Symposium Will Take a Closer Look at Custer

George Armstrong Custer may have been the most famous loser in American history.

A shameless self-promoter, he was a genuine Civil War hero renowned long before he and some 200 of his men died at the Battle of the Little Big Horn 120 years ago.

Saturday the Autry Museum of Western Heritage will hold an ambitious symposium on Custer, the man and the myth, called “Inventing Custer.”

Among the high-profile participants will be Michael Blake, author of “Dances With Wolves” and a soon-to-be-released novel about Custer, “Marching to Valhalla,” and Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Water Sioux and the author of the 1969 bestseller “Custer Died for Your Sins.”

Historian Paul Andrew Hutton, whose expertise includes Custer’s treatment in the movies, and historian Shirley Leckie, an expert on how Custer’s widow, Libbie, made him into a legend, also will appear, as will half a dozen other authorities on Custer and the Sioux and other Native Americans who won the day. But Blake and Deloria alone should be worth the price of admission, if only because they have such different views of the man his Native American foes called Yellow Hair and Son of the Morning Star.

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At present, Blake is scripting a Custer epic to star Brad Pitt. Conventional wisdom is that the protagonist of that movie is bound to be more hero than villain, more like Errol Flynn’s charismatic Custer than the bumbling madman played by Richard Mulligan in “Little Big Man.”

Blake says he did not set out to rehabilitate the tarnished contemporary image of Custer in his novel, which Random House will publish in October.

“My whole intention in doing ‘Marching to Valhalla’ was to give Custer a voice,” Blake says. “It’s not an apology. My hope was to humanize him.”

Whatever else Custer was, he was very, very human. He seems to have been madly in love with his wife, although who knows if Libbie carefully choreographed that impression, as she did so much else in her role as maniacal keeper of the Custer flame. (There’s a wonderfully goofy love note Custer wrote to Libbie in the Autry’s current Custer exhibit that suggests he loved her enough to be decidedly silly with her.) But that didn’t keep his contemporaries from spreading rumors that both Custer and his brother had slept with the same Cheyenne woman, the daughter of a chief slain at Custer’s infamous raid on a Cheyenne village on the Washita River.

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Blake’s book is written in the first person, in Custer’s voice, as if the general, an inveterate scribbler, were keeping a casual journal in the months before he met his fate on the Little Big Horn. In Blake’s version, Custer was attracted to the beautiful young woman, did spend a night with her, but ultimately feels decidedly guilty about it.

“I don’t agree with Vine Deloria that he was the Eichmann of the Plains,” says Blake. In Blake’s view, Custer won his place in history by his valor at Gettysburg and in other Civil War battles. “He achieved some enormous successes at an incredibly young age. He did things beyond signing a $100-million contract to play basketball.”

In Blake’s analysis, Custer’s Civil War exploits helped make him the 19th century equivalent of a pop star and all but guaranteed that he would fall from grace, in the view of a public that hates failure and envies success. “America loves to build people up and then cut them down,” Blake says.

Pitt read “Marching to Valhalla” in manuscript and told Blake of his enthusiasm for the project. As to the casting of Pitt, Blake says “he’s right there in the ballpark.” But Pitt isn’t the perfect choice, in the writer’s view. “I think the person who was born to play Custer is Kevin Costner, but he’s a bit old for the part now,” Blake says. “Kevin has a certain zest for life that Custer had. Kevin has a certain ruthlessness in battle that Custer had, and I think Kevin has a sense of honor that Custer had, too.”

As to Custer’s behavior at the Washita battle, or massacre, there’s no doubt he led the attack on Chief Black Kettle’s village one freezing night in 1868, killing over 100 Cheyenne, most of them women, children and old people. But, Blake says, Custer himself “never butchered any women and children that I know of.” Blake points out that, despite the contemporary policy of total war against the Indians of the Plains, Custer took 53 women and children captive after that bloody fight.

When Vine Deloria Jr. is asked if he does indeed think Custer was the Eichmann of the Plains, he pauses not a nanosecond. “No question about it,” he says. Throughout the Indian Wars, the writer and Native American activist points out, virtually everything the military did violated one or another of the treaties between the tribes and the federal government. “The soldiers were not defending civilization,” he says. “They were crushing another society.”

In Deloria’s view, Custer established his bona fides as a psychopath by his frenzied assault on Jeb Stuart’s Confederates during the Battle of Gettysburg. Hellbent on glory, Custer showed cavalier disregard for his own men. “Soldiers were nothing to him, except tools,” Deloria says.

He believes that the scorched-earth policies of Sheridan and Sherman during the Civil War created monsters such as Custer. Such men “came out of the Civil War feeling that the only way to make war was to kill as many people as possible. . . . By the end of the Civil War, they didn’t think of their enemies as people at all.” In an odd way, Deloria says, Custer’s behavior on the Plains “was racially neutral.”

Deloria says he regularly comes in contact with apologists for Custer, who denigrate the Native American victory at the Little Big Horn as an ambush by a numerically superior force. “You’ve got a wide network of redneck history buffs who think every Indian victory was a massacre and every white victory was a battle, regardless of the situation.”

Deloria also pooh-poohs the notion that Custer faced 2,000 or more warriors in the field. Deloria puts the Native American force at “500 fighting men.” He reasons that the harsh Montana terrain could not support a larger number of warriors and that records kept by federal Indian agencies do not indicate the presence of thousands of young Native American men in the region. “You have to conclude that historians have conjured this up to make Custer look better,” he says.

Deloria says that the mutilating of bodies on battlefields where Plains tribes triumphed began after the infamous massacre of Sand Creek, where white soldiers set the precedent. He also says there is considerable evidence that many of Custer’s soldiers committed suicide at the Little Big Horn. Supporting that view: soldiers who were found shot to death with only a bullet casing or two nearby, suggesting they fired their guns a few times and then turned them on themselves.

For generations, whites had been taught to fear a fate worse than death if captured by Native Americans, through racist tracts beginning with the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, says Deloria. As a result, he says, many of Custer’s men were scared to death of the warriors in front of them and followed what had become an axiom of this racially charged war, “Keep the last bullet for yourself.”

Is this going to be a great symposium, or what?

DETAILS

* WHAT: Seminar “Inventing Custer” at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.

* WHERE: 4700 Western Heritage Way, in Griffith Park, across from the Los Angeles Zoo.

* WHEN: Saturday beginning at 9 a.m.

* HOW MUCH: $25.

* CALL: (213) 667-2000, Ext. 317. Reservations recommended.