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

by Evan S. Connell

On a scorching June Sunday in 1876, thousands of Indian warriors - Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho - converged on a grassy ridge above the valley of Montana's Little Bighorn River. On the ridge five companies of United States cavalry - 262 soldiers, comprising officers and troopers - fought desperately but hopelessly. When the guns fell silent, no soldier - including their commanding officer, Lt Col. George Armstrong Custer - had survived.
Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history - 130 years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn.
Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as 'one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers', wrote what continues to be the most reliable - and compulsively readable - account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his research and novelist's eye for story and detail to re-create the heroism, foolishness and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, American History, War, Native American, Military History

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Evan Shelby Connell Jr. (August 17, 1924 – January 10, 2013) was a U.S. novelist, poet, and short-story writer. His writing covered a variety of genres, although he published most frequently in fiction.

In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."

Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell, Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann) to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941. He started undergraduate work at Dartmouth College but joined the Navy in 1943 and became a pilot. After the end of World War II, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. He never married, and lived and worked in Sausalito, California for decades.
(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Kate [Bighead] said... two [Cheyenne] women punctured [Lt. Col. George] Custer's eardrums with a sewing awl. They did this to improve his hearing because he had not been able to hear what he was told in Oklahoma seven years before. When he smoked a pipe with Medicine Arrow and Little Robe they told him that if he broke his promise and made war on the Cheyennes he would be killed. 'Through almost sixty years,' Kate signaled with her hands, 'many a time I have thought of Hi-es-tzie as the handsome man I saw in the South. And I have often wondered if, when I was riding among the dead where he was lying, my pony may have kicked dirt upon his body.’”
- Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star


When I first tried to read this book, it was at a very young age, when my grandpa lent it to me during a visit to his house. It seemed a natural fit for my tastes. I'd already been to the Little Big Horn (still called “Custer's Last Stand National Monument” at that time) after begging my parents to take me there, as though it was Disney World and not a National Battlefield in Montana. Beyond that, I had read the Landmark Book on George Armstrong Custer's death and watched Errol Flynn die with his boots on. I was already a Custer-phile, taken with the idea of a man dying on a hill, surrounded by his enemies.

That didn't prepare me for novelist Evan S. Connell's nonfiction take on George A. Custer’s famous final battle, an encounter that has become synonymous with doomed decision making.

The problem was that when I first cracked these covers, I had not yet been introduced to the non-linear narrative. And this is certainly non-linear. It starts with Lieutenant James Bradley coming upon three Crow scouts. Unknown to Bradley, they have escaped Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn. They are scared. Across a river – they would not cross – they told Bradley about a disaster of great magnitude.

This is one helluva way to start a book. It is, in fact, an excellent hook. At the time, however, my untrained mind could not handle anything but a straight-forward chronology. I gave up after a couple pages, unable to handle concepts such as prologues or flashbacks. Thankfully, I picked this up in later years, after my mind grew – like the Grinch's on Mount Crumpit – at least two sizes. Indeed, I've picked it up a few times since then. This is one of the few books I've ever read cover-to-cover more than once.

It is that good.

A lot of good historians have tackled Custer. Reliable, thorough historians who have no axe to grind. Well, sometimes they have axes to grind. Nonetheless, Custer has been covered by many a dogged chronicler, from Stephen Ambrose (who should be avoided) to James Donovan and Nathaniel Philbrick (both excellent popular historians), people willing to chase down every scrap of an interview and every cartridge left on the field. The problem with their output, however, is that it doesn't necessarily comprise great literature. Even Donovan and Philbrick are more workmanlike than master wordsmiths.

Thus, Connell brings something entirely different to the Custer genre: style.

Son of the Morning Star is an aesthetic marvel. At times it can feel like a dendritic disaster, one digression leading to another, and then to another, and then another, until the book is chasing its own tail. Really, though, its structure is amazing, thoughtful, and composed for maximum effect. In other words, it's really, really readable, and enjoyably so. It is an artful collage of history, biography, and narrative that manages to tie together the strands of Custer's life, the lives of the American Indians, the Indian Wars, and the famous last stand in Montana on June 26, 1876. There is simply an abundance of story here, told masterfully.

Because of its resemblance to a mosaic, an overall picture of Custer's last stand is hard to come by solely by reading Son of the Morning Star. Connell never reaches a point in the book where he says: this happened, then this, then this, and then they were dead. Instead, discussions about certain aspects of the battle are surrounded by apparently unconnected bits of trivia. For instance, there is this paragraph, on the mysterious demise of the Gray Horse Company (E Troop), whose men were allegedly found in a deep ravine:

The hillside above this gully is irregular, spotted with small cactus and sage, and nothing suggests that the slope was forested a century ago. Which is to say, if the cavalrymen did lose their horses at this point they must have felt helplessly exposed and rushed toward the one place that might protect them. Yet the moment they skidded into the gully they were trapped. All they could do was hug the sides or crouch among the bushes, look fearfully upward, and wait. A few tried to scramble up the south wall because the earth showed boot marks and furrows probably gouged by their fingers, but none of these tracks reached the surface.

The sentence following this paragraph says that a Hunkpapa named Iron Hawk shot an arrow into one of these soldiers. The sentence after that launches into a bit about how Plains Indians "could put an arrow entirely through a buffalo." This leads to an extended riff on the bow-and-arrow as a weapon (its power, its range, its accuracy).

This is how the book is structured, and if you don't like this description, you won't like this book. In a way, it feels on first reading almost improvisational, as though a particularly unfunny comic gets up in a nightclub and starts riffing about Custer and Crazy Horse and the rest. In reality, a great deal of care is placed into the arrangement of these snippets. And it works. I hesitate to call it this, but Son of the Morning Star is a Custer mood piece.

Clearly, Connell did a ton of research on this book, and he uses both white and Indian sources. However, frustratingly, there are no endnotes. The analysis is also lacking, or rather, it is a bit on the facile side. For example, Connell will quote an Indian for the purpose of showing the battle lasted a very short time. However, this conclusion will be based on that one Indian source, shorn of important context such as where this Indian was, what part of the battle he was talking about, etc.

Connell is also fairly credulous when it comes to some of his sources, and he presents a number of unreliable witnesses as airtight. You see this with his treatment of Kate Bighead (quoted at the top), who passed on many of the myths surrounding the Little Big Horn. While a great raconteur, she is not always to be believed. An example of this is her indelible portrait of the desecration of Custer's body, where Kate describes Cheyenne women puncturing Custer's eardrums with a sewing awl because he hadn't listened to their warnings not to fight them. Kate likely came up with this story because Custer was found with blood coming from his ears. This blood, though, was likely not the result of a sewing awl, but rather the bullet through Custer's head (the ballistic echo of a bullet in the skull oftentimes ruptures the victim's eardrums).

Of course, Kate's story is incredible drama. And Connell is too good a dramatist to pass it up.

This is not a book for ten year-olds, which is when I first tried (and failed) to read it. That got me to thinking whether I would recommend it to people who weren't already interested in the Custer saga. This is kind of a deep cut, and with its fractured framework, I initially thought this might be a hard sell to Custer newcomers.

But I don't think that's right. This is such dazzling writing that it should appeal to anyone who appreciates history done with passion. This is a breathless tale, artfully told. It’s a book that rewards you after you put it down, when you realize that all the jigsaw pieces have formed an unforgettable picture.

[Kiekiat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a delightful book and my introduction to Custer, the Indian Wars and the customs, folkways and mores of both the US Cavalry of the mid-19th Century and various Native American tribes. "Son of the Morning Star" is not an easy book to read for a linear thinker like me. It is by no means a chronological biography of General Custer leading up to his controversial and ignominious end at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June of 1876.

Instead, it is a veritable treasure trove of vignettes about Custer and his wife Elizabeth, various plains Indian tribes and US military life. Connell also does not attempt to arrive at any truths or judgments. He often recounts an alleged event giving the opinions of various historians, supposed observers of the event and sometimes will weigh in on which person's version seems most likely to be accurate.

Having never read anything about Custer, this book sparked my interest and I plan on reading a few other works such as Nathaniel Philbrook's more conventional history, "The Last Stand" and Douglas C. Jones's "The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer," a sort of alternate history using the assumption that Custer survived the battle and was court-martialed for disobeying his commander's orders (which might have happened in real life had Custer somehow managed to survive.

Normally I would scrap such a meandering hodgepodge of a book, but Connell is such a magnificent writer that the book captivated me from the beginning. I don't think I will ever become a Custer fanatic, but this is one of those books where I can say I felt enriched by reading it. I'll admit I've been in a torpor since the pandemic began and my reading has suffered. I haven't wanted to tackle any long, complicated works and it took me almost three weeks to finish "Son of the Morning Star."

