'A Terrible Glory' by James Donovan and 'Custerology' by Michael Elliott
BOOK REVIEW
Custer's allure continues: Donovan recounts the Little Bighorn battle free of agenda, and Elliott attempts to explain the general's fascinating legacy.
ON June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer made a spectacular career move: He lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn and was killed, along with five companies of his men, by warriors of the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. If he had won, it's doubtful that we would remember his name today; by losing, and dying, he became, if not the most famous, at least the most written about military officer in U.S. history. (He is certainly the one most depicted on the screen, with dozens of actors, including Errol Flynn, Robert Shaw and even Ronald Reagan donning the buckskin jacket.)
Every aficionado knows the major titles in the Custer literary canon -- Jay Monaghan's "Custer" (1959), Stephen E. Ambrose's "Crazy Horse and Custer" (1975) and Evan S. Connell's "Son of the Morning Star" (1984) to mention just three of the most popular in the last half-century. What's amazing is that after 132 years there are still so many books being written on Custer and the Little Bighorn, a battle that competes with Gettysburg in terms of literary production. What's even more amazing is that the definitive books on the Little Bighorn are just now being published. Curiously, though, relatively little has been written on the battle itself -- lots of Indian oral history, lots of speculation, but little researched history. The reason is clear: There were no white survivors to record their memories.
"A Terrible Glory," by Texas author James Donovan, is probably as close as we're going to get to knowing what really happened. Donovan's account is gloriously free of the sociopolitical agendas and rhetorical cant that re-forms around Custer and the battle with each new decade. The frontier cavalrymen Donovan describes are neither heroic bearers of the white man's burden nor agents of genocide but mostly "undermanned, underpaid, undersupplied, undertrained and underfed" men who often had little experience shooting or even riding. Their opponents were a "warrior culture that trained males from early childhood to fight, ride and survive better than anyone in the world" -- though the various tribes were woefully lacking in organization and cohesion.
One of the best things about "A Terrible Glory" is its lack of agenda: White people thought the way they thought; Indians thought the way they thought; the two ways of thought seldom came together -- and Donovan is content to let it go at that. There's no attempt to place blame for the disastrous outcome of the battle (which he pieces together using the latest forensic evidence), and none is needed.
