This Day in Western History (Death of Daniel Boone, Restless Frontier Legend)

Sept. 26, 1820—Half a continent away from his Berks County, Pa., birthplace, Daniel Boone died quietly in his sleep at age 86 near present-day Defiance, Mo., still yearning to hunt far from the thousands who had followed his lead into the interior of the vast North American continent.

Partly because as a child I watched Fess Parker playing him for six seasons on TV in the 1960s, I associated Boone for years entirely with Kentucky. It would be a long while before I realized he also spent considerable time elsewhere—Pennsylvania, North Carolina, present-day West Virginia, and Missouri.

Many myths already existed about this legendary American frontiersman, and I’m afraid Parker’s TV series dispelled few of them and maybe even added some more. (He probably preferred practical wide-brim felt hats and wool and fabric to the coonskin caps and buckskin in which he’s usually depicted, for instance—and was hardly an Indian fighter, since, by his own admission, he only killed three men throughout his long life.)

It is true that he established the settlement Boonsboro; escaped from captivity by Native-Americans (and helped his daughter do the same); and clashed with the British in the American Revolution.

Other aspects of Boone’s life are not as well known, but explain much of his nomadic life:

*Slaveholder: Despite being raised by Quakers, Boone owned slaves in adulthood—as many as seven at one point. Slaves were used to help farm at Boonsborough, and were among the casualties he died during Native American attacks. At the same time, a slave named Burrell guided the frontiersman in the 1760s as he looked for a potential settlement; another, Adam, owned by another settler, told him about the death of Boone’s son James in a 1773 Indian attack, enabling the grief-stricken father to recover the remains; and an ex-slave, Pompey, was able to save his life when Boone was captured by the Shawnee in 1778 by translating his pleas to Chief Blackfish.

*Land speculator: Like other major figures in the early republic—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and financier Robert Morris—Boone was an active land speculator. In Boone’s case, his inability to provide adequate written documentation led to heavy debt, loss of his properties, a warrant for his arrest, and a permanent move out of Kentucky in the 1790s.

*Public official: Hardly the solitary figure of so many legends, Boone was, like his father, Squire Boone, a leader. Aside from his role in helping settle Kentucky, he was a member of the Virginia legislature and, in his 70s, a justice in the new territory of Missouri.

*Legend in his own time: Unlike a frontiersman of the second generation, Davy Crockett, was not interested in generating publicity for himself. But legends began to accrue about him even in middle age. John Filson started the process in 1784 with an appendix about the hunter in Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. Very problematically, the “interview” with Boone sounded suspiciously flowery. By the end of his life, the English poet Lord Byron extended his legend across the Atlantic by including him as a character in the epic Don Juan.

In encountering Boone’s grandchildren decades later, historian Francis Parkman hailed their famous ancestor’s “quiet and tranquil spirit.” Quiet, even given his disgust with the court system in Kentucky, taciturn, perhaps; but tranquil? That’s not a word I would use to describe someone with Boone's wanderlust.

While slightly romanticized, Theodore Roosevelt’s portrait of Boone in the 1890 book he wrote with friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Hero Tales From American History, offers a judicious appraisal of this pioneer:

“The toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond.”

This Day in Western History (Death of John C. Fremont, ‘Pathfinder’ Who Lost His Way)

July 13, 1890—Across the continent from the territory he explored and earned him lifelong celebrity, John C. Fremont died at age 77 of appendicitis, without the glory he craved or even the wealth that compensated for a while.

Five expeditions west of the Missouri River, all recounted in vivid prose, earned Fremont the nickname “The Pathfinder of the West.”  For a nation experiencing phenomenal expansion of its territories and a citizenry seeking opportunity, this young army officer:

* proposed the best routes through California and Oregon; 

*described the attraction of the Great Salt Lake so vividly that it convinced Brigham Young to lead his new, controversial sect, the Mormons, out there; 

*christened the narrow strait between the Pacific and San Francisco Bay "the Golden Gate";

* fired the imaginations of readers of all ages with tales of his adventures with sidekick-scout Kit Carson; and 

*suggested the best preparations for journeying through vast stretches west of the Mississippi.