A little background information for readers who are not familiar with Custer or the opening of the American West and conquest of much land formerly belonging to Mexico, our Southern neighbor, because it was our destiny as determined by our Christian God. General George Armstrong Custer is part of the American myth, a larger-than-life figure who, perhaps, represents a composite of the variegated forces that shaped this country--forces both malign and noble, with both features often intermingled.

Forgive me if I'm speaking of things you know far better than I. I've met people in faraway lands who knew more about my home state than I do, and much more American history.

Basically, America expanded from east to west and there was a notion among many people that it was our "manifest destiny" to occupy all of the land stretching from the East Coast to the West. That is, it was God's will that we possess these lands, though God had checked us in the War of 1812 when we set our sights on acquiring Canada. However, there were impediments to be surmounted. First, a lot of the Western lands were the property of Mexico and Great Britain owned the "Oregon Territory" in the Pacific Northwest. Second, there was internecine strife re: expansion because of slavery. Those opposing slavery were concerned that new lands not be made into "slave states." Third, the Western part of America was populated by vicious savages (i.e., Native Americans) who preyed on settlers and good Americans heading west seeking better lives. We had already subdued these savages in the Eastern United States with smallpox, firearms and the creation of a special territory where the savages could live in peace and harmony, creatively called, "Indian Territory." Our 7th President Andrew Jackson, aka "Old Hickory" had done a good job forcing the Eastern savages on a long march to their new Valhalla.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_o...

It was James K. Polk, our 11th President, though, who did the most to fulfill God's will and acquire the land that was rightfully ours. Here's a little song about him that explains how he fulfilled our "manifest destiny."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTiC...

(If this link doesn't work, just do a Youtube search for the song, "James K. Polk" by the group "They Might be Giants.")

Part 2:

President Polk, a protégé of Andrew Jackson, was often called, "Young Hickory" (as the TMBG song indicates) due to his intention to follow the agenda of "Old Hickory"--to wit, corralling the Indian savages. Polk has risen and fallen in the rankings of US Presidents by political historians, but it is uncontested that he set four goals and accomplished them all. Those goals germane to this review include acquiring the lands of the Southwest from Mexico and purchasing the Oregon territory from Great Britain, both of which he accomplished.

Polk set in motion the need to right the wrongs of the Mexicans, who had committed the egregious offense of EXISTING and occupying at least some of the vast land mass comprising the American Southwest and the state of California. He offended Mexico in 1846 by annexing the territory that now comprises the state of Texas, a small area of 268,000 square miles (695,662 sq. km).

Mexico had only achieved independence from Spain in 1821 and was a much poorer country than the United States. Likewise, its northern regions were routinely plundered by the aforementioned Indian savages.

The Mexicans seemed unduly chaffed at the annexation of this tiny portion of land and President Polk followed up by stationing troops along the Mexican border (such as it was). Additionally, in a spirit of fairness, the United States had offered a whopping 25 million US dollars (830,500,000 in today's dollars) but the Mexicans, strangely feeling hostility at US encroachment, refused our generous offer.

I am not sure if President James K. Polk was a religious man, but he WAS a strong believer in manifest destiny, a concept similar to the notion of "American exceptionalism," a doctrine strongly advocated by Fox News intellectual Sean Hannity. Manifest destiny was a contested concept even in its time, but, like "American exceptionalism," it had powerful and wealthy advocates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifes...

Mexico's inscrutable adherence to the concept of honor, defying God's Will for America, led them to foolishly defend their nation rather than to capitulate and accept our generous terms for their arid, useless land. The war lasted several years and was something of a rout for the Americans, unsurprising since they were fighting under the aegis of the Supreme Creator of the universe, much as the ancient Israelites obeyed God's command to invade and subdue the ancient Canaanites both as an admonishment and an appropriation of a portion of their lands.

https://bibleproject.com/blog/why-did...#!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican...

Slavery still remained and was undoubtedly the most divisive and contentious issue in the US. The US North was comprised of "free" states while all of the states in the US South were "slave" states. The issue of slavery was complex and seemed unsolvable, though politicians finally arrived at a concept called "Popular Sovereignty," which asserted that it was the right of the voters in each new state in our expanding nation to decide whether the nascent state would be slave or free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular...

The nation was so divided over the issue, though, that it led to America's Civil War, a war that is claimed, even by some historians, to have been a war about "state's rights," but was, in reality, a war about the issue of slavery. (see link below)

https://www.owleyes.org/text/house-di...

The US Civil War marked the entry of George Armstrong Custer onto the American scene. Custer quickly rose in the ranks due to a combination of bravery and self-promotion. He was a cavalry officer whose outstanding ability led to his promotion to Brevet Brigadier General at the tender age of 23. As Goodreads member Lisa notes below, Custer was an arrogant man, cocksure, and given to outlandish adornments to his military costumes and in his civilian dress. He was a dandy who would have been labeled as a "popinjay," a word that has sadly passed from modern English usage but which denoted "a vain or conceited person, especially one who dresses or behaves extravagantly." (Oxford English Dictionary) Directly below is a link written by people far better educated than myself chronicling Custer's Civil War exploits. The takeaway from Custer's Civil War service is that his exploits in the conflict propelled him into the national spotlight, a fame he did not shy away from, and was the beginning of the Custer mythos as American hero.

https://www.thoughtco.com/george-arms...

Thus remained the problem of the pestiferous savages inhabiting the lands "acquired" from Mexico, along with other parts of the American West which God, in His inscrutable handiwork, had apportioned to the American people (excepting the pestiferous savages). The savages continued their vicious attacks on restless US settlers headed West. Many Americans had immigrated to our shores from European countries where the opportunity to own land was nonexistent. It was apparent to the powers that be that the United States would never achieve its manifest destiny until the warring savages were exterminated and the more peaceful ones contained in lands designated for them by the US government. Enter again Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, cavalry commander still called "General" by his men. He led a division of the US 7th Cavalry.

For an unbiased look at our righteous "Indian Wars," I recommend this link provided by the United States Army:

https://history.army.mil/html/referen...

Custer was a complex man and Evan Connell does a superb job letting the reader know that. Custer was extremely fond of animals, for example, and routinely traveled with much-loved dogs and even had a pet porcupine that shared his bed (along with his wife Elizabeth). Yet he could also display brutal callousness toward animals and once shot a majestic crane just to measure its wingspan. Custer had a happy marriage and clearly loved his wife, yet was reputed to have carried on many affairs with Native American ladies and prostitutes who often accompanied military divisions as "sisters of mercy," to borrow the title of a Leonard Cohen song. Custer seems to have been a personality either loved or hated by his fellow soldiers, respected by many for his bravery and self-confidence. Others felt he was reckless and haughty. The constants in Custer's complex life seemed to be his devotion to his wife and family, his need for fame and acclaim, a propensity for flaunting authority, whether it be army regulations or direct orders from his superiors. It seems fairly clear that Custer had set his sites on becoming President of the United States, a sure sign of mental imbalance, and hoped his fame from the books he authored, coupled with his national prominence from the Civil War and the Indian Wars, would catapult him to the nation's highest office.

We all know the outcome of Custer's dream, and I think it's fitting, albeit sententious, to bid Custer adieu with the words of Matsuo Basho from his "Oku No Hosomichi," a poem written during his final journey as he happened upon a great battlefield of the past:

The summer grasses—
For many brave warriors
The aftermath of dreams.

(trans. Donald Keene)

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dominant impression I get of Custer from this, the first book I’ve read about the “national totem” who “stands forever on that dusty Montana slope,” is that of a real natural born killer. One of those gracefully ferocious, lupine men. The accounts of his preternatural energy and aggression and extracts of his own letters cohere into a picture of predatory grace, of sleek, elemental blood-thirst and glory-hunger. Custer was eerily in touch with his nature—-the nature of a gleeful hunter. Connell quotes the letter to his sister in which Custer describes killing his first man—a patrician Confederate officer whose Spanish broadsword and fine saddle he took as trophies—and reading it one feels the thrilling discovery of his inevitable vocation. From him I feel a superb animality, a sportive savagery.

Frederick Van de Water discerned a “precocious ruthlessness” in Custer’s harsh cheekbones and raptorial profile. No flexibility, no hint of contemplative nature. This is the face of the archetypal swordsman, with deep-laired challenging eyes above a rapaciously curved nose.

