Custer, from Civil War hero to Indian killer, is keenly covered in new biography

To get a sense of just how divisive George Armstrong Custer was during his short life, one need only consult a couple of the Union Army officer’s post-Civil War press clippings.

In 1866, The New York Times declared that “the nation loves and adores him,” adding: “Custer! — the synonym of dashing gallantry and unfaltering fidelity!”

Two years later, the Des Moines State Register, alluding to the well-documented mistreatment of men under his command, offered an alternative viewpoint: “His memory will be a stench in their nostrils.”

His ever-shifting public profile is among the many rich storylines in “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America,” a vivid new biography by T.J. Stiles.

“How do we reconcile the buckskin-clad outdoorsman and Indian fighter with the Midwesterner, college graduate, and professional writer?” asks Stiles, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner. “Or the battlefield emancipator with the avowed white supremacist?”

Custer was 36 when he was killed during the Battle of the Little Bighorn, an 1876 clash between the U.S. Army and Native American warriors. As Stiles writes, “it is the one fact about the man that lives in American memory.”

But as this book demonstrates, Custer cycled through many incarnations before he found himself on the receiving end of the ultimate form of frontier justice.

There was no reason to believe that the native Ohioan would emerge as one of the era’s defining military figures. Custer had discipline problems at West Point, and in 1861 he graduated last in his class.

But early in the Civil War, Custer proved to be a talented reconnaissance man, and was named an aide to Gen. George B. McClellan, the Union Army’s commanding officer. He saw extensive action at the helm of gritty cavalry units.

Armed with a revolver and a sword, he killed Confederate soldiers at close range and fought in the war’s deadliest battles. By 1865, Custer “was now a national celebrity,” Stiles writes.

Post-war, Custer wrote magazine articles (later compiled in a memoir), dabbled in politics (“He … held that America was a white man’s country,” Stiles writes) and plotted a mining venture that he hoped would make him rich (it didn’t).

It was during this period that Custer’s reputation plummeted. In 1867, he was court-martialed and convicted for being absent without leave from Fort Wallace, Kan., and for ordering the shooting of deserting soldiers.

After a suspension, Custer returned to Army service for his final chapter: A leading role in the American government’s brutal wars against Native American tribes.

Stiles captures the campaign at its most intense and appalling. Here, he describes the 1868 Battle of Washita, in which Custer’s 7th Cavalry set upon a Cheyenne camp in Oklahoma Territory: “In the chaos of the initial attack … troops shot down dozens” of Indian women and children, after which Custer “ordered the slaughter of the horse herd. One by one, 875 ponies were shot dead.”)

The book’s only real flaw emerges when Stiles discusses Custer’s behavior during the so-called Indian Wars. “The very existence of the United States was predicated on the dispossession of the indigenous,” he writes. “If Custer was wrong, ultimately it was because the nation was wrong. Many believe it was. But he was no outlier.” It’s an unconvincing, everyone-else-was-doing-it defense, a rare instance of wishy-washy thinking in an otherwise astute book.

Because Little Bighorn has inspired so much theorizing, Stiles wisely concentrates on the events leading up to the battle, not the combatants’ tactical decisions. Still, he disputes the common notion that Custer was a “glory-obsessed, arrogant fool” whose pride informed bad battlefield strategy, leading to his own death and the deaths of more than 200 other soldiers at the hands of Lakota and Cheyenne fighters.

“The popular narrative contains some truth about every aspect of Custer’s life,” he writes, “except his performance in battle — the one field in which he displayed consistent good judgment and self-possession.”

Faced with a subject whose life never lacked for contradictions, Stiles has crafted a worthy biography, one that places Custer within the context of his times, and aside from one exception, refuses to let him off the hook for his many transgressions.

This story was originally published October 31, 2015 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Custer, from Civil War hero to Indian killer, is keenly covered in new biography."