Part of running across the West meant reading about its history. I brought two history books— Ronald C. White Jr.’s The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words and James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution —and a historical novel, Pete Dexter’s Deadwood. While I was driving, Kirsten read Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In my rumination on these histories, it seems appropriate that we read about two so disparate characters in Lincoln and Custer, who really teach us some important about how the West was and what will be its future.
What we have seen in our meditation on the West is a melee of fervent fanatics and egomaniacs like Custer tempered by a few great men who seek order like Lincoln. George Armstrong Custer represents one more character, a piece of the puzzle in a battle that seemed more for glory, riches and fame than for any common good that seemed to be taking place across the West. Undoubtedly, there were characters who had more foresight and the ability to see on down the road. People like Lincoln, who was humbled by God and by what he saw as an “almost perfect union.” As Ronald C. White observes in Lincoln’s Meditation on the Divine Will: “What was most remarkable, in an atmosphere charged with religious fervor and hyperpatriotism, was Lincoln’s new belief that God’s purposes may not be able to be identified with either side. What sets him apart, in this musing from his contemporaries in both the North and South was his absence of pretension. He neither touted his own sagacity nor claimed that God was on his or the Union’s side. Lincoln, who never wore his religious beliefs or feelings on his sleeve, here pondered just how it was that God, as the unseen, quiet actor in the war, was working out his will through human instruments.” (169). Few are the minds, especially in a nation in its adolescence, filled with seekers of glory and riches, that could have parlayed their sense of what was right for them with what was for the greater good.
You can’t find two prime movers further away in their thoughts and demeanor than Lincoln and Custer. Somehow, they tell us a lot about what would become of the nation as its greedy pursuit of riches and glory was tempered by the occasional wise prophetic spirit—the likes of Lincoln or MLK—who have brought the nation together against all odds and despite its diversities. As Lincoln put it in his Second Annual Message to Congress in 1862, “Because of these diversities,” he says in his attempt to validate all voices of opinion with regard to the question of slavery and emancipation, “we waste much strength in struggles among ourselves.” (182). Recognizing their differences and putting asides their egos represented the only way to reconcile deep differences in moral opinion.
Custer, on the other hand, or the lesson that Custer’s mishap teaches us, breaks down the myth of rugged individualism that pervades Western folklore. Unlike Lincoln, who realized that he couldn’t do it alone, but rather used his leadership and team player skills, Custer wanted to win the battle on his own so he could be a “Western Hero.” This colossal spirit of independence in which one’s ability to make it on their own has always been touted in the old Westerns, even while it was a communal spirit of cooperation that really won the West. We tend to forget that the frontierspeople had to rely on each other’s help to tame the wilderness and make it through the extreme conditions that they faced. In Grass Beyond the Mountains, a fascinating depiction of opening up the frontier grasslands in the wilds of northern British Columbia, Richmond P. Hobson makes this point most evident:
“An interesting custom of this isolated and far-flung country was the way the frontiersmen eased their thirst for talk and company by throwing in to help each other out, when the circumstances necessitated it. In this land where there was no such thing as hired help, neighborliness was taken for granted.
With the slightest provocation or with the frailest kind of excuse, a rancher would saddle up a half-broke colt or one of his snappiest horses and start to ride. His destination would be some particular friend’s cabin; any distance up to fifty miles was not considered unusual.
What usually happened was that after two or three days of talk—during which the visitor helped his neighbor with the work—the two men would think of some other friend to visit, and off both of them would go to the next place.” (61)
Upon visiting the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and seeing Last Stand Hill and the short distance between it and the hill where Generals Benteen and Reno, who stuttered to come to Custer’s aid, one has to wonder just how drunk, how insubordinate and more poignantly, how hung up these other officers were on saving their own skins and preserving their own glory to let Custer’s entire battalion get slaughtered. This self-centered glory-seeking is what seemed to define the United States in its other endeavors at the time. Like Melville’s Captain Ahab, we were hell-bent on fulfilling our Manifest Destiny by chasing the white whale to Cuba, the Philippines and Mexico. Philbrick makes the point that it wasn’t Custer’s last stand or the beginning of the end for Sitting Bull and the Lakota Sioux, but the Wild West’s last stand. The United States had so much business to settle abroad. In other words, while Custer and all of his men were mutilated, it wasn’t the last stand of an ego maniac Indian fighting general or the last stand of the Lakota way of life but of the Wild West as a business venture.
Because there is so much mystery surrounding the event, Custer’s Last Stand is an important part of the mythology of the Wild West and its brash fights between cowboys and Indians, and of course, this myth’s meaning has changed over the years. Philbrick notes: “In the late nineteenth century, with the help of Buffalo Bill Cody’s tremendously popular Wild West Show, which often ended with an ear-splitting reenactment of Custer’s demise, the perpetually thirty-six-year-old general became the symbol of what many Americans wanted their country to be: a pugnacious, upstart global power. Just as Custer had stood fearlessly before overwhelming odds, the United States must stand firm against the likes of Spain, Germany, and Russia. Now that America had completed its bloodstained march across the West, it was time to take on the world. As Custer, or at least the mythic incarnation of Custer, remained center stage in the ongoing drama of American history, those who’d manage to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn [none of Custer’s 200-some men] were left with the aftermath of the general’s controversial leave-taking.” (302) It must be noted that “[d]espite his inconsistencies and flaws, there was something about Custer that distinguished him from most other human beings. 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. Some are remembered because they transcended the failings of their age. Custer is remembered because he so perfectly embodied those failings.” (306).
Sitting Bull, on the other hand, is remembered as part of a dying way of life. He appropriately wrote, “They attacked our village and we killed them all. What would you do if your home was attacked? You would stand up like a brave man and defend it.” Even Custer admired the so-called hostiles. In My Life on the Plains, Custer wrote: “If I were an Indian, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown I without stint or measure.”
Visiting the Little Bighorn, one can feel the ghosts. Hordes of tourists were lined up in the summer sun after taking a detour off the interstate to take a look at where Custer and the Wild West died. Made into an amusement park, the place represents a quick look back into the past to see a part of the bloodstained history of America. You can back on the freeway and continue on in your 42-foot long RV.
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