Custer made his name in the Civil War, at 23 becoming the youngest American to make general. But even among the dinosaurs that ran the Army of the Potomac in its first years, Custer was a total throwback. If McClellan was trying to be Napoleon, Custer behaved like an ancient Nordic berserker. His only tactic was to charge the enemy and slash or club or shoot him. And he was always fatalistically in front, glancing back excited during charges, he writes in another letter, to admire the gleaming massed sabers of the cavalrymen following his lead. Impetuous, fatalistic, unignorably flamboyant. Connell writes: “Wherever he met the enemy he advanced like a fighting cock.” His primitiveness also showed sartorially. Not for him the same-coated standardization of a modern army, he ornamented himself with finery, chance and tailored, and with the trophies of killed Confederates:

He began to wear a tightly fitted hussar jacket, gold lace on his pants, and rebel boots. One staff member likened him to a circus rider. Fought recalled him wearing a dark blue sailor shirt that he got from a gunboat on the James, a bright red tie, a velveteen jacket with gold loops on the sleeve, and a Confederate hat.

Like a circus rider. He wanted to be seen. Think of a pro wrestler. His conception of warfare was boisterous and self-glorifying. As Connell adds: “the impression he gave of himself, somewhat deliberately, was that of a preposterous figure—which he was, and which he was not. Behind the pranks and the outrageous costume ride a killer.” And he was like this through and through. The regimental band played his personal theme song, “Garry Owen,” also the official drinking song of England’s 5th Royal Lancers, to sound the charge. He learned taxidermy so as to mount and preserve the exotic trophies he began to hunt once he went west to fight Indians. They tell of him stuffing an antelope or a giant elk or a grizzly during the night, as the rest of his regiment slept off an exhausting day on the march. His brother Tom, part of a small circle of relations and sycophants who insulated Custer from the hatred and distrust he in inspired in most of the men under his command, liked to catch snakes on the march and ride with them coiled around his arm, much to the displeasure of his nervous mount. They were boys on an adventure. Custer was always adding to a huge menagerie of “wild and half-wild things” that included a wildcat, a pelican, a porcupine, and an entourage of fearsome staghounds that accompanied him everywhere he went during the last decade of so of his life. One was named for Lord Byron, another for Blucher, the Prussian Field Marshall who helped defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. While Custer was stationed in Kentucky, locals raised complaints because packs of these hounds tore apart their dogs, cats, and even their livestock. His wife reports that they so thickly surrounded her husband that she was fortunate if she secured a place in the marital bed.

After the Civil War, Benito Juarez offered Custer $16,000 in gold if he would be accept the title “Major General of the Caballeros” and lead a mercenary force to expel the French from Mexico. As Custer’s first ancestor to America was a Helmut Koster, one of the Hessian mercenaries Britain hired to fight the revolting colonists, a career as a soldier of fortune would have been fittingly lineal. However, Custer was denied leave to take this job, and was sent west. The frontier seems to have been a bouquet of exciting new scents for this inquisitive hound. A new enemy to kill, new game to hunt, new landscapes to romp about in.

Despite America’s relative youth, despite the mere one hundred and twenty five years that separate me from the Little Big Horn, Custer and his wife (who would live all the way to 1933) are people I find terribly difficult to adequately imagine, let alone fully comprehend. America may be a young nation, but the frequency of its cultural upheavals means that great chasms separate the generations. George and “Libbie” Custer were final specimens of the American cultural colonial mind. Their intellectual furnishings were derived entirely from Europe, specifically Romantic poetry and its swashbuckling and sentimental prose offspring. James Fenimore Cooper is about as indigenous as they get. Connell’s extracts from their correspondence and the books both wrote—-Custer’s My Life on the Plains and the widowed Libby’s three volumes of hagiography—-shows us people who believed in cavaliers and damsels, who framed the frontier as an arena for their fantasies of chivalry and romance. These people inhabited books in a way that Americans of 2009 simply cannot.

Henry James, after Turgenev introduced him to a circle of cultivated Russians resident in Paris, observed that people from culturally peripheral lands are especially capable of burrowing into, living within all European culture; later, James would say much the same thing about Americans. Russians in the wake of Peter the Great learned to become Europeans by absorbing the sentimental standards and conduct to be found in contemporary European literature. Custer and his American contemporaries were no different. Like some Pushkin character, Custer fashioned his self-concept and public persona, his "statue" as Cioran would call it, out of Sir Walter Scott novels, Byron’s early oriental tales, and the martial lore of the Napoleonic era. Henry James is relevant also because he was nearly an exact contemporary of Custer (1839 and 1842), and like Custer the ideals of manly accomplishment he imbibed as an American boy in the 1840s are similarly Romantic and Napoleonic, however different the figures they cut in American history. Napoleon, Fred Kaplan writes, was always a lodestar for James. One of the weirdest episodes of James’s life is the deathbed delirium in which he dictated letters to family in the voice of Napoleon, addressing his relatives as members of the Bonaparte clan.

I like that Connell is so attentive the rhetoric of history’s actors and witnesses. He’s always interrogating the prose styles of diaries, letters, captivity narratives, oral histories, newspaper editorials and government reports for clues to what the writers may have overemphasized or distorted or entirely overlooked. He particularly values the diary of a rustic Private Coleman, whose unpunctuated Faulknerian run-ons abound with misspellings and horrifyingly eloquent images. Custer himself is an unnervingly good writer. In our strange version of humanism, we tend to think the natural born killer incapable of cultured articulation, of the cunning literary deployment of the ego. He was no intellectual, but back then you didn’t have to be one to command a vivid style. I’m excited to read My Life on the Plains, and the pseudonymous articles Custer wrote for Turf, Field and Farm, for what they might reveal about his self-fashioning as an intrepid warrior-explorer-outdoorsman (this rugged persona was to make quite an impression on Teddy Roosevelt, who would later call Custer “a shining light to all the youth of America”). I’m also curious about the degree of divergence between his Romantic personal myth and the squalor of his frontier slaughters. One of the blurbs on the back of my copy of this book calls it “the story of General George Armstrong Custer as Flaubert would have written it”—-a remark I didn’t quite understand until I realized that Connell and Flaubert are both anatomists of the affected exoticism and escapist rhetoric that are legacies of Romanticism. Custer could be a counterpart to Emma Bovary, both of them raised on sentimental fiction, both carrying Romantic literary myth into collision with an unaccommodating reality. Emma dies laughing. Private Coleman, on the battlefield days after, says Custer’s corpse looked as if he “died with a smile on his face.”

Son of the Morning Star is one of those revelatory works we get when an intuitive imaginative writer (Connell is primarily a novelist) takes up historical narrative. William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain and the Billy the Kid chapter of Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy also enstrange our most familiar lore. Connell quarries his prose from Anglo-American modernism. It made me think of Eliot, Pound, Williams. Connell’s paragraphs are like little poems, spare, sinewy, oblique, each short sentence stripped down to the irreducibly spooky image or fact. Connell arranges extracts from primary sources into collages that feel so vivid. Constant digression is another of Connell’s techniques—he’s always showing the reader the how one thing is connected to another, how a multitude of stories join and mesh at any given point. For instance, Connell is talking about the progress of one of the three US Army columns slowly converging on Sitting Bull’s camp in Montana (Custer's 7th Cavalry was the spearhead of one of those columns, but he raced ahead to the Little Big Horn, attacked alone, and was, as we know, smeared against the hillside): the troops come across an Indian grave, a warrior wound in the blanket and set high on a post. The soldiers take down the bundle, unwrap it and examine the items coiled in with the desiccated corpse. One is an eleven-year-old letter from a white settler woman, Fanny Kelly, a captive of the dead warrior’s band. She had been abducted from a wagon train and had taken every opportunity to seed their path with little messages identifying herself and telling how she might be found and ransomed. From there Connell takes up her story for a couple of pages. And later he braids her story back into the main narrative, using her notes and the captivity narrative she wrote after being freed to illustrate the plight of another captive settler woman who Custer failed to rescue. It is a testament to Connell’s architectonic skill that these digressions deepen and enrich his narrative rather than sidetrack it.

