Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer deserved his reputation as the greatest Indian fighter in the United States Army. But, in other respects, he was a plonker. He was a fearless if foolhardy cavalry commander, yet much of his success before the Battle of the Little Bighorn was down to luck rather than military genius.
Custer was bad at taking orders, and sometimes not good at giving them, and dismissive of authority other than his own. While that was interpreted as heroic individualism by those he inspired, others who loathed him saw only the numbskull he so often was. While tracking Indians across the plains of Kansas he became separated from his regiment. He encountered his first buffalo but, in trying to bring it down with a pearl-handled revolver, shot his horse through the head instead. He was alone in hostile territory, lost to his command and forced to find it on foot. To gallop off in the first place was irresponsible, made worse by what followed. Yet he showed such flamboyant disregard for the rules time and again.
To give the 7th Cavalry “uniformity of appearance” he divided the horses according to colour – four units got the bays, three the sorrels, one the chestnuts, another the browns and another the blacks. The company under the most junior officer got the mixed bag of leftovers. This was madness. Horses are not mass-produced armoured vehicles; each had its own personality which its rider had got to know over the previous year. “This act at the beginning of a severe campaign was not only ridiculous, but criminal, unjust, and arbitrary in the extreme”, wrote one angry officer.
Custer had a lively and devoted soul mate in his wife, Libbie, who believed in him as much as he believed in himself and, for the most part, they had a strong and sexually robust marriage, despite the infidelities which punctuated it, including his affairs with his African American cook, a Cheyenne captive and a string of prostitutes. His ambitions were grand; his arrogance grandiose. Defeating Sitting Bull, he thought, would pave his way to the White House, despite falling out with President Ulysses S Grant; evidence that Custer was a lousy politician.
Readers are less likely to come to this book to learn of Custer’s personal foibles and failings than to learn about his last stand at Little Bighorn, the most famous military disaster in the history of the United States and a pivotal moment in its relationship with native America. Nathaniel Philbrick reconstructs it like a Boy’s Own adventure which, to Custer, it was. His enthralling account is a racy page turner as we follow the fortunes and misfortunes of those involved, accompanied by the most vivid eye-witness accounts of bravery and cowardice that exist in the literature of warfare.
The outcome should never have been in doubt because the Indians outnumbered and outgunned the US troopers. But Sitting Bull, the superior tactician, thought Custer could have won the day had he not divided his forces and failed to storm the Lakota encampment when he had the chance. The Indians had Winchester rifles capable of firing 17 rounds without reloading; Custer’s men were armed with single-shot carbines. Arrows were just as devastating as the repeaters. If only half the 2,000 warriors let off 10 arrows apiece that would have been the equivalent of 40 arrows descending on each soldier. And since every fourth cavalryman was required to remain mounted to hold the horses for the other three, Custer’s firepower was reduced by 25 per cent.
The author concurs with the legend that Custer was probably one of the last to die. As he had once promised not to attack the Indians two Cheyenne women, in an episode of the blackest humour, pierced his eardrums so he might hear better in the afterlife. To spare Custer’s widow further upset the soldiers who viewed his body neglected to mention the arrow jabbed up his penis.
The author on occasion demonstrates a similar squeamishness. One major suffers such an “unspeakable death at the hands of the Cheyenne” that he cannot bring himself to write in any detail, and two white women experience an unexplained “fate worse than death”. I’m not prurient, but how can we judge how much worse their fate was unless the author gives us some idea of its severity? An historical account involving a gruesome massacre should not adopt the coyness of a family newspaper. My only other criticism of an otherwise excellent read is the author’s habit of suddenly swerving off up a side street of background material which interrupts the pace of the narrative.
In the end, though, I agree with the author’s assessment of this complex, infuriating but remarkable man. “Despite his inconsistencies and flaws, there was something about Custer that distinguished him from most other human beings,” Philbrick concludes. “He possessed an energy, an ambition and a charisma that few others could match. He could inspire devotion and great love along with more than his share of hatred and disdain and, more than anything else, he wanted to be remembered.” And if that is how his life is to be measured 134 years after his death, then Custer got his wish.
