THE BOOK REPORT: The other side of history

George Custer was the son of an Ohio blacksmith, poor and without much hope of ever becoming a world-recognized name. With the intense desire to make something of himself, he decided to become a lawyer. His family, however, lacked the means to facilitate that dream, and Custer was forced to choose another path to fame: war.

As a student at West Point, his grades weren’t all that impressive, and he neared expulsion each of his four years in school. When graduation came, he was ranked 34th out of a class of 34. Graduating from a military academy in 1861, with the explosive beginning of the Civil War, Custer was commissioned a second lieutenant. From battle to battle he rode, gaining a name for himself, culminating in a heroic eight-hour battle at Gettysburg. George Custer had found his calling, and by the time the war had ended, he was a captain with a reputation of valor in battle.

With the no domestic enemy left to fight, Custer, along with many other military men, followed the ever-expanding frontier to fight against the Native Americans who resisted the sweeping changes to their homeland. The volatile situation was the perfect environment for the veteran officer to advance his reputation. After winning a string of battles, his luck ran out at Little Big Horn, where he and 257 of his men were killed by a group of Indians led by the Lakota chief Crazy Horse.

After his death, Custer was honored as a national hero. He was seen as a man who died for the progression of the country. A man who sacrificed himself, protecting the innocent from the bloodthirsty hordes of savages that ravaged the American West. At least, that was the story that was told in the 100 years that followed.

After almost a century passing with only one side of the story told, Dee Brown wrote his classic history of the mistreatment of Native Americans, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Published in 1970, it was an instant best-seller and an important focus on a long-forgotten people. Brown’s book is an eye-opening list of story after story exposing the back alley of Manifest Destiny, the shattered lives of hundreds of people groups crushed under the wheels of American expansion.

Brown outlines the battles won and lost and, though stilted at times, paints a very different picture than the common telling of Western history. Names that never graced history books are read for the first time, bestowing humanity on the unwashed masses of the past. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a tale of sorrow that must be told and not forgotten. It is a powerful rebuke for the empires of old.

And Custer, long deemed a fallen hero, is exposed as a man whose quest for glory drove him to slaughter the innocent and risk the lives of his men. Fame is only one side of a two-edged sword. The opposite edge is infamy.

5 of 5.