Custer

Capt. George A. Custer and Gen. Alfred Pleasonton on horseback (Library of Congress).

(Timothy Egan) ... What happened on that hot day of June 25, 1876, one of the last violent clashes in the mostly one-sided Indian wars, is an ever-shifting narrative, moving with the times. For quite a while now, Custer has been shorthand for hubris, ignorance and had-it-coming, but in earlier decades Custer was a hero. An iconic picture called “Custer’s Last Fight” once graced the beery interior of nearly every saloon in the United States, courtesy of an aggressive bit of cultural imperialism by ­Anheuser-Busch.
Larry McMurtry, the prolific Texas author, screenwriter and book collector, knows something about the fetish for the fallen commander, and confesses that “as a rare book dealer I once owned a collection of Custerology numbering more than 1,000 items: scrapbooks, diaries, trial transcripts, regimental histories, publications of learned societies, reprints of reprints, and so on.” And he seems to have brought along every artifact to his latest book, “Custer,” a brief, breezy tour of the man and the conflict, complete with an astonishing variety of photographs and artistic renderings. Continued