Brian W. Dippie - Custer's Last Stand: The anatomy of an American myth

In 1876 George Armstrong Custer's forces attacked a Native American village. In the battle that followed around half of his troops, including every single man that was with him, was killed. It was a major victory for the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho who had temporarily united and a significant blow to the US Army, and the American state which was in the middle of celebrating its centennial year.

There are a plethora of books about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which is known to White people as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I've reviewed some of them on this blog. There is a modern tendency to understand Custer as a spoilt, over-confident, inadequate military leader whose lust for glory led him and hundreds of troops to an early grave. This was not the case in the immediate aftermath of the Battle. Indeed as Brian W. Dippie's brilliant book points out it was not until the death of Custer's widow Elizabeth Custer in 1933 that more critical accounts began to circulate.

What did circulate in the aftermath of June 1876 was the myth of Custer's "Last Stand" and his heroic battle against "savage" hordes. Dippie's book is a study of the process by which this myth was constructed and the role it has played in how the US sees itself. The book was first published in 1976, and the edition I have was republished with a new introduction in 1994. In that introduction Dippie points out that some critics were frustrated by the repeated descriptions of the "last stand". These, Dippie shows, took places in multiple formats - reenactments, paintings, poetry (such terrible poetry), novels, comics and most recently films. 

The problem of the Last Stand is it is a myth. As Dippie points out it was constructed immediately after the Battle with a press dispatch "from the field" reporting "Custer, surrounded bya chose band... all lying in a circle of a few yeard, their horses beside them". It made, according to Dippie, "a deep impression on the minds of contemporary Americans... they became the basis of a heroic national myth". 

There is no need in this review to repeat the various accounts that Dippie has collected. Some of them are dire, and bear little resemblance to what happened at the Battle. Custer has, by turn, been ambushed by devious enemies, killed by a rush, killed escaping, died by his own hand, died by betrayal and died as literarily the last man, fighting with a cavalry sword (which neither he, nor any other cavalryman, were carrying on the day). There was a strong tradition of poetry being written, usually heroic, and almost always laughably bad. But poetry was widely read at the time and perhaps more than anything else it helped recast the defeat as a victory - even as Custer was lying in his grave. 

But other formats have also played their role - some also influential on me. A very large number of paintings depicted the battle and continue to shape perceptions of how the fighting took place. Dippie notes that one of the most important was that distributed by brewer Anheuser-Busch in 1896. They began promoting Budweiser a million prints of "Custer's Last Fight" sent out to bars and pubs across America. Generations of drinkers looked at that painting as they sipped their beer. Similar paintings graced the covers of childrens books that impressionable kids like me read, marvelling at heroism in the face of American Indian savagery. Looking at the Anheuser-Busch print today one is struck by how laughable it all is. Custer standing tall in the middle of dead and dying soldiers brandishing a sword (he didn't have) as troopers are violently scalped and clubbed around him. Its an awful image that only surfices to portray Custer and his men as the brave, civilised people, in the midst of savagery.

Custer’s Last Fight (1888) by Cassilly Adams

There is a certain irony in this. Dippie points out that for Indians, "Custer is the core of a complex of white racist beliefes. For guilt-ridden whites in turn, he is a convenient cultural scapehoat: 'Custer died for our sins.' " But, he says, ironically, "Custer was no hardline racial bigot". However it's hard to agree completely with where Dippie takes this. "To cast him in the form of a zealous racial exerminator is simply to substitute rhetoric for fact". But in June 1876 Custer had every intention of exterminating a village of Native Americans, just as he had in 1868 when at the Battle of the Washita River Custer's troopers killed men, women and children in a Cheyenne camp.

Nonetheless Custer's death and the myth of the "last stand" became both a justification for further assaults and extermination of Native Americans and a myth of white supremacy. As Dippie concludes, of the Battle, "precisely because it was a deviation from the relentless pace of Western conquest, because it was a temporary imperiment in the path of that 'resistless restless race' of pioneers, Custer's Last Stand was elevated into a realm apart". 

Dippie's systematic cataloguing and recounting of pictures, films, poetry and literature, demonstrates both the centrality of the myth to the US's self image and the construction of a particular vision of America. It is a fascinating account.

Related Reviews

Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story
Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Michno - Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat
Brown - Showdown at Little Big Horn