The adjective often attached to Fremont was “Byronic.” That suggestion of romanticism sprang from the well-known origins of his relationship with his wife, the much-loved child of Thomas Hart Benton, the influential U.S. Senator from Missouri.

The pretty 16-year-old eloped in 1841 with Fremont, then a dashing 28-year-old surveyor with the United States Topographical Corps (later, the Army Corps of Engineers). Eventually, she was so effective in bringing her initially furious father to her husband’s cause that Senator Benton was instrumental in gaining support for a couple of Benton’s early expeditions.

Jessie Benton Fremont was not only absolutely devoted to her husband, but also vivacious and intelligent. She pushed her husband’s cause relentlessly, not only with politicians who crossed his path, but also through reports, magazine articles and books published under his name that she actually ghostwrote. They pioneered modern marital partnerships of celebrity and power, with Jessie taking an unprecedented role in his subsequent political career. A century and a half before Billary, John and Jessie could have been known as Jossie.

But other associations with the word “Byronic”—melancholy, moodiness, restlessness, alienation—explain Fremont’s ultimate disappointment. Seldom has an American grasped for so much and ended up with so little.

It must have been galling for Fremont to realize that two other figures, Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln, had achieved successes that eluded him: military victory at the head of vast armies and/or the Presidency.

Nobody ever talked about the Party of Fremont, even though it was the Pathfinder rather than Lincoln who had been the first Republican candidate for President, in 1856. Too inclined to go his own way, he could never comfortably accept the essential notion of chain of command that enabled Grant to win his string of victories in the Civil War.

What led to Fremont’s solitary, sorry end?

*Illegitimacy. The circumstances surrounding Fremont’s birth out of wedlock in 1813 in Charleston, SC, foreshadowed in certain ways his own early adulthood. His mother, married to a man twice her age, ran off with her French tutor and had a child by him. Likewise, Fremont chafed against the norms of courting in wooing Jessie Benton. But the odor of scandal clinging to his mother’s affair fueled his own ambition.

*Impetuosity. In June 1846, Fremont helped spearhead the “Bear Flag” rebellion that sundered California from Mexico, paving the way for its eventual absorption into the United States. Once again, he was pushing against the bounds of convention, transforming “from a military adventurer, a freebooter, a filibusterer, into a hero,” wrote historian Bernard de Voto in The Year of Decision 1846.

But his refusal to accept General Stephen Kearney’s authority to organize a new territorial government precipitated Fremont’s arrest and conviction on charges of mutiny, disobedience and improper conduct. President James Knox Polk’s commutation of the sentence and a public perception that he had been unfairly targeted increased his popularity, leading to his election as one of the new state’s first two U.S. Senators. But that only confirmed his wayward inclinations.

*Arrogance and extravagance. In the early days of the Civil War, supporters of the Union looked to two potential military saviors: George McClellan in the East and John C. Fremont in the West. Both ran afoul of Abraham Lincoln, resulting in their being relieved of command. As head of the Western Department in Missouri, Fremont caused a firestorm by proclaiming the emancipation of slaves owned by rebels. The general not only had not cleared it with superiors beforehand, but publicly refused to rescind the order until he had dispatched Jessie to make his case for him with Lincoln. Her mission was unsuccessful, and soon Fremont was defending himself for alleged extravagant contracts and expenses. Exoneration on these charges led to a new appointment heading up the Mountain District comprising parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia, but no path to glory, as he was roughed up in Stonewall Jackson's "Valley Campaign" and asked to be relieved when placed under an old rival, Gen. John Pope.

*Risk-taking. When gold was discovered in lands he had purchased in the Sierra foothills, Fremont became a millionaire. But after the Civil War, his penchant for land speculation and dubious investments in railroads led to the loss of his fortune in 1873. He took risks in his personal life, too, sparking rumors of affairs that the ever-devoted Jessie dismissed. A general’s pension arrived weeks before his death in 1890.

