The Norman Maclean Reader
Page 34
O. Alan Weltzien
February 2008
Notes
Introduction
1. “Episode, Scene, Speech and Word: The Madness of Lear” is available at www.normanmaclean.com.
Edward S. Luce
* “Edward S. Luce: Commanding General (Retired), Department of the Little Bighorn” is reprinted from Montana: The Magazine of Western History 6, no. 3 (Summer 1956): 51–55. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.
1. For a full description of the Museum, see Harry B. Robinson’s article (“The Custer Battlefield Museum”) in the July, 1952 issue of this magazine.
CHAPTER 1
1. Col. W. A. Graham, The Custer Myth, p. xi.
2. Custer’s Luck, p. 484.
3. There has been controversy even about how the news first reached the outside world. For an authoritative discussion of this controversy, see Harrison Lane’s “Custer Massacre: How News First Reached the Outer World,” Montana: Magazine of History, Vol. III, No. 3 (Summer, 1953), pp. 46–53.
4. The Conquest of the Missouri, p. 311.
5. For a detailed account of this trip, see the chapter in The Conquest of the Missouri entitled, “The Far West Races with Death.”
6. The dispatch is quoted in full in The Custer Tragedy, pp. 196–97 and The Story of the Little Big Horn, pp. 110–14.
7. The Conquest of the Missouri, p. 306.
8. As such, he had planned to accompany Terry’s column on the summer campaign, but had to cancel his plans at the last moment because of the illness of his wife, and sent Mark Kellogg, a reporter for the Tribune, in his place. The Conquest of the Missouri, p. 309.
9. Boots and Saddles, p. 269.
10. For some representative comments by Democratic newspapers, see The Custer Tragedy, pp. 205–6.
11. The Story of the Little Bighorn, pp. 109–10. Dustin is wrong in giving the date as July 6 (The Custer Tragedy, p. 205), for as noted above the messages sent from Bismarck were held up a day because of line trouble east of St. Paul.
12. Quoted from Did Custer Disobey Orders, p. 25, because it is accompanied there by Dr. Kuhlman’s interesting and probably valid conjecture as to the sources of the error in mileage (83 miles in 24 hours) upon which President Grant based the charge of disobedience. As for the actual mileage, Dr. Kuhlman says, “The fact is that the greatest distance marched in any given 24 hours was 35 miles, and the whole distance from the Rosebud to the battlefield was, according to Godfrey, 113 miles—which is not far from the truth.”
13. First published in the Helena (Montana) Herald and reprinted in full in The Story of the Little Big Horn, pp. 162–67.
14. Custer’s Luck, p. 466.
15. For instance, see The Story of the Little Big Horn, pp. 167 f., but a much larger list could be drawn up by anyone interested in this unhappy subject.
16. Godfrey’s detailed description of the body is reprinted in The Custer Myth, pp. 376–77. Dustin says that all officers who viewed the body agreed there was no sign that the heart had been removed. Sgt. Ryan’s later story to the contrary Dustin regards as imaginative, stimulated by the legend then current and by distant memories of the actual slashings on the abdomen. The odds are all that Dustin is right in dismissing “the heart story” as imaginatively plausible but untrue. The Custer Myth, p. 185.
17. Boots and Saddles, p. 215. “It was found out on the battlefield that he had cut out the brave heart of that gallant, loyal, and lovable man, our brother Tom.”
18. See below, pp. ___.
19. See below, pp. ___.
20. According to Godfrey, The Custer Myth, p. 376. But descriptions of the position in which the body was found vary somewhat (see for instance, The Custer Tragedy, p. 185), although all agree that the position was one of composure, perhaps arranged composure. The variations in descriptions may well occur because Bradley or the parties coming later to the Battlefield probably moved the body in order to be sure of its identity.
21. Even Sitting Bull and Gall are quoted to this effect, The Custer Myth, pp. 73, 376.
22. Custer’s Luck, p. 487.
23. She Watched Custer’s Last Battle, last page.
24. See below, p. ___.
25. Legend into History, p. 212.
26. Edgar I. Stewart, “Which Indian Killed Custer?” Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Summer, 1958), p. 9. This article also relates Rain-in-the-Face’s own confirmations and denials of the story.
