Growing Up With Custer

This paper is an exercise in auto-ethnography, discussing in the first person the impact of the American general George Armstrong Custer (1839-76) upon the imagination of a boy growing up in sixties Yorkshire. It is based on the premise that no person can ever be understood in isolation from the influence that they have had on others. Three encounters with the Custer myth are described: the board game The Battle of the Little Big Horn; Robert Siodmak’s film Custer of the West; and the comic strip ‘Custer’ in the British boys’ comic Jag. Charles Taylor’s notion of the imaginary is then used to theorise these cultural phenomena as stories that enable the practices of a society to make sense. Each phenomenon puts forward praiseworthy aspects of Custer – his courage, his charisma – but suppresses facts that would tarnish the image, such as his abusive treatment of female prisoners. The notion of the myth is discussed and it is shown how much of that myth still remains mysterious because it is intractable to empirical enquiry. The task today is to look at the ends to which the myth has been put. The paper concludes that growing up with Custer established a heroic construct that must now be rejected, even if its fascination remains. It is all too easy to be charmed by what should make us horrified.