7.
Still, the Northern Cheyennes were in effect prisoners at Ft. Keogh and the mouth of the Tongue River was really not their home—the mountains and the pines were farther back, between the Tongue and the Rosebud. No one knows when they began to slip out of camp and return to this country that is not far from the Custer Battlefield. Perhaps it was Little Wolf himself who started the final move; in 1880 while drunk he killed Starving Elk who long had been paying too much attention to Little Wolf’s wives and his daughter, Pretty Walker, and, when any Cheyenne killed one of his own, his people had “to throw him away.” In exile, he and a small group of his followers went up the Rosebud until they came to a tributary that led them into the mountains between the Rosebud and the Tongue, and there, about fifteen miles southwest of the present townsite of Lame Deer, they pitched camp.28 The camp grew, and probably Gen. Miles was glad to have Indians he trusted leave for the back country and reduce the Indian population around Ft. Keogh. Besides, he had promised the Cheyennes that, if they surrendered and fought for him, he would fight for a permanent home for them. Gen. Miles’ attitude toward Indians probably should not be confused with that of some of his young officers, such as Lts. Clark and Casey, who in their own time must have been regarded as “Indian lovers” and who to us seem like early modern students of ethnology, but if Gen. Miles was not an anthropologist he was all Army, and for some reason it is easy to forget the number of old-line soldiers who believe the Army is the implement of their country’s ideals just as it is easy to forget how often an old-fashioned sense of honor and justice arrives at right conclusions and once there has lasting power to see that something is done. By Executive order dated November 26, 1884 a reservation was set aside for the Northern Cheyennes in the country they had chosen which is close to the Custer Battlefield and takes in the mountains lying between the Rosebud and the Tongue.29
Even yet the troubles of the Northern Cheyennes were not over. For one thing, as a late and somewhat arbitrary creation, the Tongue River Reservation, unlike the Great Sioux Reservation, included land in which there were already ranchers, and at best and understandably ranchers regarded strychnine as equally suited for coyotes and Indians. The white settlers for miles around did all they could to get the Cheyennes moved, and finally in 1889 their agent, needing help and without an important friend near, wrote Gen. Miles, then commanding the Division of the Pacific. There is nothing very modern about the military reply; it is without sentiment or sociology, reflecting only one emotion—old fashioned moral indignation:
Headquarters,
Division of the Pacific
San Francisco, California
June 1, 1889
Sir:
Referring to your letter of May 15 in regard to the proposed removal of the Indians I would say that, in my judgment, there is no good reason or justice in doing so.
These Indians surrendered in good faith in the spring of 1877. . . . During the last twelve years they have been entirely peaceable; several of their people have been killed while employed by the Government. They have been a good part of the time self-sustaining; the Government has allowed them a little corner of territory upon which to live, and justice, humanity, and every other commendable reason demands that they should be allowed to live in peace in the vicinity in which they were born.
The congregating of great masses of Indians, as has been done in the Indian Territory and on the Great Sioux Reservation, is not only a blot upon our civilization, but also a black mark upon the map of the United States, and I trust the Government will extend to those people the protecting hand which a peaceably disposed people are entitled to.
They were told that if they remained at peace and did what they were directed to do the Government would treat them fairly and justly. They have fulfilled their part of the compact and it would be but justice for the Government to allow them to remain where it has placed them during the past years. What is more, Indians who surrender their tribal relations, are, under the law of Congress, entitled to take up the land for homes on the public domain, and in this instance, they have undoubted right, legally and morally, to remain where they are now located.
Very respectfully
Your obedient servant
Nelson A. Miles,
Brigadier-General,
U.S. Army30
So the Northern Cheyennes were allowed to keep their reservation, although some of them still were not allowed to live on it. Another Cheyenne band had accumulated at Pine Ridge Agency, made up in good part of the two hundred and fifty followers of Little Chief who had voluntarily left Ft. Keogh in 1878 for Indian Territory, had been steadily unhappy there, and had been granted permission to return north in 1881.31 The agent at Pine Ridge, Dr. McGillycuddy, did not like these Cheyennes any better than he had liked Dull Knife’s band. “The Bedouins of the Desert” would not farm or haul freight, they kept his Sioux in turmoil, and every now and then some of them would take off for the summer, making the four-hundred-mile trip to the Rosebud to see their relatives back home. The Cheyenne agent was not much happier than McGillycuddy to receive them, since they came without rations and he had trouble to get enough for his own charges. It was probably Gen. Miles who understood their loneliness and finally did something about it, although a practical reason may also have influenced his action.32 Gen. Miles, it will be remembered, was put in charge of the operations against the Sioux during the Messiah Outbreak in the winter of 1889–90, and he may have wanted to reduce the number of Indians on the Pine Ridge Agency where much of the trouble was brewing, although, since there were not many Cheyennes on the reservation and they had avoided the Ghost Dance, the chances are that other things were more important in his mind when he allowed them to start happily in midwinter across the four hundred miles of badlands, broken country and deep snow lying between them and Ft. Keogh. Even there they had to wait for the government to send further orders. It was October, 1891 before they were allowed to move to the reservation, a decade after they had left the south for home. At last, though, they were all there, all who were still alive, in the red mountains covered with pines that look black in the distance from the plains.
