The accompanying changes on the Battlefield itself tell only part of the story, although certainly one problem has been to make the Battlefield accessible to the American public and to draw them to it. But pressure groups are always proposing changes that would leave the Battlefield with its story obliterated by California mausoleums, courthouse statues, and concessions selling hot dogs, moss agates, petrified wood, fool’s gold, and warm beer. Perhaps the second is the harder problem—to keep the Battlefield so that it may be seen as it was by those who made it history.
To a greater or lesser degree, the National Park Service is always confronted by these two conflicting problems—to get Americans to see its history, walk in it, and touch it, and yet to leave its history intact. But there are always those who see only timber or grazing lands, or would just like to look around—for minerals or oil. Although the Battlefield is not without some of these economic threats, its greatest menace is the widespread belief that the dead should always be covered with domestic grass and the grass should be frequently watered. Yet what could be more becoming to these dead who fell on sand and sagebrush than the sagebrush that half hides the simple stones placed where their bodies were found?
The Major has instinctively assumed that he was given a military assignment, and he has held the Hill. He commands the post, and the Stars and Stripes float over it. It is more even than a military trust. It is the hill where the Ten Commandments were given to Moses—and to him, and a voice sounds out over the 750 acres of the enclosure when a tourist is seen removing a yucca plant or a clump of sagebrush.
But the ultimate justification for preserving history is that it may be seen and understood. In 1940, the road from the main highway extended just beyond the Monument, under which lie the bones of the enlisted men who fought in Custer’s command; today, tourists can follow the 3-1/2-mile flow of battle on an all-weather road which continues down the Battle Ridge, crosses Medicine Tail Coulee where Custer may or may not have first met the Indians, and ends at Reno Hill (although the Major hopes that funds will be found someday to complete the road to the main highway so that the tourists will not have to retrace their route). It was a fight to get this road, and it is a fight to keep it open in all weather with a small force and a small budget. Along the road there are interpretative signs at key points, and these did not come easily, either. The guide service established by the Major is as fine as will be found at any historical site. Before the Museum was built, the Major stationed the guides at the Monument and they were expected to have the same all-weather properties as his road. Scheduled talks are now given in the observation room of the Museum, from which a wide view of the actual scene of fighting is supplemented by a relief map of the whole battle area that cannot be seen from any one point near the Hill.
Of course, the Museum itself is the most important addition since the Major became Superintendent.1 History grinds slowly and painfully in building a museum. It was not until 1952 that the Battlefield Museum was officially dedicated by Gen. Wainwright and Col. Brice C. W. Custer, but it was first envisioned by figures from another era—Mrs. Custer herself, General Miles, Governor Joe Dixon, and Senator T. J. Walsh. Major Luce worked with them, and, after their deaths, with Senator Burton K. Wheeler who continued the fight. In 1939, Congress authorized the construction of the Museum, but inscrutably failed to appropriate funds to construct it, and the war years that followed should have ended any hope whatsoever. Instead, Major and Mrs. Luce went on campaigning and planning and in 1947 completed their “Museum Prospectus,” which is the basis of the present arrangement of exhibits. They not only made plans; they went out and acquired museum collections for a museum that might never get to an architect’s drawing board, and to do this took much more than belief. It took a lot of the Old Army humor, sentiment, and dramatic sense to get owners to part with almost priceless historical possessions but fortunately many of these owners were themselves tied to the Old Army by family and by sentiment. For both tourists and historians the Museum today gives life and added meaning to the silent stones outside. For the tourists, there are dioramas of scenes from the Battle, displays of actual Battle relics, and uniforms and photographs of many of those who crossed the divide between the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn at high noon on June 25 eighty years ago. In addition, for historians and writers there are letters, diaries, official papers, newspaper clippings, and a library containing many rare and valuable works.
