The Portrayal of Custer in the Hollywood Movie Little Big Man

"I knowed General George Armstrong Custer for what he was," claims Jack Crab, the main character and narrator of the motion pictureLittle Big Man who claims he is the only white person who survived the Battle of Little Bighorn. Jack, who plays many roles in his youth ranging from Cheyenne warrior to gunfighter to storekeeper, encounters Custer at various turning points in his life and eventually witnesses the general's death. Historical accounts of Custer's life and personality are numerous and contradictory; however, some sources agree with the movie's depiction of Custer as an irrational man whose self-righteousness and ambition led to his death at Little Bighorn.

General Custer makes his first smug appearance in Little Big Man when he happens upon a destitute Jack, whose store has been repossessed because of a swindling partner. Custer does not know Jack or his wife Olga and has no knowledge of their circumstances, but he takes one look at them and pronounces that their destiny is to go West. "You have nothing to fear from Indians," he says. "I give you my personal guarantee." Of course, Custer's personal guarantee proves worthless, as the next scene shows Olga being kidnapped by Indians during the journey. At Jack's next encounter with Custer, the general claims that he has the amazing ability to tell any man's occupation by looking at him and declares that Jack is undoubtedly a mule skinner. Custer also fancies himself a medical expert, as shown by his speech about how "poison rises from the gonads up to the throat and seeps into various muscles," in which he mispronounces the word "gonads." Though the words attributed to him are fictional, Custer's arrogance is documented by at least one biographer (Utley 208).

In the movie, Custer's arrogance is taken to the extremes of paranoia and delusions of grandeur. When Jack sneaks up behind Custer in his quarters with the intent of killing him, Custer seems unsurprised to find a man behind him with a knife. He acknowledges that he ought to have Jack hanged for such intentions but concludes that Jack's life is "not worth the reversal of a Custer decision." The phrase "a Custer decision" is spoken more than once by this haughty general, whose reference to himself in the third person signifies his exaggerated self-worth. At the movie's climax, when the general declares Jack "a perfect reverse barometer" and asks for his opinion on what he should do, Custer responds to Jack's honest answer with triumphant smugness: "Still trying to outsmart me, aren't you, Muleskinner? You want me to think that you don't want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is, you really don't want me to go down there!"

The most telling quality of this General Custer is his ambition. Once having made the "Custer decision" to take the Indians at Little Bighorn by surprise, nothing can change his mind. Even the news that the element of surprise has been lost elicits only this crazed response: "Yes, but they don't know that I intend to attack them without mercy. Nothing in this world is more surprising than the attack without mercy!" Perhaps, as Utley says of the real Custer, he has "total confidence in the capability of the Seventh Cavalry to whip any number of Indians" (196), but it may also be the hope of fame that propels Custer toward his greatest mistake. The historical Custer may not have exhibited the edge of insanity that permeates the actions of the screen Custer; however, Custer's immediate superior, Samuel D. Sturgis, was quoted as saying that the general was "insanely ambitious of glory" (6). Jack claims that the wildly ambitious Custer had his eye on a presidential nomination and "figured he needed one more dramatic victory over the Indians" to attain that position. Whether this is, as Jack says, "a true historical fact" is uncertain. But Custer's biographer agrees that the general was in it for the glory: "He loved war, but more especially he loved the laurels that it brought" (211). The Chicago Tribune agreed, publishing a scathing editorial claiming that Custer preferred to take the risk of failing rather than "share the glory with others" (5).

Because even George Armstrong Custer's biographers do not agree upon who he was or what his fatal flaw may have been, it is difficult to draw a definitive contrast between Custer's historical self and the portrayal of him that is found in Little Big Man. However, the movie does serve to parody the unblemished image of Custer found in numerous paintings of the late nineteenth century, in which the general "in the midst of chaos, stands . . . tall and calm" (Milner et al. 676). This symbol of bravery and American patriotism bears no resemblance to Little Big Man's stumbling, hallucinating Custer, who addresses the Senate and the President on the battlefield. Certainly, the real Custer must have exhibited elements of both representations of him.

Works Cited Milner, Clyde A. II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds. The Oxford History of the American West. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Utley, Robert M. Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier. Norman, Oklahoma, and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.