I never expected that the much-traveled Fremont would be buried comparatively close to where I live: not in the native South that he scorned for its slaveholding ways, not in the California he brought into being, not in the Missouri of his in-laws and days as a Civil War general, but outside New York City, in the suburban Rockland County hamlet Sparkill. (See James Kaplan's interesting "New York Almanac" post from five years ago.) 

It is the quietest of resting places for an apostle of Manifest Destiny spurred by ambition, propelled by propaganda, and fatally engulfed in controversy.

This Day in Western History (Narcissa Whitman Becomes 1st White Woman to Cross America)

Sept. 1, 1836—When Narcissa Whitman reached what is now Walla Walla, Washington (then part of what was known as Oregon Country), on this day 180 years ago, with her husband, Dr. Marcus Whitman, as part of a small missionary group, she became what is believed to be the first white woman to cross North America. The couple’s epic, 3,000-mile journey paved the way for similar journeys (many conducted with the help of Marcus) undertaken in the following decade along the Oregon Trail, and even beyond into the post-Civil War era.

I’ve long felt that the story of Narcissa and Marcus would make a compelling subject for a film: a couple engaged in missionary work who must face all kinds of struggles to achieve their goal--physical hardship, internal dissension, the constant threat of attack. But it would not be the kind of happy, triumphant film about strong pioneers favored by Hollywood in its Golden Age, but rather a kind of Protestant counterpart to the 1990 adaptation of Brian Moore’s Black Robe—about cultural conflict, misunderstanding, and self-doubt among all-too-human people who choose to do divine work.

At the time of her transcontinental trek, Narcissa was, at 28 years old, still young and strong enough to survive the rigors of an overland journeyl. (After comparatively easy steamboat travel, the trans-Mississippi portion was accomplished partly by wagon train, then on horseback, over often bumpy terrain.). But she would encounter other circumstances far less happy and far more troubling over the next 11 years, and her spirit would be tried in ways that even her deep religious faith could not help her sustain.

Ever since I read Jane Eyre, I’ve applauded the decision by that heroine not to become the missionary wife of St. John Rivers. Not only is there the rather large matter of how she could stay devoted to this repressed clergyman who is still carrying the torch for someone else, but all Jane’s considerable hard work and self-discipline might not even be enough in India, a land completely alien to her. 

That mismatch between a woman’s skills and temperament in a much different environment was even more marked in the case of Narcissa Whitman in the Pacific Northwest, among American Indians. On the surface, it shouldn’t have appeared so: She had learned the kind of skills needed to survive life on the frontier, away from a community: how to weave and spin, sew, cook over an open fire, and make soap and candles. As a result of a second spiritual awakening at a revival meeting, the 16-year-old resolved to "consecrate myself without reserve" and "go to the heathen" as a missionary. A comparatively well-educated woman for her time, she was among the first students at Franklin Academy, a church-affiliated secondary school in Prattsburg, N.Y., where she was raised.

But the question faced by Jane Eyre—of how much commitment to a spouse can help one in missionary work—was present in Narcissa’s life, too. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the governing agency for missions sponsored by Presbyterian and Congregational churches, made it plain that it preferred married rather than single people for this work, perhaps believing that couples were more likely to reject any temptations in faraway places. As it happened, Narcissa and Marcus had not known each other long or well before they wed in New York State. They had still only been married six months when they reached Walla Walla.

The Whitmans, anxious to have at least one other missionary couple accompanying them to Oregon County, prevailed upon Henry Spalding, an ordained Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Eliza Hart Spalding. This turned out to be a mistake.

Historians have divided on whether or not Narcissa had rejected a marriage proposal from Rev. Spalding before her marriage to Marcus. But at very least, they had been students together at Franklin Academy and had worshipped at the same church, and for whatever reason, he had expressed misgivings about her before the trip.

Trouble between the two couples soon erupted, as they differed even over the elementary question of how to load their wagon train. As they crossed prairie, mountain, and desert, guided at various points by fur traders and Nez Perce Indians, the weather turned hotter, the diet more tiresome and their patience thinner. After seven months, with the Whitmans traveling a bit ahead of their companions, they finally made it to Fort Walla Walla.