Undoubtedly, these changes on the Hill partly explain the increasing numbers who come there, but the Hill has not stood waiting for the American public to come to it. The 7th Cavalry never believed in waiting around for somebody to find out about it. The Major has worked with local chambers of commerce, and state and national historical societies. He has eaten roast lamb, mashed potatoes, and green peas, and made speeches. He has written articles, unveiled paintings and statues, and appeared on radio. He has politicked with politicians, and ambushed writers who never knew what happened to them—even after Cheyenne and Sioux warriors began to gallop through their stories shouting Hi-yi-yi. It is little wonder, therefore, that in the year before his retirement he was given the National Achievement Award by The Westerners, or that at his retirement the National Park Service presented him with a citation for outstanding service.
Yet, of his many honors, he probably most cherishes the one he received long ago when he was made Sergeant, Troop B, 7th U.S. Cavalry. This is the honor that he has always worn, and he has worn it even in his unguarded moments. Often in the evening, for instance, the old Sarge of the 7th would sit watching the shadows of rabbits shyly appear from the sagebrush and grave markers. The name he called them were not poetical names but the names of old troopers. “Hey, Horseface Klotz,” he would call, and an oval shadow would come toward him, stop, and then come on again.
Undoubtedly, too, he is on friendly terms with many other shadows that move in moonlight through the grave markers.
Sir, the Hill will miss you.
From the Unfinished Custer Manuscript
For several years, primarily in 1959–63, Maclean struggled to write a book about Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He tried to define the battle as ritual tragedy and planned a book in three parts: part 1, “The Battle”; part 2, “The Marks on Those Who Survived”; and part 3, “Our Marks.” Judging from this blueprint, Maclean was most interested in the continuing story of the battle, the myriad ways in which it remains a part of our national mythology. Maclean saw Little Bighorn as one litmus test of our changing attitudes about the American West, particularly the frontier military campaigns that almost wiped out many tribes of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. For many reasons, including health problems, he was unable to complete the book he envisioned. He knew he was writing about the battle—its principal players and afterlife—in ways markedly different from western historians, and finally could not make the material fit into the conception of classical tragedy he held in highest regard. He drafted and worked on fourteen of his projected twenty chapters, none of which have ever before been published. Maclean’s letters to his friend the distinguished western historian Robert Utley poignantly attest to his struggle to define and complete his project, and his eventual abandonment of it.
In these five extracts from Maclean’s first, incomplete book, we see Maclean’s distinct style emerge, as well as ideas about tragedy that receive full expression in Young Men and Fire. Included here are three of the four chapters from part 2: chapter 1, “The Hill”; chapter 2, “The Sioux”; and chapter 3, “The Cheyennes.” In the first, Maclean announces his fundamental interest in the “after-life” of the battle and focuses upon the subsequent changes in status of the battlefield itself. The next two chapters tell contrasting stories of dispersal and defeat of the primary tribes who fought the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn—their Pyrrhic victory. Also included is the fourth chapter, “In Business,” of the projected part 3. Here, Maclean’s irony rings loudly as he links the battle with subsequent adverti
sing, particularly the most famous popular art image of the battle, a favorite saloon lithograph, with the growth of a major American brewery, Anheuser-Busch. “In Business” shows a drier, more satiric side of Maclean, who savors the fact that Custer, a teetotaler, was elaborately deployed in saloons to sell beer. Finally, the opening two sections of what was to be his final chapter, “Shrine to Defeat,” reveal Maclean drawing together several strands from his overall project under the aegis of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, an excerpt of which serves as the chapter’s epigraph. These pages elaborate the connections between that epigraph and some of Maclean’s conclusions about the aftermath of the battle. In addition to Freud, Maclean cites George Orwell in exploring “our tendency to memorialize some of our disasters.”
Note: Maclean’s citations, however incomplete, appear here in his footnotes as they do in the original manuscript.
