Another book about George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn?


But hey, this book is filled with photographs, drawings and other visual art. Best of all, the author is Larry McMurtry, the bookman of Archer City; amateur historian of the American West; author of iconic novels such as "Lonesome Dove," "The Last Picture Show," "Terms of Endearment" and (my favorite) "All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers"; memoirist; essayist.

A shopping list scrawled on a napkin might be worth reading if McMurtry were the author.

So here I am, having read another book about Custer, but the first one I've ever read by McMurtry. He is not coy about the vastness of the Custer literature. McMurtry characterizes it as mostly "cranky," akin to the "equally vast and cranky literature about Sherlock Holmes."

Wait. Was Holmes a flesh-and-blood person? Is it strange to compare Holmes and Custer? Sure, but McMurtry, no matter how literate, can come across as strange.

Here is the opening paragraph of McMurtry's substantive coffee-table book about the man who became famous because his death - on June 25, 1876 - said so much about the not-so-United States of America: "At one time a picture called 'Custer's Last Stand' hung in virtually every saloon in the land, and quite a few barbershops too. I first saw it in our small barbershop, in Archer City, Texas. A painting by Cassilly Adams, lithographed by Otto Becker, was given away by the thousands by Anheuser-Busch, the great brewing enterprise of St. Louis. General George Armstrong Custer, long locks flying, was fighting on staunchly against terrible - in fact impossible - odds. And when he fell, along with some 250 of his men, the world was no longer the same."

As you see, McMurtry starts the Custer saga in an unusual place, with a lithograph, and begins to capture the horribleness of Little Big Horn - horrible because of Custer's deadly campaigns against American Indians and because of how mass killing killed him at age 37.

The Indian perspective is honored by McMurtry, who quotes Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux: "The Whites made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they only kept one. They said they would take our land and they took it."

Some of that land fell to Custer, a warrior who would rather fight than love, who earned a reputation as reckless, who graduated last in his class at West Point, who suffered discipline by his superior officers over and over.

"As a rare book dealer I once owned a collection of Custerology numbering more than one thousand items," McMurtry discloses, "scrapbooks, diaries, trial transcripts, regimental histories, publications of learned societies, reprints of reprints, and so on."

Citing some of the best biographies of Custer, McMurtry argues for the brief biography I am discussing in this review because writing short means plain speaking. What McMurtry says more plainly than the more verbose biographers is this: Little Bighorn is an important historical battle not because of death toll (minor compared to many Civil War battles) but "because it closed a great narrative, the narrative of American settlement."

McMurtry provides valuable context throughout this short life of Custer, context about the Indian way of life, about the geography of the plains and the mountains, about the brutal nature of daily life without electricity and other conveniences.

The context of American military superiority compared to the American Indian "savages" led to disbelief about Custer's death.

"It couldn't be," McMurtry writes, "and yet, improbably, it was. The news across the northern plains was generally treated as an insult of some sort. How dare they, these uppity savages?"

Of course, on the day of the Little Bighorn battle, the amassed Indians had no intention of fighting. Custer started it, and would quickly regret it.