“The whole company galloped almost the whole way to the Fort,” Narcissa wrote home. “The fatigues of the long journey seemed to be forgotten in the excitement of being so near the close….[S]oon we were seated at the table and treated to fresh salmon, potatoes, tea, bread and butter. What a variety, thought I. You cannot imagine what an appetite these rides in the mountains give a person. I wish some of the feeble ones in the states could have a ride in the mountains; they would say like me, victuals, even the plainest kind, never relished so well before.”

What delighted Narcissa was a crowing rooster, as well as other animals she could no longer take for granted: “You may think me simple for speaking of such a small circumstance. No one knows the feelings occasioned by seeing objects once familiar after a long deprivation. Especially when it is heightened by no expectation of meeting with them. The door-yard was filled with hens, turkeys and pigeons. And in another place we saw cows and goats in abundance, and I think the largest and fattest cattle and swine I ever saw.”

Eleven days later, after a far less grueling trip down the Columbia River, the Whitmans and the Spaldings reached Ft. Vancouver. The two wives stayed put while the husbands, undoubtedly glad to be out of each other’s company, scouted separate missions. Henry Spalding chose one in what would become Idaho, while Marcus picked a site 120 miles away: Waiilatpu, or "Place of the Rye Grass."

The location, on the Walla Walla, was every bit as pleasant as the Indian name indicated. But it lacked good, abundant timber, and Marcus ignored warnings that the Cayuse tribe was harder to persuade than the Nez Perce. Arriving at their mission in mid-December, when food was hard to find and Narcissa was already well along in her pregnancy, the couple only survived that first winter by killing 10 wild horses. It was only the first example of misfortune arising from their own failure of vision.

In Narcissa’s case, this was more than metaphor: Within a few years, her eyesight rapidly deteriorated. That was by no means all of the couple’s problems:

*Marcus was absent from the mission for long periods, plunging Narcissa into increasing isolation and depression.

*In 1839, their two-year-old daughter Alice Clarissa—her mother’s chief solace—accidentally drowned in the river behind the mission house.

*While Alice, before her death, had, amazingly enough, started to pick up Nez Perce, the primary language of the Cayuse, Narcissa never learned the native language.

*The Whitmans denounced practices that the Cayuse enjoyed, including dancing and gambling. In fact, they made few attempts to accommodate native ways—and little headway in converting the Indians.

*Unease on the part of the Whitmans toward the Indians grew into dislike. The Indians sensed this condescension, and reacted accordingly.

*The Whitmans pretty much gave up converting Indians, concentrated on medicine and aiding white settlers. The Cayuse grew alarmed at the swelling white influx onto their land.

*In 1847, Marcus attempted to treat an outbreak of malaria in the area. The Cayuse died in greater numbers under his care than the white settlers did. The Indians, acting on their belief that the families of those who died under the care of a medicine man (as they viewed Marcus) had the right to take his life, did so. Shortly afterward, they killed Narcissa and the couple’s adopted children as well.

This Day in Western History (Outlaw Butch Cassidy Is Born)

Apr. 13, 1866— Robert Leroy Parker was born in Beaver, Utah, the oldest of 13 children in a family of Mormons. That name very likely means nothing to you. But if you’re fascinated by Wild West outlaws—and especially if you’re a film fan—you’ve almost certainly heard of the name he adopted as an adult: Butch Cassidy.

You’d never associate an emotion like guilt with the wry leader of desperadoes depicted in William Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But that does indeed appear to have motivated Parker’s decision to use the name by which he has become a legend: He did not want his mother to be embarrassed by his enormous deviation from the norms of his religion.

The “Butch” part of the name derived from a brief job as a butcher; “Cassidy” came from a rancher he admired, Mike Cassidy. As for Butch’s partner, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, “The Sundance Kid” got his nom de crime from his stint in a Sundance, Wyo., jail for stealing a horse.

You might recall a line from the start of the Paul Newman-Robert Redford film: "Most of what follows is true." I suppose that claim is not as blatantly false as the one from the Coen Brothers’ Fargo that it is “based on a true story,” but you do have to be rather careful. This is Hollywood, after all, as well as a Western, where the truth is whatever sounds good in a story conference.

