CUSTER
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Custer was a brave, shrewd soldier who demonstrated such valor during the Civil War that he was named a brigadier general at the age of 23, the youngest U.S. soldier ever to achieve that rank; yet he was also prone to reckless misjudgments on the battlefield, inspired, it seems, by a belief in his own invincibility. He was a vain man with a taste for flamboyant dress who dreamed of running for president, yet he was also devoted to his wife Libbie and deeply respected by his men. He was known for his fairness to Indians, yet on June 25, 1876, he was leading his men on an expedition that would almost certainly result in the massacre of hundreds of Indians–men, women, and children–who had wandered off the reservation.
Playwright Robert E. Ingham wisely chooses not to organize this information as a chronological narrative but as a series of impressionistic, loosely connected vignettes. We learn that Custer gave his wife the table on which General Robert E. Lee signed the peace treaty at the end of the Civil War. We hear Custer explain that he had his cavalry sing “Garryowen,” a Scottish drinking song, when riding into battle because the song’s tempo increases from a trot to a canter to a gallop. The soldiers explain how their carbines were apt to jam, which may have contributed to the Indian victory at Little Bighorn; and an Indian tells the apocryphal story of the soldier fleeing the massacre who was chased by an unarmed brave: when the Indian started to catch up, the soldier suddenly stopped his horse, turned toward his pursuer, put his revolver to his head, and killed himself.
The only culprit I can find is Ingham’s script, which proves an interesting history lesson but tedious drama.