27. The Custer Myth, pp. 363–64.
28. “The bodies of Dr. Lord and Lieutenants Porter, Harrison, and Sturgis were not found, at least not recognized,” Gen. Godfrey, The Custer Myth, p. 377. See also Sheridan’s report, Ibid., p. 374.
29. Conquest of the Missouri, pp. 378–79.
30. James S. Hutchins, “Custer’s Clay,” introductory essay to The American West: Emphasizing Custeriana, Catalogue 56 (J.E. Reynolds: Van Nuys, California, 1960).
31. Part IV, Section 1 of The Custer Myth is devoted to accounts of the burials, and contains the first-hand accounts of Godfrey and Col. “Mike” Sheridan and two articles by Dustin. The chapter in The Conquest of the Missouri entitled “The Bones of Heroes” is also devoted to the same subject. Since the location of the grave markers is crucial to Dr. Kuhlman’s analysis of the Battle, the “Foreword” to his Legend into History should be carefully studied. It will be noted that he and Dustin disagree considerably about the care given to the dead.
32. Legend into History, pp. xiv–v.
33. Not until 1930 were both Custer Hill and Reno Hill purchased from the Crow Indians and named Custer Battlefield National Cemetery. The administration of the area was changed from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, in 1940, and in 1946 the area was given its present name, Custer Battlefield National Monument. Its splendid museum, first conceived by Mrs. Custer, was officially opened in 1952. For a history and description of the latter, see Harry B. Robinson’s article on “The Custer Battlefield Museum” in The Montana Magazine of History, Vol. II, No. 3 (July, 1952).
CHAPTER 2
1. Custer’s Luck, p. 428.
2. Warriors without Weapons, p. 85.
3. Actually at Hat Creek, thirty miles from War Bonnet Creek, but legend has shifted the incident to the more literary watershed.
4. This incident is examined thoroughly and with discernment by Don Russell in The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman, 1960), pp. 214 ff. Don Russell tells me that for a while he lost any belief in the story that Buffalo Bill killed Yellow Hand but his faith returned as he began to note how many of those claiming Buffalo Bill had not killed Yellow Hand ended up by claiming they had.
5. The part about the costume may well be true. See Campaigning with Crook, p. 42.
6. Campaigning with Crook, pp. 42, 94.
7. Campaigning with Crook, pp. 94–95.
8. The work that DeLand and others did in locating the exact site of the battle is described by him in The Sioux Wars, South Dakota Historical Collections, XVII (1934), 218–27.
9. This small battle was witnessed and dramatically described by two professional writers, the reporter, John F. Finerty (in War-path and Bivouac) and the soldier-novelist, Capt. Charles King (in Campaigning with Crook and Stories of Army Life).
10. The most smashing of those winter attacks was led by Gen. Mackenzie against the Cheyenne camp of Dull Knife. For a detailed account, see Grinnell’s The Fighting Cheyennes, pp. 359–82.
11. [blank]
12. For a detailed account of the surrender and death of Crazy Horse, see De Land’s The Sioux Wars, South Dakota Historical Collections, XVII (1934), 313 ff. and Mari Sandoz’s Crazy Horse (New York, 1942).
13. Actually, he may not have been this old, since speculations as to the date of his birth vary from 1840–45.
14. The Conquest of the Missouri, pp. 415–17.
15. Sitting Bull, pp. 256–57.
16. Pine Ridge, Rosebud (not to be confused with the Rosebud in Montan
a), Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Lower Brule. Warriors without Weapons, p. 32.