In no uncertain terms, the film portrays Butch as the brains of the outfit. (Butch, to Sundance: “Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”) Butch and his partner did, in fact, plan their escapes carefully, minimizing the possibility that they might have to draw their guns and kill anyone. 

But one real-life incident makes me suspect that the movie pulled its punches about the true amount of Sundance’s gray matter. At one point while the pair were trying to make a new life for themselves in South America, Sundance got drunk and bragged to someone about his true identity and past exploits. It’s not terribly different from those stories you hear these days about crooks who stop to take selfies, then post them to Facebook.

Some other stuff that didn’t quite happen the way it’s depicted on the big screen:

*Our (anti)heroes are dogged through much of the film by a posse that includes a Native American tracker named Lord Baltimore. He didn’t, however, exist.

*That posse in North America is depicted as relentless. In real life, Butch and Sundance gave them the slip and managed to stay well ahead of their pursuers.

*The film identifies Butch’s underlings as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Actually, amazingly enough, the group was known as The Wild Bunch. But, with Sam Peckinpaugh’s western bloodfest with that title coming out the same year, 20th Century Fox didn’t want audiences confused, so the name was changed.

The film is far more interested in the present—and limited future—of Butch and Sundance, in a turn-of-the-century West where they are becoming anachronisms, than it is in their pasts. In actuality, Butch, for instance, appears to have gotten into his life of crime by rustling cattle near the ranch where he worked before graduating to robbing banks.

In one very large sense, however, the film was true to life. It ends in a freeze frame of Newman and Redford making a break for it against hopeless odds in Bolivia. Most historians do accept the Bolivian authorities’ contention that Butch and Sundance were, in fact, killed in 1908. But a small but persistent group believes that Butch somehow survived the shootout and made his way back to the Pacific Northwest, where he died three decades later. The movie's ending gives them the (admittedly very, very slim) chance that this did indeed occur, while sparing the rest of us the visual evidence of their demises.

This Day in Western History (Lincoln Signs Homestead Act)

May 20, 1862—Envisioning what a revitalized America might look like, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which turned over 270 million acres of the public domain to private citizens, for free or at minimal cost.

No other administration has been so associated, from its first day in office to its last, with a war and its consequences as Lincoln’s. By necessity, historians have concentrated on this aspect of his Presidency to the exclusion of almost all else.

But the Civil War did not undermine the determination of either the President or his party to enact sweeping domestic legislation. In fact, in a certain way—i.e., the elimination of “strict constructionist,” pro-slavery Southern Democrats—the outbreak of hostilities enabled Lincoln to pass more legislation than what otherwise might have been possible.

A modest bill to provide lands to settlers at either no or minimal cost/cheap credit, for instance, had been vetoed as recently as 1860 by President James Buchanan, and the Republicans had called for passage of the bill in their platform that election year. With no obstacle in its path two years later, Congress passed and the President signed a bill that gave irresistible momentum to the settlement of the West and provided a safety valve for people stuck in a stagnant economy.

If you’re not in a state directly influenced by this piece of legislation (and maybe even if you are), you’ll be hard-pressed to recall, years after seeing it in a high-school history text, the year it passed. But in this case, it’s important that this bill passed in 1862 rather than 1857 or 1867. As just seen, the measure had no chance of passing prior to secession by the Confederacy in 1861; had it been proposed five years later, its impact on returning veterans would have been late and limited.

To start with, the act was part of a series of measures—including the Morrill Act, which helped to establish agricultural colleges through land grants, and the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing the first transcontinental railroad—meant, as Lincoln told Congress, “to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” In other words, before the GOP increasingly became a party of entrenched privilege in the Gilded Age, it fostered egalitarianism in a diversified economy.

This program was also, in a sense, a later version of “the American System,” the economic development system proposed by Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” Henry Clay. Key to the American system were federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands.