PART II
The Marks on Those Who Survived
“There are rewards for hawks and dogs when they have done us service; but for a soldier that hazards his limbs in a battle, nothing but a kind of geometry is his last supportation.”—Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, I, l
CHAPTER 1
The Hill
Every battle has something of a personality and a personal after-life. But it is true of battles as of men—only some have a deep personal life of their own with the capacity to affect permanently the lives of those associated with them and to be known everywhere by those who know almost nothing about them. The battle of the Little Bighorn, which from the ordinary historical point of view lacks any great significance, has been an immense personal force altering the feelings, beliefs, daily routines and larger destinies of those who survived it or were related to the dead. It has given a structure to their lives, however harsh the outlines, for (it seems that) the dead who continue to live become abstracted into patterns and are transformed and transform others, as it were, into a kind of geometry.
To the large world outside, the Battle has many personal traits that attract a wide diversity of personalities. It has the power of an endless argument, one of the world’s battles destined to be fought forever. More has been written about it than about any American battle excepting possibly the Battle of Gettysburg,1 and at times with as much fury and general confusion as darkened Custer Hill late in the afternoon of June 25, 1876. Some of its power, undoubtedly, is in its artistry. It is almost a ready-made plot with ready-made characters for that large class of writers who lack the power to invent plots and characters of their own. To painters of similar abilities, it is close to a finished composition—a hilltop in a big sky; repeating the circle of the hilltop, a circle of kneeling men in blue; within the embattled circle a central standing figure highlighted by blond hair; and, surrounding the circle of blue, larger circles of contrasting redskins. The Battle has also had the power to promote business, draw customers and sell beer. And it has had two powers perhaps deeper than all others—the power of horror and of jest. It shocked the nation as nothing had since the death of Lincoln, leaving permanent marks upon the individuals, families and tribes connected with it. Recently—but only recently—we have become enough at ease with it to make it into a joke. The joke has many variants, some of them dirty and all of them grim, but essentially it is one joke and underneath the many variants is a kindly undertone, as if some joke had been played upon the bluffs of the Little Bighorn for which there should be universal forbearance, on the chance that the joke played there is played some time on all of us. Clearly, our dead are delivered from oblivion when they become a joke on us.
The history of the personality and personal after-life of an event is not history of any commonly recognized kind, and this one, for lack of a classification, may be called the biography of a battle. That the Battle still lives and grows, however, is a fact demonstrable by the ordinary kinds of historical and even statistical evidence—by the number of books written about it, the number of times it appears visually in paintings or on the screen or TV, the number of times it is heard in such common sayings as “so-and-so made his last stand” or “too damn many Indians.” But a reality of a somewhat different order has to be explored for the sources of its life, and observations about this reality cannot always be documented with footnotes, since life-after-death, at least in this life, depends upon patterns and geometrical extensions and may of course depend upon much more. Yet what lives beyond its natural self is clearly structured for remembrance. The patterns are partly in the natural thing which must have had a higher sense of form than that of most of the living matter surrounding it. The patterns are also partly superimposed and come from us, who strive or at least feel at times that we should strive to make something structural out of our own lives. The history of this life-after-death, however, involves much more than the matching of two sets of fixed patterns. As there is no life in fixities, so each who achieves immortality must retain something of his past and yet take on new meanings with the passing of time. Unless capable of such organic growth, even immortality dies.
The ground itself upon which the Battle was fought has its own history of death and transfiguration, and it seems right to begin with the reality of the earth and to trace first how this isolated piece of it soon after the Battle became known to the whole world and eventually was transformed into a National Monument. On the Hill itself, which is somewhat symmetrical, there are also lines to be traced. The lines are of white-stone markers and they correspond roughly to the Hill’s contours and converge near its top. Each stone is indeed an abstraction of what was found there.
