Taking another look at figures from the past
Taking another look at figures from the past
By: Bill Mead
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Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
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0 responses 0 comments If you don't like history you should turn to the sports page right now. That's because I'm going to stop being silly for a moment to bore you with a discussion about a couple of guys from America's past that I think have been treated a lot worse than they deserve.
The first whipping boy is Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who graduated at the very bottom of his West Point class, became a Civil War hero and years later, in 1876, led his horse soldiers to disaster along a ridge in Montana. That fiasco makes Custer a vainglorious idiot, right? That's been the popular view ever since Custer's adoring widow died in 1933 and couldn't defend him anymore.
It's a fact that Custer wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, as the current saying goes, but in my opinion he was anything but the buffoon that history writers have portrayed over the last 75 years. During the Civil War his performance was so outstanding that he became the youngest general in the Union army, although it was only a brevet rank which meant it was mostly honorary. When the war ended he went back to his permanent rank of Lt. Colonel and headed west to fight Indians, which Americans of that era didn't see as the near-genocidal undertaking we now consider it to have been. In his ten years on the frontier he won the confidence of such military icons as Phil Sheridan and William T. Sherman. Custer was not the bumbler of legend in the eyes of competent superiors.
My assessment of Custer swung even more in his favor after I read his book “My Life on the Plains” which all evidence suggests he wrote himself. It reveals a perceptive person of high intelligence. Somebody else may have written a better story of that time and place but I haven't seen it.
A less-impulsive officer might have avoided the debacle at Little Bighorn but in Custer's defense, his actions there assumed that the Indians would behave as they normally did, which was to fight briefly so they could escape on their fast ponies. Historians now claim that Custer acted stupidly at Little Bighorn but I have to believe he was more unlucky than dumb, relying on experience which on that one occasion in western history was the wrong guide.
Custer was emotionally immature and I don't think I would have enjoyed him as a friend. I know I wouldn't have wanted to serve under him. But I'm convinced he was a lot better at what he did than we have been led to believe.
The 19th century explorer John Charles Fremont is another man out of the past that I believe has been treated unfairly by many scholars. His nickname “Pathfinder” is routinely ridiculed but there is no evidence that Fremont ever claimed that title. It was cooked up by campaign workers when he ran for president in 1856. Fremont was a romantic and his writings about his many expeditions through the west were somewhat more colorful than the facts warranted. He became a celebrity in his own time, which usually isn't good for one's legacy.
On the other hand, Fremont was a diligent scientist, a genial man of great fortitude and a leader who was esteemed by many frontiersmen of genuine ability who served under him for long periods, including Kit Carson and Joseph Walker. The latter eventually turned on Fremont for reasons that make Walker seem like less of a man than Fremont. I don't know why Walker's personal venom has been blown so far out of proportion by many historians.
Fremont was a deeply-flawed hero in many ways but that shouldn't make us forget how effective he was in telling the nation what it had in the wild west.
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