A slaveholder himself, the Senator from Kentucky was concerned that slavery would fracture the Union.  He was a member of the American Colonization Society, seeing colonization of freed slaves back in front as a means of removing the evil from American life. (Lincoln likewise advocated that position, and only abandoned it during wartime when it provoked a storm of criticism from abolitionists and freedmen such as Frederick Douglass.) Clay saw markets as another means of unifying the nation across sectional lines, this time through commerce.

The Homestead Act provided a shot in the arm to what was then the major American employment source: agriculture. Approximately 2 million farms existed in 1860, but owners of small farms had been squeezed by the Panic of 1857 and the rise of large farms (particularly Southern plantations).  For a fee of only $18, the Homestead Act allowed someone to stake out a claim, build a cabin, live on the land for five years, and, at the end of that time, “prove up”and claim the land for himself.

The effects of the Homestead Act were immense, including a nation more united by commerce and the creation of a breadbasket region west of the Mississippi that, in the 20^th century, would feed a world badly damaged by catastrophic wars. Above all, it created a more egalitarian society, opening greater opportunities for freedmen, war veterans, women (over 10% of claims were filed by women), and immigrants.(See, for instance, Fergus Bordewich's assessment of the legislation in The Wall Street Journal this past weekend.)

At the same time, it should be recognized that the act did not achieve the full extent of its promise—or, in at least one instance, its impact was deleterious:

·        

      *Approximately 60% of lands reverted to the government, since the soil (especially in the Dakota Territory) was not always favorable to settlement;

·         * Although 2 million emigrants settled in these trans-Mississippi territories, a number of these newcomers were even less than dirt-poor—they literally could not afford farm tools;

·         * The postwar wave of white settlers increasingly pushed Native-Americans off they had once held for years.

This Day in Western History (Custer’s Waterloo at Little Big Horn)

June 25, 1876—Libby Custer got her wild man of a husband to swear off drinking completely, and she induced him to reduce his swearing. But she was less successful at curbing his gambling instinct, and that tendency led Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer to be slaughtered with his men at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Black Hills of Montana, in one of the worst military disasters in American history.

For a battle that everyone agrees took no more than two hours--and, according to more recent reconstructions of Custer and his surrounded, panic-stricken 200-odd men, quickly disintegrated into a chaotic melee with no command or organization--Custer’s Last Stand has resulted in countless books, articles, and depictions in all kinds of media to match its endless controversy. Such fine historians as Stephen E. Ambrose (Crazy Horse and Custer), Evan S. Connell (Son of the Morning Star) and, most recently, Nathaniel Philbrick (The Last Stand) have weighted in.

(If you’d like some helpful discussions of how the big screen has treated the event, you can read essays by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. and Dee Brown on, respectively, They Died With Their Boots On and Fort Apache, a film with a fictional character strongly suggestive of the colonel, in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.)

You really can drown in all this ink, no matter how fascinating. But as the first paragraph in this post implied, there’s another way to think of the Custer controversy, one really out of left field, one that, nevertheless, is more relevant than you think: women. (Or, as one of my friends--and he knows who he is--might write: WOMEN!!!)

When Colonel Custer died with every one of his men in his ill-fated campaign against the Lakota Sioux led by Sitting Bull, there was one obvious candidate for responsibility for this devastating loss sustained by the U.S. Army: himself. He was a glory-hound of epic proportions, the Union Army’s youngest general in the Civil War but now dying to make his status permanent. (He was only a “brevet” general in the war--meaning that his title was temporary--and had become a colonel in the regular army after Appomattox.)

If he could achieve victory over the Sioux, Custer believed, he could not only receive that long-desired promotion but maybe even propel himself to the White House. It was hardly a pipe dream: from George Washington to the current President, Ulysses S. Grant, Americans had always loved a man on horseback.

That burning ambition led Custer to disregard the wishes of the Commanding General of the Army, William T. Sherman, who warned Custer’s superior office, General Alfred Terry: “Advise Custer to be prudent, not to take along any newspapermen.”(Said newsman, Mark Kellogg of the Bismarck Tribune, died in the battle, too.)

Custer’s frustrated ambitions led him to discipline his men harshly, drive them relentlessly (especially on the 300-mile road trip across grasslands, badlands, mountains, and rivers that took him to the Little Big Horn), and take chances with their lives.

