, refused to go to Washington. He didn't need to see tall buildings, big cannon, or teeming masses to know that his people's situation was dire. After the victory at the Little Bighorn the smart Indians all knew that they were playing an endgame. The white leaders--Crook, Miles, Terry, Mackenzie--especially Mackenzie--were even so impolite as to fight in the dead of winter, something they didn't often do, although the Sioux Indians did wipe out the racist Captain Fetterman and his eighty men on the day of the winter solstice in 1866. In Texas the so-called Red River War had ended in 1875 and some of its fighting talent, especially Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, went north to help out and did help out. LINCOLN MEETS CUSTER, OCT. 3, 1862, AT ANTIETAM. In the East and Midwest, as people became increasingly urbanized or suburbanized, these settled folk developed a huge appetite for stories of Western violence. Reportage suddenly surged; the New York Times and other major papers kept stringers all over the West, to report at once Sitting Bull's final resistance, or some mischief of Billy the Kid's or the Earps' revenge or any other signal violence that might have occurred. Publicity from the frontier helped keep Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show thriving. For a time the railroad bookstores groaned with dime novels describing Western deeds, the bloodier the better. (See Richard Slotkin's masterpiece The Fatal Environment for a brilliant analysis of how the frontier affected our increasing urbanization.) By Cody's day, indeed, the press had the power to make legends, names with an almost worldwide resonance. One of the legends that hasn't faded was that of the scruffy New Mexico outlaw Bill Bonney (one of several names he used), or Billy the Kid--no angel, it is true, but by no means the most deadly outlaw of his time. That was probably the sociopath John Wesley Hardin. The other legend that remains very much alive is Custer's. The Battle of the Little Bighorn is considered by able historians to be one of the most important battles in world history, a claim we'll deal with in due course. What Billy the Kid and Custer had in common was fighting; it's what we remember them for. Both died young, Billy the Kid at twenty-two and Custer at a somewhat weathered thirty-seven. Custer had barely managed to graduate from the military academy (34th out of 34) and then walked right into one of the biggest fights of all time, the American Civil War, a conflict in which 750,000 men lost their lives--warfare on a scale far different from the small-scale range wars that Billy the Kid engaged in. In the Civil War, Custer's flair as a cavalry officer was immediately manifest; it found him at war's end the youngest major general in the U.S. Army. Custer's ambition, throughout his career, was furthered by the short, brusque General Philip Sheridan, of whom it was said that his head was so lumpy that he had trouble finding a hat that fit. PHILIP HENRY SHERIDAN. Not only did Custer have disciplinary problems at West Point, he continued to have disciplinary problems until the moment of his death, June 25, 1876. One thing was for sure: Custer would fight. Time after time his dash and aggression was rewarded, by Sheridan and others. Ulysses Grant, also a man who would fight, came to distrust Custer--or maybe he just didn't like him. Grant was never convinced that Custer's virtues offset his liabilities. Before the Battle of the Washita (1868), Custer was court-martialed on eight counts, the most serious being his abandonment of his command--he drifted off in search of his wife. He was convicted on all eight counts and put on the shelf for a year; though long before the year was up Sheridan was lobbying to get him back in the saddle. SHERIDAN WITH CUSTER, THOMAS DEVIN, JAMES FORSYTH, AND WESLEY MERRITT, BY MATTHEW BRADY. Excerpted from Custer by Larry McMurtry All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.