Word: custers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Custer's battlefield yields clues to old mysteries
...afternoon of June 25,1876, with guns blazing and sandy hair shining, Lieut. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, along with some 220 of the troopers under his command, was massacred near Montana's Little Bighorn River. The secrets of his last stand against more than 2,500 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors were buried with him. There were no white survivors to tell the tale, but plenty of folks back East were ready to propel Custer directly into legend as a straight-shooting hero. The years have only served to embellish the myths and mysteries...
...headstones that dot the battleground are supposed to mark the site where each soldier fell, but some may be inaccurate, positioned later for dramatic effect. With so few clues, there are all sorts of unanswered questions: Did Custer die on the gentle hill where his body was found, or by the river as Indian tales say? Did the last troopers, as Indian veterans claimed, commit suicide to avoid being tortured? "The myths around Custer and the battle have become much bigger than the facts," says Vine Deloria, a Sioux author. "This could help set the record straight...
...more stunned as I see my friends, who, caught up in the headiness of a military victory, have become apologists for our invasion. When the thrill of combat subsides, I hope this adventure will become the last instance of America's primitive behavior, as symbolized by General Custer and his slaughter of the Indians. In the future, I urge that we have respect for all life, Cuban as well as Grenadian as well as American...
Last Stands takes its title from Custer's misadventure in 1876. The author watches old age ambush the adults around him. His grandmother loses interest in living. Her husband leaves her and enters an old soldiers home in Washington. Hilary's father suffers a physical breakdown in New York City; the newspapers make much of the once famous poet's nearly starving to death in a residential hotel. His mother, now launched on a teaching career, rescues her estranged husband from his solitude and takes in her vegetating mother from Kansas City. "Well, what...