Connell’s collages and digressions are perfectly suited to taking us back there. No other book on American history has made me feel so transported. Connell is so good at rendering the pressure of events and public ideas on people’s lives. In 2009 the issues in the air, the policy debates and decisions that will define America’s future are things like health care, Afghanistan, recession-recovery. In 1876 one of the big questions was whether the government should get behind public opinion and finally wipe out the Indians still refusing the give up their land and way of life. This book can be so scary because Connell—what with his collages of newspaper editorials that openly advocate genocide and tales of festive exhibitions of Indian scalps at public theaters—is good at recreating that American moment, when Indians, settlers and soldiers were busy scalping, shooting, stabbing, skinning, bludgeoning, raping and mutilating each other up and down the Great Plains. As Sitting Bull, in Canadian refuge, later said of the United States, “the country there is poisoned with blood.” America can be fratricidal, and wolfish to intimates. Just as the paradoxical Jefferson coined “all men are created equal” while not only owning slaves, but maintaining a household of bastards he fathered on a slavegirl, owning his children as chattel; just as America’s bloodiest war was its civil one; so too is Custer intimately bound up with the peoples who according to myth—myth both pro- and con, the Victorian myth of Custer as a white martyr AND the later myth of him as the uncomplicated cartoonish embodiment of white rapacity—stand as his opposite and enemy. For one, the boldness, boisterous singularity, and contempt for death that mark Custer’s pre-modern warrior style bring him closer to his Native American counterparts than to any kind of officer West Point would have wanted to produce. And even more deeply: Oklahoma, 1868: Custer’s 7th destroyed a sleeping Cheyenne village in a predawn ambush, and after the battle/massacre he took for his concubine one of the village’s teenage girls, Me-o-tzi (“the young grass that shoots in the spring”). She might have had his child in January 1869. She might have given him and his brother Tom venereal disease. She is said by Kate Bighead, a Cheyenne woman interviewed in 1927, to have considered herself Custer’s wife, to have rejected offers of marriage after Custer left her, and to have gashed her legs and cut her hair—traditional Native American mourning-widowhood gestures—when she heard of his death; also, the Cheyenne were proud that one of their own was associated with such a “handsome” warrior, and Kate herself, like many other girls, nursed a crush on the man the Cheyenne called “Long Hair,” and, after the 1868 ambush, “Creeping Panther.” Connell ends the book with the question of why Custer’s body was not mutilated like those of the other soldiers at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. To this Kate Bighead testifies. She was among the Cheyenne women picking over the dead soldiers after the battle. While they were contemplating Custer’s corpse a group of Sioux warriors rode up and said they wanted to cut him apart, but the Cheyenne women told them not to, because Custer was their relative.

Oh, and another thing. Custer planned to run for president. He told a group of his Crow allies that after winning great victories over the Sioux and Cheyenne he would return to Washington and there “be made the Great White Father,” as the Indians called the President of the United States. Connell mentions the rumor that Custer plunged so rapidly ahead of the other columns on the Little Big Horn campaign because word of his quick sole victory could be telegraphed to St. Louis, where the Democrats were to hold their convention and where they would soon start nominating candidates for the 1876 presidential election. Libbie Custer would certainly have made a great political wife. According to Capt. Benteen, she was as cold-blooded as Custer and as wholeheartedly convinced as he of his personal greatness and huge destiny. Shortly after their 1864 marriage, Libbie was introduced to Abraham Lincoln, who told her that he hoped Custer would make fewer suicidal charges, now that he had a wife. Libbie said she hoped he would charge more, to which Lincoln replied: “Oh then you want to be a widow, I see,” and laughed. Benteen writes that she pragmatically overlooked Custer’s numerous affairs, not just with Indian women but also with their black cook, Eliza (the three of them once took a studio photograph together. Google it). President Custer, striding into the White House with his bodyguard of half-domesticated wolves, trailing black and Indian concubines—-the mind reels.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Son Of The Morning Star

Recent contrasting highly perceptive reviews of Evan S. Connell's "Son of the Morning Star" (1984) prompted me to read the book. Connell's book is difficult to classify because it is a broad meditation on Custer, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and the American West. The book is too digressive, introspective, and meditative to be considered a historical narrative. The description of the event at the focus of the book -- the massacre of Custer's Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn -- on June 25, 1876, is hazy indeed. Connell largely talks around the famous battle. The book lacks an index to allow the reader to track the specifics of the discussion and to return easily to particular topics --- and I think this is deliberate rather than an oversight.

Apart from this book, Connell is most famous as the author of the novel "Mrs. Bridge" (1959) which I read many years ago. In understated, eloquent writing, Connell's novel tells the story of an upper middle-class American family with its characters limited in their outlook on life, overly cautious, lonely, unfulfilled, bored, and sexually frustrated. The subject of Connell's history could not be more different than that of his novel. Whatever else it may be, in Connell's West we have vigorous, passionate, free-wheeling, and romantic individuals, both Indian and non-Indian. At one point, a character in the history remarks in impeccable French to the effect that "here we are all savages." The West is a large-scale world of passion and action. Describing its excesses, brutality, cruelty, and stupidity, Connell seems to me a romantic, preferring the vigor and eccentricities of these days and people to the quiet conformity of the Bridges. The title of the book, "Son of the Morning Star" bears comparison with the prosaic title "Mrs. Bridge". The Indians bestowed this poetic nickname on Custer. He was a man of notoriety during his short life and of many nicknames, including "Long Hair" or "Yellow Hair" and the cruder sobriquet, "Iron Butt".

Literary works are made by style. Connell's organization of his material and his apparent prolixity can create a sense of frustration and disjointedness in reading; but it makes his tale. Without an introduction or other preliminaries, Connell begins in the middle of his story with the fate of Custer's subordinates, Reno and Benteen, at Little Big Horn. Custer's own fate is indirectly described, through their eyes. The author presupposes, as he may for this event, that the reader already knows the outlines of the famous story. The book then flits forward in time to discuss Reno's subsequent Court of Inquiry over his role in Little Bighorn and the lives of both these characters in the story. Then, Connell leaves Little Bighorn to move back in time to the early days of settlement. We get an introductory overview of Custer's early life, his West Point days, his Civil War service, his courtship, and then the book moves on to other things.

In the process, Connell offers portraits of many participants in Little Bighorn. There are innumerable digressions. Connell picks up a character or event and cannot let it go. The reader learns a great deal and also sees the conflicting evidence and the many different ways of understanding a historical situation. The book does not work as a narrative that tells a coherent story from beginning to end with a perspective that the author outlines for his reader in advance to ease the way. Instead Connell offers a circular account, that shifts focus and time frames and that remains as obscure as does Little Bighorn itself, for all the iconic and legendary character it has assumed. As the book progresses, we get a history of Custer's life in pieces, as well as the of the conflict that led to Little Bighorn and its aftermath. I described Connell as a romantic above for the passion he brings to his story and for the life of adventure, risk-taking and feeling that he obviously treasures. But he does not romanticize characters and events. Gruesomeness, wantonness, death, and human pettiness pervade his account.

Besides its digressive character, Connell's writing is also understated and subdued. His writing is unobtrusive and allows the events and characters he portrays to be shown in their complexity. The book is difficult because it is history, a book about the history of a history, and a personal reflection. More than on Little Bighorn or on the West, Connell shows the reader how perspectives on Custer and on the Battle have changed with time, especially as reflected in art and literature. Many passages of the book explore his own attitude towards Custer and his other protagonists. As battles go, Little Bighorn was small. Custer himself could fairly be regarded as a minor figure rather than as the stuff of legend. Connell shows why Custer, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the many other characters in his book matter.

"Son of the Morning Star" is not the work to read for a basic history. But it is a work of art and a meditation on the American experience.

Robin Friedman

[Jill Hutchinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating take on the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It pretty much strips Custer of his hero status......history had made him a doomed warrior standing alone against a vicious foe when in fact, the truth is somewhat at odds with that perception. This book has been questioned as to its historic veracity but I found it to be gripping and well researched. The "Last Stand", romanticized in the same manner as the Charge of the Light Brigade, will always be open to conjecture but this is a ripping good read no matter how the reader feels about the subject. Highly recommended.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really enjoyed this book, despite that the beginning gave me trouble. At the start I was confused. I chose this book over Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles because Connell’s book was said to be well researched and told both with historical accuracy and with passion. All turned out to be true. Also, having read the author before, I knew I liked Connell’s manner of writing. Authors have a unique writing style which you come to recognize and appreciate, if good.

This is a book of non-fiction about the Battle of Little Big Horn / Custer’s Last Stand / Battle of the Greasy Grass. The battle goes by all three names. General George Armstrong Custer, leading the Seventh Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army, faced the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes on June 25–26, 1876, in Montana. He and the American troops were defeated. Much said of this battle is incorrect. Connell goes far in uncovering what is and is not true.

Secondly, the book provides an in-depth portrait of General Custer. We learn of his wife and liaisons with Native American women. Biographical portraits are drawn of the battle’s other participants too, such as Major Marcus Reno, Captain Frederick Benteen, and chiefs Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Rain-In-the-Face.

Thirdly, the book provides fascinating information about Native American nomenclature, beliefs traditions and ways.

