Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn [Paperback]

Mr. Connell has brought his skills as a story-teller to this meticulously researched book, part biography of General Custer, part history of the Plains Indian Wars. Mr. Connell dwells on the rare human details historians often ignore: he tells of Crazy Horse on a pilgrimage to the burial scaffold of his infant daughter; Lt. Calhoun - who probably mounted the only organised defence at the Little Bighorn - carrying a cake into battle; Chief Gall listened to Mendelssohn's "Wedding March." Yet within the participants' common humanity lay a common savagery - Mr. Connell recalls the graffiti scribbled by a seventeenth-century French deserter in Illinois: "Nous sommes tous sauvages."

In this novel, Mr. Connell explores deeply the personalities of General Custer and other federal and Indian leaders. General Custer, seen by some as a hero, by others as the cause of the defeat, was an enigmatic and extravagant figure, fearless in battle and sentimental in repose. It is said that on first seeing through field glasses the more than four miles of allied Indian camps, he exclaimed, "Hurrah, boys, we've got them!" Disregarding a Cheyenne warning, General Custer rode to his death - and led to death every man of the Seventh Cavalry who followed him. A foolish miscalculation ended the life of the man Indian allies had named "Son of the Morning Star." The story is told that after the battle a squaw drove a sewing awl through his ear and into his skull so that he might hear better in the next world. Although the Indian forces won the battle on the field, in the greater context of their struggle to retain their land and culture in the face of westward expansion, the victory was a great defeat, followed by death, exile, humiliation, relentless pursuit, and betrayal, "Son of the Morning Star" recreates an era from the past that still haunts us.

As a matter of interest Republic Pictures Home Video produced a, 183 minute, video series titled "Son of the Morning Star" documenting Evan S. Connell's brilliant historical account of two great warriors, one final confrontation at the Battle at the Little Bighorn, for the American frontier.

This book must already be a classic of American, if not world literature. It is as original and as profoundly moving as 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' but it is not as biased. Connell maintains a well-judged neutrality throughout. He often cleverly distances himself from the whites by calling them by the Sioux term 'wasichu' and on one memorable occasion he views the advance of Custer's 7th through Indian eyes, depicting it as a charge by pink-faced men sporting long side-whiskers.

On the other hand, he does not endorse an unthinking, sentimental view of the Sioux. We should not accept their accounts of the battle as factual and free from untruth and exaggeration just because they are Indian. Neither should we fall into the uncritical view of Plains Indians as early ecologists with a mystical and consistently reverent relationship with the earth. The effect of a nomadic tribe passing through a region could be as devastating as a visit from a herd of African elephants, it seems, and Sioux hunters were almost as capable of killing buffalo for their tongues, or just for sport, as were the 'wasichu'.

Nowhere does Connell's fairness and respect for his subject emerge more clearly than when he is dealing with the main player on this immense stage -- Custer himself. One example will suffice, the episode when Custer rode off alone after game while ostensibly in pursuit of thousands of hostiles, as per his orders, culminating in his accidentally shooting his horse and stranding himself miles from his unit. Connell's description does actually allow for a sympathetic reading. Firstly, Custer knew that he had no chance of catching up with the Indians, who were on their home terrain, and secondly, a lesser horseman might have come unstuck from the fatally injured mount with a broken limb or worse. In going hunting, the hyperactive general may have been making the best of a pointless sortie; he never was one to waste his time, it seems. In other places, Connell is hard on Custer when he is perceived as deserving it, as in his habitual maltreatment of his men, but the final portrait is of a man whom one cannot pass over lightly.

Connell criticises the reports of one of the newspapermen who attempted to cover these events in the Black Hills, Kellogg, because 'There is no insight, nothing memorable, nothing sings in the mind.' Exactly the opposite can be said of Connell's prose. These characters, red and white, leap from the brooding Montana background and 'sing' in your mind long after the book is put aside. For this reason, I do not agree with the criticism of the lack of photographs in this edition: there are pictures aplenty to be found in lesser books that need to rely on them.

Larry McMurtry, in his 'Crazy Horse', says that Connell's book may concern itself with the massacre on the 'Greasy Grass' but it is also about the American character as it developed in the nineteenth, and, by implication, in the twentieth century. Sometimes this sub-text emerges into the open, as when Connell compares the attitude of the generals towards the tribes with the American military's approach to the Viet Cong a century later.

To sum up: if you only read one book about Custer and his exploits this has to be the one. The detail is meticulous, the judgments are both well-supported and cautious and the descriptions are worthy of an 'audacious novelist' as Connell has been described. Its 422 pages fly past and leave you demanding more. ------------- Keith Muscott