Customer Reviews

Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Evan Connell has written a powerful book. It is a balanced presentation of George Armstrong Custer, the post-Civil War Indian Wars, Plains Indians and the myth of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Facts abound. I started this book thinking it would primarily focus on Gen. Custer and the fight. While those topics are the framework of the book, Connell spends quite a bit of time exploring various indian chiefs, indian practices, previous conflicts and the conditions that produced one of our country's most celebrated battles. First person quotes are abundent and the author usually produces two or more sides to every episode. These explorations underscore how difficult getting at a true history is, particulary when pride and ego rest on a particular telling of an event. He has done very good research.

This is a brutal book. American and indian savagry are laid bare. Warfare and existence on the frontier were not pretty. The "rules" of war were abandoned by both sides with regard to the taking of prisoners or the frequent butchering of women and children along with those unlucky enough to be in the path of maurading soldiers or indian bands. Connell's book leaves no doubt that American notions of racial superiority, mainfest destiny and economics created the situation in which the indians would fight in the extreme to protect their lands from white encroachment. However, the author also underscores that most of the indian tribes were brutal and ruthless when attacking other tribes, lone indians and in their own rituals and customs. Had America respected it's indian treaties, it can be argued that the indian lands still would have had atrocities visited upon them as various tribes concentrated their full time attentions on settling the wrongs each felt had been metted out by other red men. His refusal to treat the indian as a politically correct manifestation of mother nature is refreshing and allows for a very balanced telling of the story.

The author has a unique writing style. He doesn't come to a fork in the road without taking it. These side tracks and tangents allow him to explore in full the charactors and milieu attendent to The Last Stand. However, they are presented in no particular order or chronology. The author paints a strong impression rather than presenting an ordered and structured telling of a compelling tale. This incohesion is so pronounced that the end of a chapter has no meaning other than to allow one to catch one's breath before plunging into the next twenty pages of free associations.

My opinion of this book changed several times during my reading. In the beginning, I found it hard to get into because of it's meandering style. But the vignettes, characters, facts and writing are all compelling. His style will require some adjustment to the frequent reader of history. But, by the end the reader will know that they have immersed themselvs in a darn good story that fascinates.

Connell has one of the most unorthodox writing styles of any history writer I've read but somehow it works brilliantly. A proper chronological order is completely disregarded and Connell jumps all over the place, yet somehow is able to keep the reader right along with him. It reminds me of listening to an old Vet tell war stories and finish half a story and skip to something completely unrelated again and again and again until you can't remember where he originally started the conversation from. Yet, just like listening to the proud hero tell his tales, it is completely fascinating and you will hang on every word.
A prime example of this is within the first ten pages of the book, Connell is writing about President Hayes' Court of Inquiry, three years AFTER the battle.
Another thing which Connell does masterfully is tell BOTH sides of the tale. The Dakota and 7th Cavalry are given equal weight throughout the book and the author pours pertinent information as well as trivial but entertaining facts at the reader. And along with giving biographies on Reno and Benteen, the reader learns just as much background information on Gall, Crazy Horse and Two Moon.
About the only person I suggest shy away from this book is a college student cramming for a paper because there's no way they'd be able to find the needed info with Connell's writing style. However, if they don't procrastinate and began reading at the beginning of the semester, I promise you won't find another book with more info on the subject.
-Warning-
If you do read "Son of the Morning Star," be prepared to take a trip out to the high plains of Montana to see the battlefield. Connell's book instilled a 'must-see' desire into me on having to see the Bighorn for myself and I plan to go next summer. See you there!

I have read many books about Custer, Little Big Horn and the plains indian wars, but this one is truly the very best of the lot. Connell has given us an exellent biography of Custer, but we also get to know such men as Major Reno and Captain Benteen. Indians such as Sitting Bull, Gall and Crazy Horse are also prominently featured in this treasure of a book. This is so much more than a book about Custer and his last stand at Little Big Horn river in 1876. It's a book about the whole drama, that is the conquering of the west. Also, the photo section is exellent and the bibliography is unparalelled. Two very good maps helps the reader follow the movements in the 1876 indian campaign. If You're gonna buy just one book about the American west, please choose "Son Of The Morning Star". It's history, for sure, but it's not boring. It's also a source book in the best sence of the word, not to mention a literary masterpiece. Connell is a novelist, and it shows in his quick and precise eye for charaters in the play and their often peculiar behavior and actions. The heroes and/or villains is only so human in this highly entertaining book that leaves the reader wanting more. I have so far never read a better book, fact or fiction. Why don't You read it too?