The research is extensive. Truly impressive. An interview with the author concludes the audiobook. The author visited the battle fields numerous times. He searched all to be found archived in libraries and at museum sites. Solders’ diaries, Native American accounts and articles in the press were studied. Three and one half years of intensive study was devoted to the task. He does not merely present the facts but analyzes the validity of the statements made.

The book has a unique style. Some might say it is unorganized. It has no introduction nor a conclusion. It does not even have chapters. At the beginning I was terribly confused. I mistakenly drew the conclusion that what I was reading was an introductory, explanatory who-is-who chart of battle participants. This was not so. The book grew from essays on battle participants. These were then later collected, fused, amalgamated into one book. Peripheral character portraits are first drawn, only later does the focus zoom in on central figures. The flow from subject to subject is meandering, and yet at the same time, each subject leads naturally to the next. It feels as though the author is sitting by you, talking to you, chatting with you, telling you about a subject which enthuses him. The author’s extensive knowledge, delivered with dry wit and evident sarcasm pulls you in. That perceived as confusing at the beginning takes shape and form. What you ae being told becomes comprehensible and interesting. You want to know more and more and more. By the end, the flow has come to feel natural, interesting and delightful.

I will give you an example to illustrate what I have said. Two thirds through, the book focuses upon hair, the significance both Native Americans and Whites gave to it then, in the latter 1800s. The value, admiration and respect given to ti today is less. When Custer died a lock of his hair was given to his wife, just as a lock of his wife’s hair had long been treasured by him. Custer had long, golden, flowing locks. The theme then shifts to how Custer came to have such hair, which is to say his patrimony. From whom did he inherit such locks? It is at this point, far into the book, that we are told he had Dutch / German ancestors! We are told of his blue eyes and that Custer “modestly” proclaimed, “he had the eyes of an eagle”. Humor is threaded throughout. Discussion of his birth leads naturally to how he died and who saw him die. His death leads to what was written about Custer at his death. How he was eulogized and praised, glorified as a hero. We move form biographies written about him to poetry and paintings of him. Much of what is said about Custer is however not true. This is brought to the fore by the author through sarcasm and wit. So and so, “not always the most acute observer” has stated this and that which must be false since….. In one cited painting Native Americans are depicted as “Aztecs carrying Zulu shields”. At the battle, witnesses have testified to he skillful usage of sabers and yet this, as so much else is totally false. I have attempted to demonstrate how each subject flows naturally into the next, as well as the author’s abundant use of humor. I cannot think of another book written like this! All the way through I stayed curious, interested and amused. I certainly came to understand Custer’s essence, his personality and way of being.

Adrian Cronauer reads the audiobook. He reads clearly and at a good pace, only occasionally reading too quickly. The narration is not hard to follow. Being good, I have given the performance rating three stars.

This book is chockfull of interesting information. I love how the author debunks and critically analyzes the many errors that have been woven into the myth around Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn. I highly recommend this book for its wit and accurate content. I like its style.

********************


By Evan S. Connell

Mrs. Bridge 5 star
Mr. Bridge 4 stars

And if you want more about Custer:

Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an elaborate retrospection of the sanguinary battle of Little Big Horn.
Who is to be blamed for so many lost lives?

Connell focuses on General Custer, the battle’s hero (or – at least – former hero). Although worshipped by all survivors of the battle, he had been frequently accused of sacrificing too many US soldiers. In the interesting biographical account Connell mentions Custer’s wife, depicting her as “coldblooded enough to be a match for her husband”. Here, the author describes the general’s nature in an oblique manner, implying that, in his opinion, he is to be blamed for the many loses.

However, the author’s purpose is not to pronounce General Custer guilty. Making an in-depth analysis of the main characters’ courses of action, he shows us that there’s never a single guilty party.

I praise this book for paying attention to the Indian side of the matter. Connell examines their attitude towards the battle and the affect Little Big Horn has on their community.

Chief Rain-In-The-Face, who defeated Custer’s regiment, was an intriguing character, a symbol of Indian opposition to the whites.

Remarkably well-written, detailed, and supplied with a big collection of photos, this book is a must read.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Son of the Morning Star is one of the best books that I've ever read. It propelled me into reading more about American Indians, more about the West, more military biographies especially of American generals, and even the Civil War. Connell is a great writer, as seen in, for example, both novels--Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. He made the character of the Indians real, as it should be, and Custer, whom I had not judged as harshly as I did after this book. I personally knew people in my limited military experience like him--impressive, impulsive, self-consumed, jealous, hard-headed, self-righteous, competitive (which some Americans tend to consider as a virtue to be manifest at all times) and for the most part, brave. He did have admirable qualities that could have made him a successful general, and Connell brings this out very convincingly. I could hardly put the book down and was saddened when I finished it.

[David Eppenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are a Custer/Little Bighorn fan then I cannot imagine a more significant book about this man and event than this one. This book is probably the most complete compendium of all things Custer and Little Bighorn that exists on the market. However, saying all this I must also say that I really didn't enjoy reading it. While the book is well written and beyond well researched the subject is not one that I am particularly interested in. In my reading of our 19th century Western history this man and his ending are mentioned frequently and this book is also frequently cited and mentioned so I thought I should read it. All of these references have formed a picture of this man as an arrogant and foolish man that got himself and all of the men with him killed. While it is true that this was a different time and a different sort of U.S. Army that valued men like this but he still had a responsibility to these men and he failed them. Further, the event itself while tragic in the extreme is historically significant only as a bad example. Little Bighorn neither furthered nor defeated any goal by either side of this conflict and whose historic significance is a mystery to me as well as to the the author of this book. Consequently, I began the reading of this book with something of a bias that this book did nothing to correct or mitigate.

As for the book itself initially let me warn the reader that it is not for the faint of heart. The author does not spare you the gruesome details of Indian warfare. In fact should you wish to pursue further reading of this period of our history do not do so unless you can stomach some pretty horrific behavior. Our history of interactions with Indians is not pleasant, there are no heroes on either side and there are no happy endings. This book is just another part of this unhappy and shameful history but it is very well done. In this book the author seems to have collected every bit of information ever recorded, published, spoken, whispered, exaggerated, fictionalized, or just plain lied about concerning Custer and the Last Stand. Then the author engages in the mind numbing task of filtering all this conflicting, illogical, nonsensical, and impossible information in an attempt to arrive at some semblance of truth. These attempts are some times hard to follow and the shifts in time between the event being described and the time the information is being reported makes for some difficult reading. The true Last Stand fan will probably not be bothered by this but the less than enthusiastic reader (me) may find their head bobbing a bit. Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading if not for the Last Stand history then for the revelations about Indian lore and history as well as the insight into life in the Army during this period of time.

[James Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once in a while you find a book that is so well written that beyond the days of reading, long after you have finished it, the book continues to haunt you. Son of the Morning Star is one of those books. The beauty of Evan Connell's prose and the excellence of his history make this book a minor masterpiece. Perhaps the larger-than-life presence of the central character, who the Indians named "son of the morning star", General George Armstrong Custer, is partly the reason for the magnificence of the book.

“Even now,” Evan Connell writes in his book, “after a hundred years, his name alone will start an argument. 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. He stands forever on that dusty Montana slope.”

His vigor and gallantry were never denied, even by his detractors, and during the Civil War he advanced rapidly; perhaps due to fortuitous notice, but nonetheless he was a brigadier at twenty-three, the youngest American ever to win a star. All of this was not due to merit, all though he did have that, but in spite of his mediocrity evidenced earlier by his poor record at West Point, having graduated last in his class. Overall, as Custer made his career in the Indian territories, it always seemed that he was overrated by others and, most of all, by himself.

Who knows the mind of Custer and the reasons that led to his demise at Little Big Horn. Maybe Evan S. Connell hits on the right one by thinking the most simply: Custer had never known defeat, perhaps couldn’t see it even when it was only one hilltop away. Few non-academic histories have been so well-written as this and have such compelling central themes that you can't put them down. Near-masterpiece is the best thing I can say when recommending this to anyone who enjoys reading a great book. It was simply a delight to read.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A disturbing Rashomon of a history. Despite the romantic choice of title, there is nothing romantic or heroic about the title personage, or in fact any person who appears in this history. Everyone’s story (and I mean everyone, from the water boys to the laundry women, to the wives and relatives of Chief Gall and Running Bear, with selected dogs, mice and horses thrown in for good measure)—
everyone’s story—is told, in no particular order, and everyone comes out badly (except for the animals). This includes not only the prideful, confused and egotistical American conquerors, messengers of fear and greed, by turns half drunk or brave, and the bloodthirsty press supporting them back on the home front, and not only the pursued and abused native Americans—a.k.a. aborigines—who lashed out at the soldiers and settlers with all the ruthless hatred they could muster, but also the author, whose careful research is occasionally marred by his abusive, hectoring tone, and his lack of interest in conventional narrative.

