Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn

Summary

On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer sat upon a ridge and looked through binoculars at an Indian encampment below; it was the largest such village anyone had ever seen, some 2,000 lodges and wickiups stretching out over several miles. Custer sent a messenger to one of his other two detachments with this note; “Come on. Big Village. Be quick. Bring packs.” It still seems like a vaudeville joke, but the messenger, who survived the day, said he actually heard Custer say “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them!”

And so Custer and about 220 men—five companies—of his famous 7th Cavalry rode down into the valley of the Little Bighorn River and into history.

But Son of the Morning Star is not just one more dreary reconstruction of Custer’s last stand. It is a panoramic sweep of the contemporary west with every detail sharply sketched in. The numbing tedium relived, marginally, by ant-fights and other exotic diversions; an eccentric cavalry Captain insisting on riding into battle with a wedding cake on his saddle bow; and the infinitely sad affair of a trooper and his “wife” uncovered in the cruelest way—these are just a few of the more bizarre visions in a weirdly tilted landscape across which, at any moment, Indians might come riding like the funnel of a tornado.