For many, in death Custer became an instant hero for a nation, a patriot who fought valiantly to the end. As W.A. Graham explained in his book The Custer Myth, As Terry’s language…compelled the inference that he had accused the popular Custer of that heinous military sin — the disobedience of orders — his partisans and admirers — and they were legion — immediately started the hue and cry in their search for a scapegoat on the one hand, and proof that their hero had been maligned, upon the other. Soon after the battle, Frederick Whittaker began writing A Complete Life of General George A. Custer. When it was published in December 1876, it proclaimed Custer’s heroism to the public. And that proclamation of heroism continued for decades, due in large part to the steady efforts of his wife. In the 57 years after her husband’s death, Libbie Custer penned three classic books — Boots and Saddles, Tenting on the Plains and Following the Guidon — that jealously protected and embellished her beau sabreur’s image. But soon after her death on April 4, 1933, detractors renewed the attack. Frederick F. Van de Water’s 1934 biography, Glory Hunter: A Life of General Custer, ravaged Custer’s image, accusing him of being a celebrity-seeking martinet.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

By that time Custer had been portrayed in many Hollywood films — the first in 1909 — and would appear in many more over the coming years. Most of these early movies presented Custer as an out-and-out hero. In 1941, with America on the verge of entering World War II, Warner Bros. produced an extremely positive film biography of the fallen cavalier, They Died With Their Boots On. As Custer, Errol Flynn’s performance set a standard to which all Custer portrayals are still compared. While riddled with inaccuracies — problems pointed out by numerous critics — the film adeptly intertwines Custer’s struggle with the government, his view of American Indians and his love for Libbie.

But it is Flynn’s portrayal of Custer that is of the utmost importance. Flynn once said, [I will] be…remembered for Robin Hood, but [feel] Custer was one of [my] best characterizations. He was right, for he captured the spirit of Custer, inspiring a number of historians to begin studies of Custer and the American Indian wars. Paul Andrew Hutton, author of Phil Sheridan and His Army and editor of The Custer Reader, has said that after seeing They Died With Their Boots On for the first time, it quickly became my favorite film. Premier Indian wars historian Robert Utley claimed: I am a Custer nut because of Errol Flynn….He so stirred my imagination by his portrayal of General Custer in [the film], my career ultimately turned from law to history. Like Hutton and Utley, Flynn’s Custer became the spark that eventually led me to become a writer interested in race relations on the frontier.

The Custer image reached a crossroad during the mid-20th century when a new wave of negativity surfaced. Martinet and egotist still stuck, but in the 1950s and ’60s, bloodthirsty racist bent on genocide and adulterer were added to his résumé. Mari Sandoz, in the 1953 history Cheyenne Autumn, claimed that Custer sired a child with Monahsetah, whom he captured at the Washita. There is one major problem with this claim — Monahsetah delivered her child in early January 1869, less than two months after she was captured by Custer and his men.

In 1957 David Humphreys Miller based Custer’s Fall: The Indian Side of the Story on statements of aged Indian veterans of the Little Bighorn that he interviewed beginning in 1935. Unfortunately he provided no corroborative documentation. According to Miller, while riding to determine if he could see the village on the morning of June 25, Custer told Arikara scouts Bob-tailed Bull and Bloody Knife, If we beat the Sioux, I will be President of the United States — the Grandfather. In 1968 Sandoz, in The Battle of the Little Bighorn, embellished Miller’s earlier report by claiming that Custer had rushed to attack the Indians on the 25th because he needed a victory to secure the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis on June 27.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to