The Army of the West reaffirmed its dedication to doing just that only weeks after discovering the bloated, stinking carcasses of some two hundred twenty-five white soldiers on that yellow hillside. With a renewed fervor and blood-vengeance so strong that it echoed shrilly behind the chants of “Remember Custer! Remember the Seventh!”—the Army of the West hammered away relentlessly at the now-divided and conquerable bands dispersing across the plains on the four winds.
Why such fury on the part of the Army? The destruction of Custer’s men at the Little Bighorn decided nothing. More men had been killed in other engagements. So, it was not simply that soldiers had been killed, even that there were no survivors. There were other instances of no white survivors on the Western frontier.
No, instead, what fascinated then and fascinates us still is that he was killed there on that hot afternoon. He alone conjures up specific, myth-loaded images in us all. Say his name aloud and our imaginations dance on cue—bobbing and weaving to the eerie scream of eagle wing-bone whistles and hand-held rawhide drums. Perhaps instead our imaginations march in formation to the rollicking but plaintive battle-cry of his favorite fighting song “Garry Owen.”
Because of those images, so many who hear the word Custer or the name of the place where he was killed will never be able to sort myth from reality. Over the years, this much-discussed battle has taken on truly Olympic proportions. The historic Custer who was a genuine hero coming out of the Civil War gave way to the frontier Custer who struggled hard in that Washita winter of 1868—1869 to redeem himself and his standing before both his superiors and the American public.
But on that hot Montana hillside reeking with death, Custer’s fate was sealed. Not that he would die by the hands of Cheyenne and Sioux—or even by the hand of his own brother—but that the frontier Custer was fated to become for all time the mythic Custer.
The man and the myth were to be caught up forever in a swirl of debate between those for whom Custer was a much-maligned, unsung demigod, and those for whom he was a strutting, arrogant, egotistical martinet.
In this novel I wanted only to have, in some way, the real Custer emerge—the man who was a little of all those things they say he is. More than anything, I wanted to make him seem a little more human than either plaster saint or devil incarnate—to show him as a man with the same hopes and fears, dreams and regrets, chat we all know. Custer was, ultimately, a man who walked on stage at the most opportune moment, remaining for every curtain call.
Custer had feet of clay.
Like you, and like me.
In closing I want most to express my indebtedness to the primary sources used in writing my story of the Custer fight. After years of research done for this trilogy, from the reading of hundreds of books, articles and monographs written about the man and this battle, I have naturally come to some of my own conclusions. Do not curse the following for what they have contributed to this scenario of that bloody summer Sunday afternoon.
Both Dr. Thomas B. Marquis (in his Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself) and David Humphreys Miller (who wrote Custer’s Falclass="underline" The Indian Side of the Story) invested lifetimes interviewing the Indian participants of the battle. While some continue to ignore those accounts, I am indebted not only to Marquis and Miller, but to those warriors who chose to tell their stories in the truthful, objective manner described by no less a scholar of the plains Indian than Stanley Vestal (Walter S. Campbell) himself.
If a reader were to ask me to suggest one book that would discuss both the climate of the times and the battle itself—making sense of the startling complexities, I would have to suggest three: telling them to devour Custer’s Luck by Edgar I. Stewart; John S. Gray’s Centennial Campaign—The Sioux War of 1876; and, Cavalier in Buckskin—George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier by Robert M. Utley.
Yet Stewart published his work in 1955, and much of the search for the truth of that bloody afternoon has since continued. John Gray picked up the torch with his most thoughtful and dispassionate search, resulting in a book that was first published in the battle’s centennial year, 1976. The banner has since been hoisted by my esteemed friend and Western scholar, Robert M. Utley, who (besides writing very readable history) has, like Stewart and Gray, devoted his life to the quest of historic truth of that battle, using the finest of research methods, based on empirical data, to arrive at his own cogent thesis on the movement of Custer’s troops and a scenario of the Custer fight.
To all five of these scholars, I offer my undying gratitude.
You must remember that the events herein portrayed are by and large drawn from the actual documents of the time and from eye-witness testimony, dealing with a short timespan from the moment the Seventh U.S. Cavalry marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory until the setting of the sun on that bloody hillside in Montana Territory, 25 June, 1876. Certain conversations and descriptions have been supplied by the author where the silent tongues of the dead—red man and white alike—could not speak for themselves here one hundred fourteen years later.
Why is it that no other battle so captured the public imagination of its time? Why has no other single military event remained in our national memory as the Custer fight? It has, like no other event of its kind, come to symbolize, for good or bad perhaps, the essential character of the American Frontier West: the determination and grit of its characters, and the tragedy that always stood ready to challenge any man gutsy enough to pit himself against both the land and the redman who vowed to defend his last, best hunting ground.
This is essentially, in my estimation, a story of those ordinary men, both white and red, who dared pit themselves against a fate that drove so many to hurl their bodies against enemy iron, steel and lead that hot summer day. And thereby became heroic.
I believe that the essential facts herein presented are faithful not only to the gallant memories of the courageous officers and enlisted men of the Seventh Cavalry, but faithful as well to the memories of those valiant red horsemen who rode against Custer’s pony soldiers in the name of freedom and their ancient way of life on this dusty, sage-covered ridge where I sit at this moment, on another afternoon of 25 June, these one hundred fourteen years later.
Back along the hilltop at the monument it is noisy today—what with the celebration of an anniversary, with the comings and goings of those who pull off the interstate highway to drive by in slow parade, for but a few minutes to stop and peer across this forlorn piece of ground, perhaps to read a stone here and there. But few will ever allow themselves the time and the quiet to listen to the ghosts.
Where I sit late this afternoon, it is quiet. Here on Calhoun’s Hill. Where so many historians across this last century of controversy agree that the only real resistance was put up against the Sioux after Custer’s two hundred fought their ragged way up this slope from the river below.
From here I can look to the north and make out the bustle and swarm of visitors around that huge stone monolith marking Last Stand Hill. From where I sit among the sage, I can gaze across the east slope of the ridge, see the white of the markers glaring beneath the high-plains sun, each stone tablet plotting the fall of one who stood and fought beside that irascible Irishman Keogh. In the end, as I always do, I turn and look southwest, across several folds of this rumpled blanket of a landscape, and I imagine I can see across that distance the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee, where it opens at the Minniconjou Ford on the Greasy Grass itself.