The biggest gamble of all came when, upon stumbling across a Sioux and Northern Cheyenne encampment on the Little Big Horn, he decided: a) to divide his force on ground he didn’t know in the face of an enemy he couldn’t see, b) to ignore the intelligence of his Indian scouts, who warned that Sitting Bull’s forces outnumbered his; and b) to attack said enemy immediately, thereby disobeying orders that he wait until Terry’s force linked up with him.

And there was this, going several years back: the general was given to impetuosity, having been found guilty by a court martial for being absent without leave--a conviction that could have led to his being unceremoniously drummed out of the Army, but for the urging of General Grant that Custer’s sterling Civil War record with the Union cavalry be considered in the sentencing.

The table was set, then, for Custer, with some great degree of justification, to be tabbed as the cause of his own death. It didn’t help that President Grant, annoyed when the general testified about corruption in his administration, had only agreed to him joining the Indian campaign after intercession by Sherman and mentor Philip Sheridan.

Enter Elizabeth Bacon Custer, a.k.a. Libby. She had been the reason why her husband had gone AWOL in the first place. To her, his 60-mile ride to be with her wasn’t abandonment of his post, but rather proof of his devotion.

So now, in the aftermath of the battle, grief-stricken Libby picked up the standard on behalf of her husband. For the rest of her 57 years, she pleaded his case insistently, not only in personal appearances but in three books. Probably no well-known American general had as careful a minder of a flame as Custer had with his Libby.

Well, maybe I should reconsider that. There might be one other contender for devoted widow: Sallie Ann Corbell “LaSalle” Pickett. You might not know her name, but there’s a good chance you know her husband: George E. Pickett. Yes, the leader of another suicidal charge that ended in mass deaths on a ridge, at the Battle of Gettysburg. Pickett wasn't responsible for that slaughter--that, despite generations of Lost Cause wishes, rested squarely on the shoulders of Robert E. Lee--but he was involved with another disaster that doomed the Confederacy.

Pickett and Custer shared some similarities. Their paths intersected in April 1865, when the rebel leader’s foolish decision to leave his troops while he attended a shad bake led to the crucial Union breakthrough on the path to Richmond, aided, in no small measure, by Custer’s pressing of the advantage. Like Custer, Pickett made for a dashing picture with his long locks. Like Custer, he ran afoul of his commander, being relieved of duty by Robert E. Lee just before the surrender at Appomattox. Like Custer, he found postwar life stultifying (probably more so, in Pickett’s case, as he became involved in the insurance business). Like Custer, he died while still young, in the mid-1870s.

And now we turn to the soldiers’ widows.

Like Libby Custer, LaSalle was a pretty young thing who turned her husband into a fool for love. The two women married their mates during the war, and went to bat on behalf of their husbands when they could no longer defend themselves. And both women died in the 1930s, more than 50 years after the deaths of their men.

If there was one good, even historically accurate, aspect of They Died With Their Boots On, it was the casting of Olivia DeHavilland, one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most intelligent and vibrant actresses, to play Libby. The widow was everything the actress could want in a role: beautiful, intelligent (valedictorian of her class), and devoted to her husband.

How devoted? So devoted that Libby lectured on her hero throughout the world. So devoted that she ended up writing three books that formed a collective shrine to her husband.

The effect of these should not be underestimated. Historians have, by and large, accepted Grant’s assessment of battles and junior commanders in his Personal Memoirs. Given the failings of Custer I discussed just now, there was no reason to think his negative view of Custer wouldn’t take permanent root as well. But Libby’s advocacy assured this wouldn’t happen. In fact, Custer became in popular memory not a fool, nor even a victim, but a gallant martyr in America's westward expansion.

Amazingly, though, LaSalle Pickett trumped Libby. Libby might have been indefatigable, but she wasn't excessively creative with facts. But it’s now been pretty much conclusively established that LaSalle’s books contain what can only be called whoppers--starting, but not ending, with the tall tale that Congressman Abraham Lincoln championed her husband's entrance into West Point.

