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Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend ed. by Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown

2018; Kent State University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cwh.2018.0062

1533-6271

Cheryl A. Wells,

Archaeology and Natural History

Reviewed by: Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend ed. by Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown Cheryl A. Wells Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend. Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. ISBN 978-1442-25186-1, 388 pp., cloth, $40.00. The name George Armstrong Custer continues to conjure up visceral reactions and ultimately conflicting mythical images. Custer is either the hero, a determined, confident general astride his mighty steed, clothed in soft but dashing buckskin, and resplendent with a cascade of sun kissed curls whose tragic slaughter at the Battle of Little Bighorn interrupted his great and noble quest to remove the savages and secure the west for American Christianity and civilization, or the vilest of villains, an incompetent yet cocky, foppish, arrogant, foolish, vain and ruthless prima donna expansionist bent on the unthinkable, namely the genocide of all American Indian peoples, who got his just comeuppance with his death at the Battle of Little Bighorn. [End Page 401] Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown's Inventing Custer attempts to untangle such facts and fictions while simultaneously getting to grips with Custer's metamorphosis from obscure cadet at West Point to unparalleled mythologized icon. The key to Custer's transformation lay in the Civil War. The Civil War created—as Caudill and Ashdown's books on Col. John Singleton Mosby, cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman illustrate—the perfect cauldron for myth-making. The conflict unleashed arguably unprecedented anxieties resulting from immense social upheavals, economic dislocations, and political uncertainties that extended well into the postbellum era. It is in the context of the War, the context of anxieties, that the Custer myth, which, like so many designed to offer comfort to the American people in times of great national consternation, took shape. When the context shifted, so too did Custer's status. Caudill and Ashdown argue rightly, if not thoroughly, that Custer's elevation to heroic legend and his decline to vile villain reflected and acted as an index to the American government's, and perhaps by extension the American people's, view of American Indians. The monograph is divided into two roughly equal parts. Its first half investigates the "remarkably improbable and often ironic events" that formed the foundation of the Custer myth (30). Caudill and Ashdown trace Custer's life from childhood through West Point, the Civil War, and his transformation from Civil War soldier to frontier Indian fighter. Born into a poor but hardworking family, Custer struggled academically, opting instead to entertain his classmates. Improbably, Jefferson Davis offered him an appointment at West Point, where his grade-school shenanigans continued—resulting in his receiving highest number of demerits in his class, with a four-year total of 726 and the honor of graduating last in his class (20). Yet, somehow, Custer found himself, on the eve of Bull Run, in the presence of Bvt. Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott and mysteriously reunited with his favorite horse from West Point. Custer somehow arrived in battle in time to help ford Cub Run. Following a furlough brought on by too much drink and perhaps a reoccurrence of gonorrhea, Custer returned to the battlefield in 1862 and in the vortex of the War emerged as a bold and daring fighter of "legendary panache" who "led by example from the front" (153). In this nicely woven, if analytically lacking, tale sensitive to the shifting contemporary views of Custer, the evidence to support the notion of the Civil War as the pivotal event in Custer's life is scant and far from concrete. However, in the second half of the monograph, Caudill and Ashdown make the argument that the experience Custer gained at "Manassas and Gettysburg were his undoing in the unconventional warfare with the Indians" (303). The defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn reflected Custer's continued style of fighting in what he saw as another phase of the Civil War. In this way, the Civil War does tenuously emerge as perhaps pivotal to Custer's death and, by extension, to his mythological [End Page 402] rebirth. More compelling, however, is Caudill and Ashdown's daring foray into the...