There are so many facts both sublime and mundane, so many versions of events (as many as there are witnesses) set forth in the author’s stream of consciousness approach that the reader comes out feeling both informed and yet uninformed—you have some facts, but more than one version of facts. And since the facts are told once, then, hours, or days of reading later, revisited by a different witness, it is difficult to feel a sense of certainty. What is left as certain are only the horrific abuses by both sides, each in their way justifiable if viewed in a particular context, but if viewed from this distance, it seems mostly just sad and frustrating. Even the author seems to become depressed at the blatant stupidity of it all:

“It is said that during the gestation of Remembrance of Things Past the author gradually became convinced of a frightening psychological truth: Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn by experience. Instead, they respond to a particular stimulus in a predictable way, and this repeatedly. Again, again, again, and again this undeviating, compulsive response may be observed. A brevet or a coffin. A yellow sash or six feet of Mexican soil. A grade or a grave. Again, again, again, and again, generation after generation, the dismal message reappears like writing on the wall.”

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It goes past the massacre (or great military victory, depending on your point of view) and delves into the personalities of the principal opponents involved in this fracas. Of course, eyewitness reports were only available from one side, but they seem objective enough. This might be the only book I've read three times.

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Many things are told of Sitting Bull. Some are certainly false, others may be true. But one thing is beyond dispute. Sitting Bull liked women. He liked women enormously. He was certainly married two or three times. He may have been married as many as eight or nine times. Here he is pictured with . . ."

I think it shows how memorable this book is that I not only remember all the characters, and the stories, I actually remember the captions on the pictures in the photo section of the book!

This is not just an incredible history of Custer's fight at Little Big Horn. It tells the story of the Sioux, the cavalry, the west, the propaganda machine back East, and how Americans deal with national honor, pride, defeat, and memory. Along the way there's also an unforgettable portrait of Custer as many things -- a hot-headed fool, a shrewd self-promoter, a ruthless military tyrant, and a surprisingly faithful and devoted husband, with a charming, intelligent and beautiful wife who willingly followed him into danger and also became his greatest champion after his death.

While the other reviewers are correct that the writing jumps back and forth, if you take the time to skim through you will find all kinds of incredible stories and fascinating information on every subject related to Custer's life and times. I can still remember the author explaining how Sioux chiefs got ready to sit down for a conference with the white man. First they kicked open an ant hill, so thousands of black ants came swarming out. Then they laid their best robes down over the ant hill, so the ants would swarm onto it and eat all the lice that had been gathering in their clothing for months. Then the chiefs just picked up the robes, shook off all the ants, and put the robes back on with no more lice!

This is the kind of book that makes history come alive.

[Colleen Browne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very readable book on the subject. Although the style of writing made reading it enjoyable, Connell sometimes skipped around in terms of subject and timeframe which didn't always make sense. I also thought the author could be rather flippant about people he didn't like or respect which brought his own professionalism into question. What I found most objectionable was his constant reference to Native women as squaws. Although I appreciate that there are differences of opinion as to whether the term squaw is objectionable or not, Connell's constant use of it makes it and the way he uses it makes it sound like a demeaning term. How about just referring to them as women? Finally, I have trouble crediting any book that is not documented. Footnoting would have added credibility to the book.
Being a native Montanan, I have visited the battlefield several times. I remember it before the memorial to the Natives killed at the battle and that addition made it a far superior site to visit than before when it glorified Custer and ignored the sacrifice of Native Americans. In the end I am still waiting for a history of the battle that has more credibility- although again, the writing was beautiful.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly Son of the Morning Star was only 2 Stars for me because I could not see any organization to the story. The book starts out on an ancillary fight and just meanders through decades of western history, as well as some Civil War stories. Individually, the anecdotes were fine but this book was simply erratically constructed.

[Jeff Dickison · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent history of Custer's Last Stand, that is well researched and extremely interesting. It feels like Connell gives information from almost every person who was involved in this event. Much of the information is contradictory and Connell lets you draw your own conclusions. It is almost like listening to gossip. Recommended to all and extremely recommended to Custer fans. My own feelings: Custer was an idiot trying to glorify himself.

[Connie Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote papers and gave speeches in my college history and philosophy classes. The very first time I visited the site, I was basically ignorant because I had not begun to study this battle. Luckily, I studied a great deal, and was able to come away with awe and to know exactly where what event took place and where.

This book is one of the main books I used in my studies. If you read about all that happened and viewed the maps, you will be in a very good position to truly see the scope of the situation. I absolutely recommend reading this book, being an ethnologist myself. It is very well thought out and presented in such a way that you almost believe you were a spectator there.

[Bob Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always been fascinated by Little Big Horn and fellow West Point grad, Custer.
He had an interesting military career; he commanded the unit with the highest casualty rate in the Civil War while also being the youngest General.
I never quite understood what happened at the Battle at the Greasy Grass, as the winners call it-- and shouldn't they get to name the battle?
It was the first trip my future wife and I ever took-- drove out there. The minute I stepped out and looked around I could see what had happened given the terrain. You could hide thousands of people there. This book is an excellent accounting of events and a good addition to any Custer library.
I've used it on research for several books that use the battle as part of the story, particularly in my Atlantis series.
Recommended.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book was like listening to a senile old man trying to tell you a story of something you are really interested in, and that you know he knows a lot about, only to listen to his narrative wind through side stories and inanities that ruin the experience.

I've read other books by Connell and really liked them. It was clear that he had a great amount of interest in Little Bighorn and had spent years researching Custer, the massacre, and several Indian tribes. But I get the feeling he locked his editor in a closet and sent this book to publication without having anyone tell him that what he wrote was a sprawling mess - a tumbling of trivial information that takes center stage for the better part of the book.

It took me 4 months to finish this thing, because I constantly had to walk away from it in frustration. I read the last 120 pages today and I feel as worn-out as if I was strapped to a chair to listen to that old senile man ranting for six hours...

[Andrew]

You can tell immediately, that Son of the Morning Star is the work of a novelist, not a trained historian. This isn't an insult, and it makes the narrative that much more interesting. As a novelist, Evan Connell is about as far from being on-trend as is possible, which is a shame, given his mordant wit. And Connell applies that same wit as he describes Little Bighorn and the abject failures who made up its white participants. You see General Custer, the genocidal maniac with a habit of grandstanding and whose widow tried somewhat successfully to signal-boost his cult of personality. You see the Indians trying quixotically to resist, and even if they couldn't beat back the US Cavalry, they could at least leave a few corpses on the high plains with their dicks chopped off. Seriously, why isn't this how they teach American history in school?

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had read Son of the Morning Star before going to the Custer memorial in Montana. I had read enough of Custer to understand the battle, but the personal stories Connell uses to build to the battle make it all the more interesting. I do like how Connell recounts the different versions of stories by soldier, native American, observer, and then says "it could have been that way, or another."
Custer, of course, does not shine in this story, but others do.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The cause of these drinking bouts seemed to be related to his [Benteen's] wife, Catherine, who was not very strong and who did not belong on the frontier. He called her Kate or Kittie, logical diminutives. He also called her Pinkie and Goose, names that might simply be affectionate or could have originated during some private moment. However, he very often referred to her as Frabbie, Frabbel, Frabbelina, and at least once as Frabbelina of Gay Street--which is, to say the least, uncommon. It might be the name of a dramatic or fictional character from the time of their courtship" (33).

"Whisky was indeed dispensed from traders' boats on the Yellowstone, along with champagne cider and such commonplace produce as butter, eggs, vegetables, pickles, lemons, licorice root, tinned salmon, chewing tobacco, shoelaces, thread, needles, etc. Out of cider and bourbon a drink was invented, christened Rosebud to honor this desolate region, and drunks were exiled to the prairie until they got over it, which probably did not take long, considering the possibility of Sioux warriors whooping over the nearest ridge" (49).

"Even now, after a hundred years, his name alone will start an argument. 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. He stands forever on that dusty Montana slope.

As values change, so does one's evaluation of the past and one's impression of long gone actors. New myths replace the old. During the nineteenth century, G.A.C. was vastly admired. Today his image has fallen face down in mud and his middle initial, which stands for Armstrong, could mean Anathema. Paul Hutton, writing in The Western Historical Quarterly, observed that as America's concept of the frontier evolved from that of a desert resisting civilization to that of a refuge from civilized decadence, so did Americans begin to look differently at the men and women who participated in settling that distant territory. 'Thus, from a symbol of courage and sacrifice in the winning of the West, Custer's image was gradually altered into a symbol of the arrogance and brutality displayed in the white exploitation...The only constant factor in this reversed legend is a remarkable disregard for historical fact'" (106-107).

