BOOK REVIEW: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
By Nathaniel Philbrick, Viking, Hardcover, 2010, 466 pages, $30
plus, BOOK REVIEW: "Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn
By Evan S. Connell, North Point Press, Paperback, 2007, 448 pages, $18
You know them by name, even if you have never read one serious history of the American West. You know them from movies, from TV, from folklore. George Armstrong Custer. Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse. And there are others not so well known: Native American warriors Gall, Crow King and Lame White Man; U.S. military men Maj. Marcus Reno and Capt. Frederick Benteen; scouts Bloody Knife and Lonesome Charley Reynolds; famed riverboat pilot Grant Marsh. These and a panoply of characters make up the extraordinary story of persons and events surrounding Nathaniel Philbrick's panoramic retelling of the epic battle that led to Custer's demise.
Before he became known as a fierce "Indian Fighter," Custer had already made a name for himself as a brash and flamboyant cavalry leader during America's bloody Civil War. On more than one occasion he had impetuously ordered reckless charges that shocked the enemy. Perhaps the most important of these was performed on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg. As Confederate forces were heading for the center of the Union line in Gen. George Pickett's infamous charge, famed rebel cavalryman Jeb Stuart and his horsemen were about to attack the Union Army from the rear. This maneuver might have changed the outcome of the battle and the war. However Custer, with his force outnumbered four to one, ordered a charge that eventually scattered Stuart's men.
Custer reveled in bellicosity. Philbrick writes: "Actual battle, not the patient study of it, was what he was destined for, and with the outbreak of the Civil War he discovered his true calling. 'I shall regret to see the war end,' he admitted in a letter. 'I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life.'" Such a relish seemed to run in the family. Custer's brother Tom was also stout on the battlefield. He was the only soldier in the Union Army to win two Medals of Honor. Tom, along with brother Boston, and two other family members, would die with Custer in the fateful encounter of June 25, 1876.
Native people wanted peace. They wanted to be left alone. But violence and a growing sense of desperation were forced upon them. The centuries-old white European encroachment on the lands and waterways of the American continent continued unabated. The intruding streams of settlers appeared inexhaustible. The steam locomotive was making inroads and penetrated further West. Seismic changes were in the offing and Native Americans like Sitting Bull were profoundly aware that the foundations of their way of life were being eroded. Treaties had proven to be no guarantee of security. Barbaric violence perpetrated by the U.S. military could be visited upon peaceful Indian settlements with sudden ferocity. In addition to the grown men who were killed, women and children were murdered and mutilated. Horrific attacks on Native peoples and their settlements turned into a kind of depraved sport. Any Native survivors of these atrocities found themselves pushed onto a reservation where a life of deprivation and dependence far removed from traditional customs awaited.
Once like a vast ocean that thundered over the plains, herds of buffalo were being rapidly depleted. Not only a primary food source, the bison provided Indian people with clothing, weapons and fuel. The loss of the buffalo in their region had already forced many Cheyenne onto the reservation. The Sioux could face the same fate. In 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota, an area long sacred to the Sioux. Prospectors poured into those hills and another treaty would soon be breached. Philbrick states: "The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm. As the officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry -- not to mention their families -- could attest, fear of the future can imbue even the most trivial event with overwhelming significance. It was no accident that Sitting Bull, renowned for the gift of prophecy, emerged as his people's leader in the darkest, most desperate time of their history."
In his splendid book "Son of the Morning Star," published in 1984, author Evan S. Connell wrote of Custer: "Even now, after a hundred years, his name will start an argument. More significant men of his time can be discussed without passion because they are inextricably woven into a tapestry of the past, but this hotspur refuses to die. He stands forever on the dusty Montana slope." Connell asks: "Why, then, should the collapse of the Seventh Cavalry be almost as vivid today as it was in 1876? Nobody can be sure. We know only that it will be remembered as long as the nation lasts. The Little Bighorn has been stamped on America with the force of a prehistoric red handprint on a rock."
A sprawling and elaborately constructed work of narrative history told from myriad perspectives, Nathaniel Philbrick's fine book gives credence to Connell's assertion.