We also now know that LaSalle Pickett was a fabulous fabulist who concocted two entire collections of wartime letters supposedly written by the Confederate general.

It all makes you wonder about this quote--written in overheated prose right out of a romance novel--by her husband that she hauled out, in her nonfiction account Pickett and His Men, supporting her conclusion that he could not have been drunk at Gettysburg: "I promised the little girl who is waiting and praying for me down in Virginia that I would keep fresh upon my lips until we should meet again the breath of the violets she gave me when we parted."

Unlike Pickett, Custer would not be accused of drunkenness at crucial instances in his career: He gave up booze permanently in 1862, after an embarrassingly public debauch endangered his courtship of Libby.

Ironically, it was another man more credibly accused of heavy drinking while on duty, President Grant, who, for all the unjust accusations of him as a "butcher," was far more careful with his men's lives than the teatotaling "Son of the Morning Star."

(Incidentally, the image accompanying this post shows the battle as recalled more than 20 years later by a Native American survivor, Kicking Bear. It’s not as well-known as the white-created depictions of the calm, sharp-shooting Custer and his men, but it is very likely far more truthful.)

This Day in Western History (Pony Express Gallops Off to Boot Hill)

April 3, 1860—The Pony Express began its fast-mail delivery service with two riders proceeding in opposite directions—east from Sacramento, Calif., and west from St. Joseph, Mo. Synonymous with breathless adventure and the opening of the American West, the service might also be thought of as a kind of dotcom of the frontier—ushering in a new era in communications, only to die quickly when it was overtaken by a faulty business model, never-ending red ink, and an even more revolutionary competitor.

The courier service—formerly known as the Central Overland California and Peak’s Peak Express Co.—lasted only a year and a half, but its legend has never died. As Christopher Corbett pointed out in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal—and a more detailed article in the Spring 2010 issue of American Heritage—the efforts of dozens of mythmakers (including dime-store novelists, “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West show, filmmaker John Ford, and countless TV scenarists) were aided immeasurably by the scarcity of formal documentation about the business by founders William Hepburn Russell, William B. Waddell, and Alexander Majors. Mythmakers were then free to write whatever they wanted, and they used the freedom with abandon.

One thing you have to say for the firm’s founders: they had certainly identified a huge need in a growing market. With “manifest destiny” providing a philosophy and the California Gold Rush a motivation, settlers had flocked to the West in the decade before the Civil War—more than half a million strong. They certainly wanted goods, but, for now, they would be happy to have mail delivered dependably, and relatively quickly.

Even that would have been an improvement over the state of affairs existing at the time. Transporting mail primarily by water—by ship from New York to Panama, by horseback or rail across the Isthmus of Panama, then by ship again to San Francisco—could, at best, take three or four weeks.

And if you tried it by land? Not necessarily better—maybe even worse. Russell, Waddell and Majors were competing to siphon off business from John Butterfield’s Overland Mail Co., which advertised traveling time for its cross-country stagecoach mail service as 24 days. But you could find news delayed not just by weeks, but even months.

Given these conditions, California Senator William Gwin had little trouble persuading Russell of the necessity of starting this venture that promised mail delivery from New York to San Francisco in 10 days. But Russell had to coax Waddell and Majors to go along with it. Less than two years later, Russell must have surely felt their qualms were well-justified. They not only lost, but lost big--$200,000, a sum that ranked as a catastrophe for that time. It ruined the three men, certainly.

The end of the Pony Express has been attributed to the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in 1861. True enough. But other aspects of the business severely strained the partners’ resources anyway:

* The partners had already lost $300,000 when their wagons were attacked in 1858 under orders of the Mormons’ Brigham Young, who feared the presence of Federal troops sent by James Buchanan.

* Russell’s reputation for cutting ethical corners (he and a Dept. of Interior clerk had schemed to borrow illegally some bonds from an Indian trust fund) made many people think twice about investing in his enterprises.

* The logistics of setting up the service were nightmarish: buying more than 400 ponies; building 200 stations in desolate area;. hiring station managers and riders. That infrastructure was eventually created, but at huge cost to the owners.