Symposium Will Take a Closer Look at Custer

George Armstrong Custer may have been the most famous loser in American history.

A shameless self-promoter, he was a genuine Civil War hero renowned long before he and some 200 of his men died at the Battle of the Little Big Horn 120 years ago.

Saturday the Autry Museum of Western Heritage will hold an ambitious symposium on Custer, the man and the myth, called "Inventing Custer."

Among the high-profile participants will be Michael Blake, author of "Dances With Wolves" and a soon-to-be-released novel about Custer, "Marching to Valhalla," and Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Water Sioux and the author of the 1969 bestseller "Custer Died for Your Sins."

Historian Paul Andrew Hutton, whose expertise includes Custer's treatment in the movies, and historian Shirley Leckie, an expert on how Custer's widow, Libbie, made him into a legend, also will appear, as will half a dozen other authorities on Custer and the Sioux and other Native Americans who won the day. But Blake and Deloria alone should be worth the price of admission, if only because they have such different views of the man his Native American foes called Yellow Hair and Son of the Morning Star.

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At present, Blake is scripting a Custer epic to star Brad Pitt. Conventional wisdom is that the protagonist of that movie is bound to be more hero than villain, more like Errol Flynn's charismatic Custer than the bumbling madman played by Richard Mulligan in "Little Big Man."

Blake says he did not set out to rehabilitate the tarnished contemporary image of Custer in his novel, which Random House will publish in October.

"My whole intention in doing 'Marching to Valhalla' was to give Custer a voice," Blake says. "It's not an apology. My hope was to humanize him."

Whatever else Custer was, he was very, very human. He seems to have been madly in love with his wife, although who knows if Libbie carefully choreographed that impression, as she did so much else in her role as maniacal keeper of the Custer flame. (There's a wonderfully goofy love note Custer wrote to Libbie in the Autry's current Custer exhibit that suggests he loved her enough to be decidedly silly with her.) But that didn't keep his contemporaries from spreading rumors that both Custer and his brother had slept with the same Cheyenne woman, the daughter of a chief slain at Custer's infamous raid on a Cheyenne village on the Washita River.

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