Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T.J. Stiles
Just finished, and just in time for the 142nd anniversary of his death on June 26, 1876. The author acknowledges that there is already a mountain of information about Custer, but I hadn’t realized that a good deal of it is still in private hands and has never been released.
Winner, 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Custer could be seen as the 19th century Trump (a point not made by the author, who never mentions Trump). He was a wily, narcissistic, inveterate self-promoter, so in love with being in the press (and so adept at leaking or even ghost-writing stories of his exploits) that it could be argued it’s what killed him at Little Big Horn - although not like you perhaps think. Evidently he could survive only brief interludes without female attention, even on the battlefield. In his lifetime he was known as the Boy General; he received a battlefield promotion to brigadier general just prior to Gettysburg, when he was only 23. He had no vices, save one: gambling. It, too, killed him.
Many people don’t realize how much of American culture can be explained by Custer’s story. Custer’s life forms a direct line to Trump, by way of Wild West mythology, P.T. Barnum and hucksterism, George S. Patton, to John Ford and his movies, all the way up to modern American values and mores. Doesn’t give away anything to give you Stiles’s last line in the book, it’s a great one.
“His sudden, offstage ending left him suspended forever between East and West, past and future, to be misremembered as needed by each new generation.”
Highly recommended.