Like many historic events of the nineteenth century--especially those of a tragic nature--the events that took place at The Little Bighorn were shrouded for decades in sensationalism to a greater or lesser degree. Misconceptions and inaccuracies have abounded as the story of Custer and his ill-fated troops has been told and retold in print and on the big screen.

I was looking for a book that would go a long way in providing an objective view of the events surrounding The Battle of the Little Bighorn and found such a book in Son of the Morning Star.

Evan S. Connell does a masterful job of telling the story. He provides excellent background history and tells how information, or the lack thereof, available to Custer at the time may have contributed to his ultimate demise. Arrogance and racism have long been attributed to Custer's disastrous campaign but Connell helps paint probably the most accurate and objective portrait of the colorful general to date. Custer was arrogant but Connell shows that there was much more to the story.

A great read!

Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star is a masterful book that defies catagorization. It isn't quite history but it isn't fiction either. Connell has taken a mountain of historical detail, including quotations from letters, transcripts, newspapers and interviews, and arranged them in a kind of narrative montage that gives us the story of Custer at the Little Bighorn in a more complete way than we have ever experienced it before. His book begins a couple of days after the battle - when Custer's absence is still unexplained - with the discovery of the remains of Custer's troop. The realization of what they are seeing comes slowly to the soldiers that find the bodies, just as the big picture of what happened comes slowly to the reader - detail by detail.

The book is full of wonderful digressions, told in the same way as the main story. These provide background information on all the major participants (Indian as well as cavalry officers) and many minor characters as well, and the story of their lives following the massacre and the inevitable search for a scapegoat.

This is a unique and beautiful book. Connell seems to have lived with the research for this book for a long time because he has internalized it beautifully and knows just what quotes and anecdotes to juxtapose in order to create the picture he wants. I can't remember ever reading anything quite like this and certainly seldom have a book match it for emotional impact. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

Between the opening words of Evan S. Connell's brilliant historical novel ("Lt. James Bradley led a detachment of Crow Indian scouts up the Bighorn Valley....") to the inevitable final thought ("....when I was riding among the dead, my pony may have kicked dirt upon his body..."), readers of "Son of the Morning Star are in for an epic journey. A stunningly detailed work, Connell's novel examines the United States' treatment of the Native American, battles fought and lost on the Montana plains and a graphic pioneer history that should make most professors squirm.

Perhaps the beauty of "Son of the Morning Star," one of the finest American historical novels ever written, is that it throws caution to the wind, much like the reckless George Armstrong Custer himself, and simply lets the bullets fly. Very few stones are left unturned. Readers who reach the eventual conclusion (which should not be too difficult, as this novel is difficult to put down) will most likely have a different view about the American West and the men who died upon its dusty plains.

There are about a thousand books that have been written about this battle and the man who led the charge down into the Big Horn Valley on that hot day in June of 1876. But nary a one has come close to capturing the kind of spirit, with a dash of incredibly dry wit, that Connell put into his heartfelt work. There are no political motivations here, and Connell is not about to create a tome of American propaganda. Thus "Son of the Morning Star" explodes from its pages, born of an obsession for exposing the leathery truth amidst the smoke and dust of haunting death. He comes ever so close, and his work resembles a trembling documentary camera lens, intensely examining the fears and rage that brought about this bloody clash upon the canvas of history.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves why this story refuses to go away? Connell does. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why such a brutal campaign and battle even took place? Connell does. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why man is so intent upon creating battles and eventually war when preventive discussion is available? Connell does. And perhaps we should ask ourselves why Custer rode down into that valley, outnumbered five to one, in a furious attempt at beating the odds for the sake of United States political glory? Connell does.

I like the fact that in Connell's nonfiction journey, there are no heroes or villains. Crazy Horse is just as eccentric as Custer. Sitting Bull is just as hackingly grandiose as Sherman. Benteen is just as ornery as Gall. These Native Americans had much to fight for on this day, and this battle would become the last stand for the way of life of an ancient era. Connell's not trying to reveal what happened during the Seventh Cavalry's final desperate moments on that dusty, storied hill. He's not even interested in who fell last. Granted, he does examine both issues, but what fascinates Connell is why this battle haunts so many Americans to this very day.

