Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians by James Welch (review)

Reviews 301 Payette River in Idaho the spring of 1978. The rapid in which he died is now called Blackadar Drop, a Class III+ run. The biography has minor grammatical and usage errors, but carves for the reader a clear three-dimensional picture of the man. VERNE HUSER AlbuquerqueAcademy KillingCuster:TheBattleoftheLittleBighornand theFateofthePlainsIndians. ByjamesWelch, with Paul Stekler. (New York: Norton, 1994. 320 pages, $25.00.) James Welch’s first published foray into nonfiction resulted from work he did writing ascriptfor documentaryfilmmaker PaulSteklerand continues atheme central to all of his writing to date: that Native Americans “are not noble red men. Nor savages. These are Native Americans. Human Beings.”To his credit he largely accomplishes this task even-handedly, writing with empathy for individuals from every side (including Indians who helped the whites against their own people), while focusing on the much analyzed yet still magnetic Custer myth. From the Indian art of the attractive dustjacket picturing warriors who have slain soldiers to the multilayered meanings ofthe tide, the bookessentiallyfocuses on both the literal and figurative necessityofkilling the Custer mythas it has been typicallyportrayed in America. Like many other efforts dealing with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it also extends into many of white America’s genocidal efforts against the Native Americans, including the Marias River massacre, the death of Sitting Bull, and Wounded Knee. In the process, KillingCusterattempts to pull these and other events together to relate them to each other more deeply, carrying their influences on to the present. But it never strays farfrom Custer, afigure thatWelch, like so many before him, appears to find irresistible (perhaps despite himself, since one of his avowed purposes is to decenter Custer). The narrative form, at once chronological and associative, reflects both the Anglo and the Indian worlds that Welch himself inhabits. In fact, the book is best when personal, whether invoking his own analyses, including information connecting to some of his fictional work, or discussing how he sees others, especially modern Native Ameri­ cans he metwhile working on the documentaryproject (including an interesting vignette about an encounter with Russell Means).At timesWelch’shumor shines through aswell. Battle scenes, especially the Little Bighorn, are well drawn. Manyanecdotes and snippets of information are intriguing. The photographs and drawings included are often fasci­ nating, sometimes graphic, adding to and reinforcing the text—one photo, of a soldier mutilated near FortWallace, Kansas, isworthy of Cormac McCarthy's BloodMeridian. Yet KillingCusterisarather uneven work. Welch never seems entirely at home in the nonfictional world, and skills commonly found in his fiction that are also relevant to nonfiction rarely surface, such as vividly-drawn characters and the lyrical style running throughout mostofFoolsCroiv, his bestwork. In fact, the book even contains some readily visible errors and slips. For instance, Welch more than once incorrectly labels Custer “General”while the soldier is in the West; several points of repetition are overly-detailed to the point that they become redundancies; much of the information islittle more than rehash (though perhaps necessarily so); apicture ismisidentified as “Custer’sLastNote” when in fact he did not write it himself, as the text itself notes. Stekler’s Afterword is basically redundant, contributing little. 302 WesternAmerican Literature In the end, though, this book supplies another dimension to the Custercanon and is worthwhile, engaging reading. On the whole Welch has written another work showing whyhe was awarded the 1994 Western LiteratureAssociation Distinguished Achievement Award. DAVID N. CREMEAN Bowling Green State University Essays on the Changing Images of the Southwest. Edited by Richard Francaviglia and David Narrett. (College Station: Texas A&MUniversity Press, 1994. 153 pages, $24.50.) The five essays in this volume “are an outcome of’—perhaps revised rather than printed verbatim?—the 1993 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington. Students of literature should welcome these insights from other disciplines. The firstessay, Richard Francaviglia’s “Elusive Land: Changing Geographical Images of the Southwest,”seems byfar the most interesting. His generalizations though, includ­ ing the central one about the impossibilityof defining the region atall, seem self-evident, as if readers could have figured them out had they taken the trouble. For instance, the term “southwest,” Francaviglia argues, was linked to the doctrine...