17. Warriors without Weapons, p. 32.
18. And remained under official ban until 1933. Warriors without Weapons, p. 91.
19. Warriors without Weapons, p. 45.
20. For an account of their modern economic history, see Warriors without Weapons, especially pp. 37 ff.
21. Warriors without Weapons, pp. 98–102.
22. Warriors without Weapons, pp. 91–92.
23. The following account of Messiah Religion and the Messiah Outbreak among the Sioux is heavily indebted to James Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1892–93), Part II. It is seldom worthwhile to quote later works on this phenomenon in Sioux history since they are based, second, third or fourth hand, on this same report. And it is truly a remarkable document, especially when one realizes how soon after the event it was published. Mooney was an Indian ethnologist in the field at the time, interviewing many of the tribes involved and even the Prophet, Wovoka, himself. But as remarkable as the first-hand data he offers is his scientific, sympathetic, and psychological understanding of what he saw. Naturally, a study made so close to the event has its errors, distortions and omissions, and the Ghost Dance is now the subject of a modern study being made by that able historian of the National Park Service, Robert Utley, whose criticisms and suggestions have helped many parts of this book besides this section.
24. Naturally different tribes and sometimes even different medicine men introduced their own variations in ritual, costume, and creed. Mooney discusses many of them in detail.
25. Mooney argues that the belief in a protective article of clothing probably came from the whites, possibly from the muslin “endowment robe” of the Mormons. As he points out, the Indian customarily went into battle naked above the waist, his “protective medicine” being a claw, head of a bird, etc. which could be worn in his hair or hidden between the covers of his shield (pp. 790–91). After such trinkets, the Ghost shirt must have seemed armorial.
26. See DeLand, pp. 446 ff., and Vestal, p. 284.
27. For opposite opinions on this question as well as on the general character of Sitting Bull, consult Major McLaughlin who as the agent at Standing Rock Reservation regarded Sitting Bull as having “all of the faults of an Indian and none of the nobler attributes,” and then consult Stanley Vestal who makes him, at least to me, equally destitute of character by trying to make him into the noblest Roman of them all. To McLaughlin, Sitting Bull was using the new religion craftily as a means of enhancing his own power (pp. 180 ff.; pp. 205 ff.), and, to Vestal, Sitting Bull was an innocent and agnostic spectator of the Ghost Dance (pp. 279 ff.).
28. My Friend the Indian, pp. 203–4.
29. Sitting Bull, p. 304.
30. Warriors without Weapons, p. 33.
31. “A Short History of the Teton-Dakota,” North Dakota Historical Quarterly, X (Jan., 1943), 139–40.
CHAPTER 3
1. The Fighting Cheyennes, p. 369. This work gives a full account of the defeat which occurred on November 26, 1876 in the Bighorn mountains near the head of one of the tributaries of the Powder river.
2. A small band under White Hawk briefly postponed the inevitable by joining Lame Deer’s “irreconcilable” Sioux who were defeated by Gen. Miles in May, 1877. Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton, The Frontier Years, (New York, 1955), pp. 101–2.
3. Two Moon’s eminence as a chief was acquired after the surrender. Both Cheyennes and Gen. Miles agree that at the time of the surrender he was a minor figure. The Frontier Days, pp. 99, 227.
4. Harry Anderson, “Nelson A. Miles and the Sioux War of 1876–77,” The Westerners Brand Book, Vol. xvi, No. 4 (June, 1959), pp. 26, 32. There is much detailed information about events following the Battle in this article which reduces the magnitude of the role Gen. Miles played in these events considerably from that the General assigns to himself in his own reports. The estimate seems just and impartial, although it would be hard to find either an Indian fighter or an Indian who did not “pull the long-bow” in recounting his own feats. The fact that the prose of most men (Miles, Custer, and Crook along with the others) exceeds their martial exploits does not alter my admiration—which appears later in this chapter—of Miles’s treatment of the Cheyennes and of his general attitude toward the Indian question.
5. Verne Dusenberry, “The Northern Cheyenne,” Montana: Magazine of History, V (Winter, 1955), 27.
6. The Frontier Years, pp. 105–17.
7. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 2.
8. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 5.
9. The Fighting Cheyennes, pp. 400–401.
10. The Fighting Cheyennes, pp. 401–2.
11. The Fighting Cheyennes, p. 403.
12. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 30.
