Son of the Morning Star

...After all, Custer was only one of many actors in the play...

...But 1 am still bemused by the very factuality of the figure standing there "on that dusty Montana slope...

...Rising to high command early in life, he lost the repose necessary to success in high command...

...He was to Sheridan what Murat was to Napoleon...

...Certainly Mr...

...This response to challenge was not something he learned...

...SON OF THE MORNING STAR Evan S. Connell/North Point Press/$20.00 William H. Nolte In Son of the Morning Star Evan Con-nell has given us an utterly fascinating account of what led up to, occurred at, and then followed the fiasco that took place at Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876...

...More significant men of his time can be discussed without passion because they are inextricably woven into a tapestry of the past, but this hotspur refuses to die...

...No one so fond as they were of torturing and mutilating their adversaries can be considered noble...

...More than anything else it is that sense of fatality that Connell conveys in this exemplary volume...

...During the Civil War, which began just as he was graduating from West Point-thirty-fourth in a class of thirty-four-Custer became the youngest American ever to win a star, being promoted to brigadier at 23...

...Though possessed of great vitality and courage, he seemed incapable of introspection and, indeed, carried little luggage upstairs, between his ears and beneath the long flowing blond hair which he carefully tended-and yet, oddly, had cut short before meeting his Maker on that final day...

...That Connell is also puzzled by our interest in the man seems apparent William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...

...The wonder is that he survived as long as he did...

...He stands forever on that dusty Montana slope...

...The simple fact is that the Indians occupied land that the westward-moving Anglos wished to farm or mine for its minerals...

...but while Sheridan liked his valor and dash he never trusted his judgment...

...In the inevitable clash that followed, the two opposing peoples responded in a perfectly human manner: They went at each other's throats with all the moral fervor that we mistakenly believe only fanatics display...

...But throughout the War his smashing victories were plotted by other men...

...At times he disappears altogether from the stage while members of the supporting cast stand in the spotlight and speak their lines...

...Twain would have delighted in Son of the Morning Star, as would Joseph Conrad, who late in life wrote his friend Bertrand Russell that he had "never been able to find in any man's book or any man's talk anything convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world...

...He fought with Phil Sheridan, and through the patronage of Sheridan he rose...

...While Sheridan is always cool, Custer was always aflame...

...In a tight situation," Connell notes, "his response was instantaneous and predictable: he charged...

...throughout this long study-as, for example, on page 106 when he pauses, as it were, in his chronicle to place the actor in cameo relief: Even now, after a hundred years, his name alone will start an argument...

...he reacted as instinctively as a Miura fighting bull...

...Had some of the 220 or so officers and enlisted men who accompanied Custer on his wild mission lived to tell tales about just what happened on that blazing hot Sunday afternoon, our interest would doubtless be less than it is and has been...

...That is to say, he has accounted for that landmark event insofar as an accounting can be made without stepping outside the bounds of evidence and entering the domain of conjecture...

...Connell does not make the romantic (or sentimental) mistake of depicting the Indians as noble savages...

...To be sure, the play (to maintain my image or figure a moment longer) has no moral whatsoever...

...But, as I say, it is less the character of Custer than it is the whole complex of Indian-Anglo relations that gives this book its special flavor...

...Reading this spellbinder of a book I was often reminded of Mark Twain's remark about "this damned human race"-to wit, his comment that the more he saw of men, the more they amused him and the more he pitied them...

...Why should he, of all people, cause us to take so much as a second look...

...Nor, on the other hand, does he gainsay the cupidity and deceit of the Anglos who sought to corral the Indians on reservations and thus deprive them of their way of life, and when efforts to that end failed endeavored simply to exterminate them...

...No matter how one explains Custer's renown, he seems to have been the pet and plaything of the ironic gods who chose to lodge him among us at a time and place so perfectly suited to his meager talent as to make him appear much larger than he was...

...Still, I am puzzled by the interest we take in George Armstrong Custer, a man who was certainly unfitted by nature to play the role of tragic hero...

...In fact, it is not so much Custer who fascinates as it is the mainly sordid enterprise in which he played a part...

...With few exceptions-Little Phil Sheridan was one-those who knew him best disliked him personally and doubted his ability as an officer...

...Given the many hints and clues, the shards of palpable evidence strewn about the site, and the human obsession for solving such riddles, it is little wonder that such an immense literature has grown up around the leading actors in the little drama...

...Moreover, he never learned from his mistakes, which were frequent...

...After all, he is a known entity and, aside from his physical appearance, not a very pleasing one at that...

...The two officers who were nearest him in his final years, Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, were much harsher in their assessments, but they detested the man and hence may have been less than objective in decrying the officer...

...Just so...

...in fact, he possessed little if any skill as a tactician...

...In an interview published in the New York Herald two weeks after Little Big Horn, an officer who knew him well explained his rise in plausible terms: "The truth about Custer is, that he was a pet soldier, who had risen not above his merit, but higher than men of equal merit...