1. THE NEWS
News of the Battle was spread first by mysterious smoke signals in the sky and by mounted warriors, the “moccasin telegraph” of the Plains Indians, and days before news from Terry arrived, apprehensiveness deepened at Ft. Lincoln because the Indians there seemed to know that a big battle had been fought and that Indians had better be quiet about its outcome.2
It was by a newspaper scoop, one of the biggest ever made by small western newspapers—not by official report—that word of the Battle first reached the outside world and the War Department.3 On July 1, Muggins Taylor, one of Gibbon’s scouts, had been sent west from the mouth of the Bighorn where Terry had now moved his troops to carry the official sealed report to Ft. Ellis. But a newspaper man met him on his lonely way and it was Taylor’s account, not the sealed report, that was the basis for the stories appearing in the Bozeman Times of July 2 and the Helena Herald of July 4. Since the white man’s telegraph lines were down, it was July 6 before eastern newspapers told the country what at first seemed impossible to believe. When interviewed, Gen. Sheridan said, “It comes without any marks of credence,” not from any information received by the War Department but from frontier scouts who have “a way of spreading news.”4 So the country paused in the midst of the Centennial Exposition, its pride momentarily supporting its disbelief although not removing its anxiety.
On July 3 at five o’clock in the afternoon the Far West left the mouth of the Bighorn with orders to reach Bismarck in “the shortest possible time.”5 For the wounded, the deck had been made into a large mattress with new tarpaulins spread over eighteen inches of marsh grass. The Far West also carried a “confidential” dispatch from Gen. Terry very different from Terry’s official dispatch carried west by Taylor to Ft. Ellis. A sentence from it may suggest its guarded import: “For whatever errors he [Custer] may have committed he has paid the penalty and you cannot regret his loss more than I do, but I feel that our plan must have been successful had it been carried out, and I desire you to know the facts.”6 Although meant only for Sheridan and Sherman, this confidential dispatch was soon to become public property and to arouse conflicting indignations. So Terry’s “secret” was part of the hurried preparations being made to endow Custer and the Battle with immortality, a part of which depends upon the perpetual motion of a heated argument.
At full steam, the Far West slid over sandbars and caromed off the banks o
f the river on the sharp bends, tumbling the crew to the deck. Then, draped in black and with flag at half-mast, she tied up at Bismarck in the darkness of the night of July 5. “She had covered 710 miles at the average rate of thirteen and one-seventh miles per hour and, though no one stopped to think of it then, she had made herself the speed champion of the Missouri River.”7
In the office of the Bismarck Tribune whose editor, Col. C. A. Lounsberry, was also correspondent for the New York Herald,8 the telegraphers worked in relays sending fifteen thousand words in a day and holding the key between messages by clicking out passages from the New Testament. But again the white man’s telegraph lines were down—this time east of St. Paul—so that it was July 7 before the messages reached the east, and the country and Gen. Sheridan received “the marks of credence.”
Even before sunrise of the 6th, however, the Far West had docked gently at Ft. Abraham Lincoln with the wounded, although the wounded by now were not so heavy a burden as the news that had to be told to women. Of the sunrise of July 7, 1876, Mrs. Custer wrote one sentence, “From that time the life went out of the hearts of the ‘women who weep,’ and God asked them to walk on alone and in the shadow.”9
2. THE RECEPTION
It is not easy to become a part of the world that received the news of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, for any modern analogy is remote and the imagination is taxed to recover even the shadows of past feelings. Let us go back no further, then, than the early winter of 1950. A few years earlier our country had concluded its greatest war, in which we had finally assembled a military machine never before equalled in efficiency and complexity. One of the proudest generals of that war, Gen. MacArthur, had been directed to bring this modern might against some dark-skinned north Koreans and Chinese communists who in a semi-barbaric way had been annoying one of our distant outposts. As soldiers, they were known to be good when it came to crawling through the underbrush, suddenly appearing and disappearing, enduring hardships, living off a handful of rice, and torturing prisoners, but they were thought to be without modern organization, weapons, and generalship. Among the other units under Gen. MacArthur was the First Division of the Marines. The “end-of-the-war” offensive was on, and advance units had reached the Manchurian frontier. Then garbled accounts began to appear suggesting through the censorship that the front of the American army had been trapped and shattered and that few American prisoners were being taken alive.