13. Although before the journey was completed American sympathy for the underdog began to assert itself, especially since the top dog was the American Army. The fear was humorously expressed that it was no longer a question of whether the Army would capture the Cheyennes, but the other way around. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 128.
14. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 118.
15. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 136 (116?).
16. The Fighting Cheyennes, p. 336.
17. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 18.
18. Grinnell says that he heard variant stories from the Cheyennes as to where the bands separated, some giving the location as south, others as north of the Platte (pp. 409–10); Sandoz raises no question about the location, giving it as north of the Platte (p. 114).
19. [blank]
20. The Fighting Cheyennes, p. 412.
21. Cheyenne Autumn, pp. 190, 193.
22. The Fighting Cheyennes, p. 418.
23. The Fighting Cheyennes p. 419.
24. The Fighting Cheyennes p. 419.
25. The Fighting Cheyennes, p. 420.
26. Cheyenne Autumn, p. 202.
27. The Fighting Cheyennes, p. 426.
28. Dusenberry, p. 30.
29. Dusenberry, p. 31.
30. Dusenberry, p. 33.
31. Dusenberry, p. 33.
32. Dusenberry, p. 38.
33. Dusenberry, p. 40.
CHAPTER 4
1. See above, [incomplete].
2. See below, [incomplete].
3. Don Russell, “Sixty Years in Bar Rooms; or ‘Custer’s Last Fight,’” p. 62.
4. The History and Development of Advertising (New York, 1929), p. 338.
5. P. 360.
6. P. 356.
7. P. 382.
8. Roland Krebs and Percy J. Orthwein, Making Friends Is Our Business: 100 Years of Anheuser-Busch (Cuneo Press, 1953), pp. 1–2.
9. Don Russell, pp. 62–63.
10. For this and other information I am indebted to the advertising agency handling the Budweiser account, the D’Arcy Advertising Company, and in particular to Robert B. Irons who is manager of their account with Standard Oil Company (Indiana) and to James B. Orthwein, vice-president of the agency and son of one of the co-authors of Making Friends Is Our Business: 100 Years of Anheuser-Busch. Their responses to my queries were always immediate, full and friendly. Information obtained from them will be acknowledged hereafter simply as “Irons-Orthwein.”
11. Making Friends Is Our Business, pp. 337, 4.
12. Irons-Orthwein.
13. Irons-Orthwein.
LAST CHAPTER
1. “England Your England.”
“This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon”
* “‘This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon’: A Few Remarks on the Art of Teaching” is excerpted from The University of Chicago Magazine 66 (January/February 1974): 8–12.
“Billiards Is a Good Game”
* “‘Billiards Is a Good Game’: Gamesmanship and America’s First Nobel Prize Scientist” is reprinted from The University of Chicago Magazine 67 (Summer 1975): 19–23.
Retrievers Good and
Bad
* “Retrievers Good and Bad” is reprinted from Esquire 88 (October 1977): 22, 30, 32, 34, 36.
Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”
* “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim’” is reprinted from A River Runs through It and Other Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
An Incident
* “An Incident” is the transcript of a talk given at the conference “Who Owns the West?” held in Missoula, Montana, May 9–12, 1979.
The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers
* “The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers” is reprinted from Chicago (1977).
The Pure and the Good
* “The Pure and the Good: On Baseball and Backpacking” is reprinted from Associations of Departments of English Bulletin 61 (May 1979): 3–5.
Black Ghost
* “Black Ghost” reprinted from Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
From Young Men and Fire
* Excerpt reprinted from Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 8.
Interview with Norman Maclean
* Reprinted from Nicholas O’Connell, ed., At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty-two Pacific Northwest Writers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987, 1998), 211–29.
Letters to Robert M. Utley, 1955–1979
1. One of the gang of “Custer Hill” sleuths, James S. Hutchins was one of the most prominent Custer historians of the mid-twentieth century. He authored several studies, including The Army and Navy Journal on the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Related Matters, 1876–1881; Boots and Saddles at the Little Bighorn; and The Papers of Edward S. Curtis Relating to Custer’s Last Stand. This and other annotations to the letters are by the volume editor.