Gandy dancer—a track maintenance worker on a railroad

“In his book, Custer reproduced a telegram from Sherman to Grant, dated one week after the slaughter, which says in part: ‘We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of the case.’ If one word of this extraordinary telegram is altered it reads like a message from Eichmann to Hitler” (132).

“It is said that at the beginning of the twentieth century one buffalo wandered across the prairie not far from a small town in Wyoming. The townspeople hitched up their wagons and rode out to have a look. They drove around the creature and stopped, the wagons forming a circle with the buffalo inside. For a long time they stared at this legendary animal. Then, because they could not imagine what else to do, somebody shot it” (136).

“General Hugh Scott knew and loved the West. Oklahoma in 1888 was ‘a wonderful, primeval country,’ the creeks around Fort Sill bordered by elm, oak, cottonwood, pecan, hackberry, and walnut. The U.S. Army at this time was methodically chopping down trees for use as fuel because it was expensive to haul coal 67 miles from the nearest railroad. Scott, upon being appointed quartermaster, refused to accept pecan or walnut wood, and he notes with pride that many fine trees survived which otherwise would have gone up in smoke” (139).

“General Sherman, whose photographs now and then give him the aspect of a vulture with scrofula…” (143).

“Then there was Mrs. Nash, who joined the Seventh in Kentucky and followed the regiment north to Fort Lincoln. Invariably she wore a veil, or a shawl pinned beneath her chin, and she is described as being rather peculiar looking. John Burkman, Custer’s orderly, said she was a good laundress, a good nurse, and a good midwife, always in demand to ‘chase the rabbit’ when a woman was expecting. Her next-to-last husband, a quartermaster clerk named Clifton, was known as a jolly fellow until he got married. After the ceremony, however, Clifton seldom laughed and a few days before his term of enlistment expired he deserted. Her last husband was a private named Noonan” (156).

“Yet he felt an affinity for them. He liked their courage and passionate independence; and what seeps through this book like a stain is a feeling of regret that he could not share their uninhibited pattern of life. As a West Point cadet in 1858 he wrote a boring, prophetic, ingenuous little essay sentimentally titled ‘The Red Man’ in which he laments the destruction of the red man’s home of peace and plenty” (167-68).

“Custer’s first biographer, Frederick Whittaker, thinks this may have been one of the happiest periods of his life, although it is just as possible that he felt bored. He could endure anything except idleness. Frederic Van de Water, who wrote a very different sort of biography with seldom a kind word for the general, likened him to Antaeus, invigorated by contact with the earth: ‘He was one of the healthiest, most vital men who ever lived, almost immune to hunger and thirst, heat and cold, sleepiness and fatigue’” (204).

“A feminine element very often radiates from sexually powerful males and in the case of Sitting Bull this was so unmistakable that one journalist, fascinated by the oval face between long braids, spoke of his ‘manhood and womanliness’” (231).

“From the moment of Custer’s arrival in Dakota Territory the explosive chronicle of his life seems preordained. In July of 1873 somewhere along the Yellowstone he shot an antelope whose carcass dripped blood on a package of donuts he meant to have for lunch. He noted the incident briefly in a letter to Elizabeth—he thought nothing of it—yet the queer misfortune reverberates like an Etruscan augury” (232).

“…among those in the column was a taxidermist, Mr. C. W. Bennet. From him Custer took lessons. After a full day on horseback Custer would study the art, often until late at night while everybody else lay exhausted, and he became—by his own estimate—rather good at it. He prepared various trophies including the heads of several antelope, the head and skin of a bear, and a complete elk

G.A.C. in a tent beside the Yellowstone, sleeves rolled to the elbow, supervised by Mr. Bennet, while half a dozen dogs sleep just outside and a summer moon floats on the shallow river—the image evokes a forgotten era: Wordsworth idyls, Burne-Jones ladies, cameo brooches, pressed flowers, mossy ruins, parasols, hoop skirts, muttonchops” (232-233).

“What should be made of such a story? Perhaps, as the wise chief Plenty Coups observed, there are things in life we do not understand and when we meet them all we can do is let them alone” (233).

“Custer’s regiment moving south through the Rosebud Valley was greeted by those pleasant summer odors that had met General Crook a week before. Plum, crabapple, and the scent of wild roses permeated the smell of sweaty horses, leather, unwashed men, and alkaline dust” (264).

“It was a rite of initiation, a test of fortitude, and if the supplicant cried out or fainted he would be treated like a squaw for the rest of his life. The general and Elizabeth had become acquainted with one of these wretched men. During his trial he had fainted and when he recovered he asked to be cut down. From that day on he wore a woman’s garment and cooked meals. Warriors mocked him. Squaws refused to acknowledge his existence except when loading him with additional work” (266).

“The last wasichu to hear Custer’s voice was an emigrant Italian trumpeter, Giovanni Martini, who died in Brooklyn in 1922. Martini—called John Martin—had not been in the States very long and did not speak much English. He probably enlisted because jobs were hard to get after the panic of 1873 when it was starve, stand in line for soup, or visit a recruiting depot” (277).

“Was Benteen telling the truth? Did he himself invent this dialogue? Nobody will ever know.

Why did Reno mark time on the hill? Nobody knows.

It begins to sound like an existential movie” (282).

“Yet the legend persists of a lone survivor. Why? It is as reasonable to ask why the myth of Custer’s long hair persists when there is no doubt that on the campaign his hair was short. He expected to be in the field several weeks and long hair collects dirt. On expeditions of this sort very few soldiers wore long hair. Nevertheless, at the climactic moment General Custer must have flowing locks.

So it is with Keogh’s horse—the one survivor” (295-296).

“The Seventh wanted to preserve him [Keogh’s horse, Comanche]. A telegraphic inquiry went to naturalist L.L. Dyche at the University of Kansas. Dyche agreed to mount the remains for $400. He caught the train to Fort Riley and came back to Lawrence, where the university is located, with Comanche’s hide and a load of bones” (297).

“Disfigurement of the dead and dying sounds prehistoric, like a ritual in an Ice Age grotto, but one must be cautious while studying the past. Edgar Stewart points out that it is a mistake to impose the standards of one race upon another. Besides, we learn now and again of civilized contemporaries reverting to paleolithic behavior. As H.G. Wells wrote, if you make men sufficiently fearful or angry the red hot eyes of cavemen will glare out at you. on September 3, 1855, for instance, following an assault on a Brulé village north of the Platte, General Harney’s soldiers gathered the pubic hair of dead squaws. A fourteen-year-old Sioux named Curly saw the mutilated genitals of these women, although what effect the sight had on this boy who later became known as Crazy Horse can only be imagined” (305).

“Like Wild Bill Hickok, Buckskin Frank Leslie, Rowdy Joe Lowe, and other borderline personalities, Cody seems to have been a curious admixture of thespian and assassin” (335).

“Those words radiate from the mind of a bona fide nineteenth-century American romantic, cameo pink, nourished on sentiment, the immaculate product of his age. While helping to bury a Vermont soldier who had been shot through the heart he sympathized with the man’s widow, and not wanting to reach into the dead man’s pockets, he slit them and removed a few personal items. ‘I cut off a lock of his hair and gave them to a friend of his from the same town who promised to send them to his wife. As he lay there I thought of that poem: “Let me kiss him for his mother…” and wished his mother were there to smooth his hair’” (353).

“General Sherman remarked in 1878 that western America had changed more in ten years than any other place on earth in fifty” (404).

“The early Mandans, for instance, felt there was not only a benevolent spirit but an evil spirit which came to earth before the good spirit and whose strength was greater” (404).

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

"My estimate of Reno and Custer is this: The former was brave but not rash, and Custer was both," wrote a First Cavalry acquaintance of Custer.

As I read this book, I tried to imagine the vast American West as an ocean of grass, imbued with danger, distance and the chance for honor, not unlike the high seas of Nelson and Farragut. It wasn't too hard to conjure. At the same time, I expected a view of the Army as a blunt instrument of national policy, often stupid and genocidal. This also was easy to imagine.

Of the endless question as to Reno's timidity vs Custer's brashness, I was unaware and remain agnostic. No, the key thing so far for me in the book is the thousand year reign of the Sioux, Lakota, Arapahoe, Cherokee and others over this land. As the book transpires we see the buffalo dying, we see a cavalry fishing party pulling literally thousands of trout coming out of a river Every Day for a month, simply gorging, and hear stories of disparate Indian tribes reflexively aiding each other with food, clothes, possessions: anything, to meet any need.