So, for the Cheyennes, geometrically speaking, there was finally a convergence of the lines that marked all those who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn. For the Cheyennes, the lines spread over thousands of miles; many of them were broken lines spread over thousands of miles; many of them were broken lines ending abruptly; and all of them were deep, so deep as to outline the Cheyenne life of today.
In 1954, Eugene Fisher, grandson of Little Wolf and then president of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council, said:
“You’d think after sixty or seventy years, there’d be no more bands, there’d be just Northern Cheyenne. But, no, these people still belong to Two Moon’s band, or Little Wolf’s band, or the Pine Ridge band, or whatever band their folks belonged to.
“Before, we used to have the soldier societies, and that was the important way to tell who a man was. But the Custer battle changed all that—and everything else about us. You might say, it was kind of a revolution. . . .”33
PART III
Our Marks
CHAPTER 4
In Business
There is no balance-sheet that tells whether the debt Gen. Custer owes Anheuser-Busch, Inc., is greater than the debt the corporation owes the General, who was a teetotaler. The General’s debt is not reduced by the fact that, when the business connection was first established, the memory of the General was a national asset and the company was still pretty much a local brewery. In the long run, they have done very well by each other.
There is some correlation between the profits of this world and its lasting memories. Although the dead are not allowed to take it with them, the dead who continue to live in this world generally go on making money. In a way, they have to earn their keep. Why not? Sometimes business rescues individuals from near oblivion and makes them weekly heroes on TV, as it has done with Wyatt E
arp and Bat Masterson. Sometimes it immortalizes a whole class of men by industrializing them. The cowboy, for instance. Apart from Westerns on movie and TV, apart from rodeos and dude ranches and adult consumption altogether, it would take quite an audit to calculate the annual profit in children’s cowboy boots, pants, belts, hats, toy revolvers, etc. More frequently, of course, business capitalizes on well established reputations but its investment in them raises the valuation of their stock and adds to their security as well as to that of the investor. So Prudential Insurance advertisements increase our feeling of security about Prudential and even about the Rock of Gibraltar.
1.
Custer’s Last Stand has been a big money maker. How much it has made would be impossible to calculate, and it is undoubtedly proper that something should remain misty about the economics of the dead. There are, for instance, small local profits starting with the Black Hills where there is a Custer State Park and a town of Custer that has grown into a motel city famous because Custer’s command first discovered gold near there in 1874. In the Black Hills, State Park lodges, souvenir shops, etc., sell Ed Ryan’s story of how at Gen. Custer’s request he remained behind with a sick buddy, and in the summer Ed dispenses autographs to eastern pilgrims.1 Just a few miles from Custer, a massive sculptor makes a hard-earned living from the private contributions and admission fees of those who came to watch him change a mountain into a statue of Crazy Horse.2 North of the Black Hills, in Medora, North Dakota, the Eaton brothers started one of the first dude ranches, the Custer Trail Ranch. From here on west to the Battlefield the trade picks up—the town of Custer, Montana, the General Custer Hotel in Billings and a mounting number of Custer motels and restaurants (some not too good). Who knows how many cars choose the Custer Battlefield Highway because it has this tradename and not just a number? One hundred and thirty thousand people visit the Field annually, even though they have to turn off an east-west transcontinental road to get there; and it is an important source of income for the permanent residents who live near by in Crow Agency and even in Hardin. This is small stuff, but it all adds up.
As a source of national income, writers have profited from it more than any other large group of investors. Some of these returns have been small—quick articles and stories, novels with rapidly fading royalties, etc.; it has been a natural for the fast-buck writer. But it has also been turned into steady income, even a few historians having made small nest eggs out of the Battle. And when it gets into the movies and TV, as it has done almost since the beginning of screen history, it gets into Big Money. Of course, as we all know, its biggest business affiliation has been with Budweiser beer.
2.
“Custer’s Last Fight” began its advertising career at an important moment in the history of advertising and American business in general. Lithographs of it made their first barroom appearances soon after Mr. Busch acquired the Adams’ painting3 and therefore in the very late 80’s or early 90’s. During the 80’s, according to Frank Presbrey, standard authority on the subject, only four American companies (Sapolio, Royal Baking Powder, Pear’s Soap and Ivory Soap) advertised on a large scale and “in the highest sense,”4 but during the 90’s, especially after the depression of ’93, advertisement and business fast became Big Business. “How pregnant the advertising ’90’s were with the future of American business may be put with the statement that it was in this period that the foundation was laid with large-scale advertising for such present-day establishments as the Eastman Kodak Company, Sears, Roebuck & Co., the Quaker Oats Company, the Shredded Wheat Company, Postum Cereal Company, H. L. Heinz (which bought Mulvany’s painting, ‘Custer’s Last Rally’), Gold Dust, the National Biscuit Company and others of similar size and prestige. . . .”5
Presbrey points out certain general developments in advertising during the 90’s that help to explain the early commercial success of the lithograph, “Custer’s Last Fight.” “By 1896 illustrations had become so much a characteristic of the advertisement that the Western Druggist ventured a prophecy that ‘when the history of advertising is written, the present will be known as “the picture period.”’”6 Moreover, because of rapid improvements in methods of reproduction, the “picture” advertisements of the ’80s changed from “relatively lifeless” outlines to “the naturalness and greater emotiveness of the half-tone reproduction of humans in action.”7 The concurrent development of another important advertising device, the slogan, gave trademarks to other companies, and to other beers, including “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous”; but in the public mind Anheuser-Busch became identified with a picture full of “motiveness” and “humans in action.”
It is hardly possible that Mr. Adolphus Busch could have known what an important step he was taking in the history of his company’s relations with the public when he first distributed lithographs of “Custer’s Last Fight” to bars handling his beer. He had first-hand evidence, of course, for believing that they would stir up some interest for a time, since the Adams’ painting had evidently attracted a good deal of attention while it was hanging in the St. Louis saloon. But within a few years he presented the Adams’ painting to the 7th Cavalry in a gesture characteristic of early advertisement much of which was a projection of the owner’s personality, and in a gesture, too, characteristic of the patriotism and generosity of Mr. Busch who had his company wire $100,000 to San Francisco at the time of the earthquake.8 But the gesture also probably indicates that “Mr. Busch assumed interest in the lithographs had been exhausted,” and it is Don Russell’s conjecture that, when the interest increased instead, Mr. Busch had to commission Mr. Becker, foreman of the department issuing his lithographs, to make a painting “after” the departed original.9 Who knows at the time, even in business, which of his gestures is going to be taken as his public image?
“About one million copies have been distributed to bars and taverns through the years.”10 In addition, the success of “Custer’s Last Fight” must have entered the thinking of company officials when later they commissioned Oscar E. Beringhaus “to paint a series of oils depicting the romantic growth and expansion of America,” a series so notable that “even ardent prohibitionists” acclaimed its art.11 But it is “Custer’s Last Fight” that has become America’s best known object of art. At present, about 25,000 copies of it are issued annually, and, significantly, many of these are sent to customers who want to hang them in their recreation and rumpus rooms.12
3.
In these days of high-powered research into consumer-motivation, it seems natural to want to make a few friendly speculations concerning the causes of the happy business relations that have long existed between “Custer’s Last Fight” and Budweiser beer. Since much of this study deals with the general causes of the Battle’s appeal to the public everywhere, these speculations focus on the Battle’s barroom success. They are speculations of friends, all of whom are familiar with American art, advertising, the West and, in varying degrees, with barrooms.
Joshua Taylor, historian of American art, says that we should start by recalling a period when a saloon was one thing and a barroom another—the barroom with goboons [spittoons] and sawdust on the floors, and walls of the fancy saloon crowded with good to not-so-good examples of what the carriage-trade regarded as the latest style in painting. It is true that, although some pictures early had been given to bars by wholesalers, Anheuser-Busch was the first brewery to specialize in this kind of advertisement,13 and, in so doing, according to Taylor’s theory, helped to make the barroom into a poor man’s saloon. Andrew Armstrong, ad man and amateur painter, has much the same theory. He thinks that the lithograph of “Custer’s Last Fight” may be an early example of what would now be called “tone-up” advertisement (a distributor walks into a retail establishment and says if you’ll use our product we’ll give you a fancy lamp and turn this place into a cocktail lounge). John Jamieson says that, when his advertising agency used to handle beer accounts, they always tried to think of something “controversial??
? to hang on the tavern walls. According to his theory, a customer has a few drinks, points to “Custer’s Last Fight,” and then announces to the customer next to him, “Do you know that happened out in Nebraska and every son-of-a-bitch was killed and scalped?” The adjacent customer or the one down from him says, “You’re crazy. That happened in Colorado where I was born, and my uncle was in it and used to tell me all about it when I was a kid.”
One thing for sure, it is an odd advertisement for beer. In the first place, it is the only national event that has become a trademark in the public mind for a large American business. A good many companies have identified themselves with national heroes, for instance the Franklin Life Insurance Company, but this identification is generally based on some quality of the hero, like thrift, which the customer is supposed to link with the company. Other companies, of course, have used historical events in their advertising, but these have generally been related to the company’s own history, as the Pennsylvania Railroad’s calendars (by Dean Cornwell) depicting important events in the history of transportation and the calendars of western railroads depicting scenes from the history of westward-ho. On the surface at least, it is not easy to see the relations that have proved most lasting between a historical event and a big business—the relations between “Custer’s Last Fight” and beer—even when the fact that the General was an ardent teetotaler is set aside.