The book is full of anecdotes, and these were not special, yet struck me hard. The Indians didn't HAVE much, with a migratory society. I could imagine shorter lives than ours, measured by character or exploits rather than stuff. The white men, though, would scourge the land immediately, like locusts. How could this be? Surely we are seeing some deep cultural difference. A thousand years of white rule in America will not leave a single trout or buffalo besides decorative ones. I cannot imagine this simply as a matter of technological disparity, though that surely affected who Won. No, it's a cultural or racial edge.

We're just plain more evil than they were.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the book, but wanted to transcribe this thought as it came to me.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not especially interested in Custer or the American West, and I generally avoid anything about the Indian Wars because the subject is tragic and infuriating to the point that it affects my ability to function normally. But this is a terrific book. It's a lot like listening to a vastly informed elderly relative natter on about his most beloved subject. It's discursive, but all the meanderings are full of treasures, and you can't help being swept up in his enthusiasm and affection. It's scholarly but seldom dry. I'm sure the scholarship is now dated, and I'm curious what the current take on Custer is. One weakness I noticed was Connell's tendency to take reports of "doomed" feelings and premonitions at face value rather than noting that people tend to (without intending to) assign those sorts of feelings after the fact. In any case, an entertaining and informative book that made me wish more novelists wrote histories.

[Carl R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Son of the Morning Star is Evan S. Connell's look at the life of George Armstrong Custer. We all know about the battle, but what about the man? To listen to Connell, if it weren't for the time, place, and manner of his demise, the world would little note nor long remember this vain and impetuous martinet. Indeed, were his to biography focus solely on it's titular subject, it would be a pretty thin book. The value of Connell's work is that he places the now-vaunted cavalryman in context, with time, place, and people.

Oft-demoted, often court-martialed, Custer assumed command of a division in an army of leftovers. Post civil war, the country wanted the most they could get out of a military that had been largely dismantled. The cream of the crop stayed in the east, the rest went to the frontier. Granted, Sheridan had a command, as did Sherman. But, as soldiers go, Sherman was an old man by the time of these last Indian wars (1876 was the date of the Little Bighorn.), and Sheridan was an exception. Among the enlisted, desertions were rife due to lousy pay, terrible food, capricious discipline (of which Custer was a master), and--most of all--sheer boredom. Among the officers, drunkenness was rife, physical disabilities--half-blindness, missing limbs, arthritis--were commonplace, and incompetence proliferated. Two key battles leading up to the grand conflict were lost due to officers' incompetence and disobedience.

Combine those conditions with the appearance on the scene of some of the most astute and savage warrior-generals in Native American history--Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall--and you have a perfect recipe for defeat on the basis of personnel alone. In addition, the Indians were truly down to their last out. White settlement had narrowed their land to a strip of Wyoming and the Dakotas in the east and north and the Black Hills on the west. With the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, their last sanctuary was threatened. They had nowhere left to go.

Connell narrates the events leading up to these conditions just as one might expect. However, he does not do it in a straight line. His storytelling is, I suppose you might say, peripatetic. Elliptical. He'll start telling the story of one of the Indians involved in the battle, then will give the history of his family, of how he got his name, of what he thought of Custer or the battle twenty years or so later, then will finally return to the battle itself. The result is sometimes frustrating. You want to get on with the chase. Then you realize you already know about the chase. And you begin to realize how outsized the history of this battle and of Custer himself is compared to the story of White-Indian conflict in the west. As outsized as the huge painting which has come to symbolize the massacre.

In truth, not only was Custer not famous among the Indians, few knew his name. If he was known, his long yellow curls were his identifier, but those were shorn for the battle. It was only after that battle, after the press and others began asking Indians who killed him that the Indians began to realize that he had suddenly gained some notoriety. Suddenly there were many takers for the honor.

The true significance of the man and the battle is summed up in the words of Kate Bighead, a Cheyenne woman, who knew Custer from before the battle and was present at the scene before, during, and after the fighting. "I have often wondered if, when I was riding among the dead where he was lying, my pony may have kicked dirt upon his body."

[Katherine Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usually when I say a book is interesting, I mean the subject matter is interesting, or the author's insights are interesting. Both those things are true of Son of the Morning Star, but it is also true that the book is interesting, because Connell made some definitely non-standard choices about his narrative.

This is not a linear exploration of the battle; the book starts with the first people to discover the disaster, and then works its way in and out, forward and back, in a set of loops or spirals, reaching back into the biographies of the major and minor players and forward into the survivors' lives and the fates of the bodies of the dead. When I finished it, the first thing I did was turn to the beginning and start reading again, because I know I missed things the first time around.

Not linear, but not disorganized. I never had the feeling that Connell didn't know what he was doing or that he didn't have a reason for his choices, even if I can't see what that reason is.

He tells the story from all sides: the Sioux and Cheyennes, the Seventh Cavalry, the Arikara and Crow scouts. The people who survived, the people who didn't. He talks about Custer's dogs; he talks about the horses--not just Comanche, the legendary "only survivor," but the horses who died, the other horses who survived, the Sioux and Cheyenne ponies. Connell pays attention to everyone. He's excellent at showing the arrogance, greed, self-righteousness, blind bigotry, and gross entitlement issues of most nineteenth-century white Americans (although not all nineteenth-century white Americans--he also searches out the exceptions), but he doesn't idealize the Sioux. The tribes who chose to help the U.S. Army had good reasons of their own, and Connell shows those, too.

Custer is at the center of the book, but Connell is very aware of just how much that center is an absence, of how much of Custer is lost to us and how difficult it is, therefore, to reconstruct his reasoning. He both shows and talks about the difficulties in the eyewitness testimony--the exaggerations and self-aggrandizements from both whites and Native Americans; the damage to the truth done by the aggressive efforts of whites to impose their own narratives and interpretations, until the Native Americans essentially gave in and told the story the whites wanted to hear; the simple actions of time--erosion and conflation--on human memory.

The one thing I wish is that there'd been enough production budget to include pictures. Connell talks about portraits a lot, from Frederick Benteen to Rain in the Face, and I would love for those portraits to be able to accompany the text. To be clear: that's not a flaw in what Connell wrote or something I blame Connell for; it's just something that would be an excellent addition.

[Justin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is exactly the kind of history book i don't get. He shows his work at every turn and it makes this book 6 times longer than it needed to be. "This writer said x. This Indian said Y. Somebody's diary said Z.". Who cares. You read that stuff on your own time and boil it down for me, okay?

Maybe Custer enthusiasts love all this detail, but i just wanted the story, as best the author could piece it together. Despite how famous this battle supposedly is, I didn't really know the story at all. I was excited to learn the story in some detail, but this was like reading the behind-the-scenes book about the book i actually wished i was reading.

I breezed through large swaths when i could tell he was going deep on, say, all the different paintings done of the battle. But i was camping and this was the only book i had so I stayed with it. A decision i regret.

Despite so many pages about one battle, i do not feel like i could satisfactorily tell another person a coherent narrative of it.

[Terry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Evan Connell is a wonderful writer of novels. This isn't a novel, it's a history and it's really a history for historians. Meticulously researched and drawing on hundreds of documents and oral histories, the detail is overwhelming and for me, much more than I wanted to know. I thought a novelist would make the story of Little Big Horn engaging, especially a writer as good as Connell. Wrong. There's no real perspective here -- he gives the reader the perspectives of as many people as possible -- least of all Custer's. The title is deceptive, because the book is about the battle, not just Custer. In fact, Connell is overly cautious about what he says about Custer -- so much so that other people and even horses are more rounded characters in Son of the Morning Star. The good thing about the book is that he provides such diverse perspectives -- commendable but, as I said, way more than I wanted to know. Disappointing.

[Binston Birchill · Rating 1 out of 5]

A meticulously researched book seemingly organized by a four-year-old. Instead of engaging me in the characters and the story, the writing style quickly made me look ahead to see where the real story started. Seeing no hope I checked the one star reviews. No hope indeed. This was the style. I was doomed to slog through randomness for over 400 pages. The only good news is that I’m done, now I can pick up a book with some structure and be at ease.

That being said there are a lot of good reviews on this book. So check it out for yourself and see how much sense you can make of the style. Good luck.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good read in parts but I felt the author rambles and skips around to much. He does a find job on the actual battle but leading up to it he digresses throughout the book by dropping the narrative and taking off on dull useless sidetracks. Dozen and dozens of characters and facts are introduced that you will never remember. If you prefer history to be explained in a chronological order this is not the book that I would recommend for you. You will find a lot of insights, facts, information, and analysis in this book but the book is solely lacking in terms of structure.