The dynamic of this legend and its many haunting sounds, still reverberating across our country so many years later, is the mournful music he's trying to decipher. Much like a person who looks towards the echo to see the ghost they know is there, Connell finds nothing but gaping silence and stripped despair. Connell's "Son of the Morning Star" captures these crying ghosts in a hazy antique bottle, and there he finds wisdom for the modern era......

I think this balanced account of the lives of George Armstrong Custer, his wife and soul mate Libby, certain of Custer's men, and those Plains Indians who opposed his efforts to pacify them, is being deliberately suppressed by those in modern times who are every bit as guilty in their "PC" version of Little Big Horn and the Indian Wars as were those nineteenth-century figures who portrayed the Sioux as savages, Custer as a paladin and a martyr, and the push west as a holy Christian crusade. Connell tells the story of the violent, tragic era as it surely was, with one side struggling viciously for its very life within its ancient homeland, and the other exerting manifest destiny while sowing the seeds of an industrial democracy in what was viewed as the open frontier of a continent already legally divided and waiting for white occupation. I applaud Connell's bravery in portrying Custer as something other than an insane bloodlusting bigot. Under Connell's educated treatment, the Custer who emerges in Son of the Morning Star is a man deeply in love with his wife, a man of self-confidence, cocky, ambitious, an adventure seeker who enjoyed a remarkable run of good fortune in battle, until the day that luck abandoned him altogether. Custer does not seem to have hated his Indian foes so much as merely relished the soldier's life and the glory doing battle against the "redskins" brought to him. Custer, a pop culture and media superstar of the 1870's, clearly had every intention of making a run for the White House, and had he survived a final, successful campaign in Montana, he might well have become President of the United States in the troubled election of 1876. Furthermore, in this book we are given Little Big Horn as it happened, nearly minute by minute. I don't know of any other writer who has composed an account of Little Big Horn that makes it seem so much like he was there to observe it unfold. Under Connell's prose, the dreary, horrific battle seems as recent as yesterday.

This slightly dated work by an accomplished novelist is well worth slugging through its lack of organization and meanderings to extract the huge compendium of facts contained therein. Please note; while other readers have thought this was an historical novel, it isn't fiction. It would deserve five stars if better organized and possessed a better index, but alas, one can't have everything. The reader will read and note a fact or story, but find himself unable to locate it later without reading through the entire book again.

The "slightly dated" aspect is deserved as it, a 1984 work, does not contain the archeological data unearthed by Fox et al since that time. Nonetheless, for sheer facts, statements, and opinions, this is the reader's single best source on the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

I recommend this book for purchase and reading.

I am increasingly convinced that a book like this brings out a basic personality difference in readers. I loved it, especially its many detours into topics that may be only tangentially related to Custer (like the scalping techniques of different tribes) but which I found endlessly fascinating. On the other hand, some friends to whom I breathlessly told them you "must read this!" found Connell's side trips too distracting. I have found similar reactions to Hughes' Fatal Shore about the founding of Australia (another book that I loved but others have found meandering). Neither reaction is 'right' or 'wrong' but worth keeping in mind as you decide whether to buy this book. If you are willing to put yourself in Connell's hands and want to learn all sorts of lessons about the Wild West (occasionally bordering on the odd and arcane but always interesting), you'll love this book. If you get frustrated when an author takes you off the narrative path and you really want a focused biography of Custer, then this book is not for you. Again, I found the book superb but can understand where some of the more negative reviews are coming from depending upon the reader's predelictions.

Connell brings a novelist and poet's gifts to the writing of history. Would that all historians wrote prose like this. In a unique, non-linear style, nearly every aspect and detail, macroscopic and mundane, of the Little Bighorn campaign is laid before us, as well as antecedent and peripheral matters relating to it. One of the many marvels of the book is the way Connell writes unflinchingly about a brutal and tragic period, yet with a dry sense of humor that compels one to read passage after passage all over again, and aloud to anyone who will listen. Connell would be a great dinner guest, and friend to meet for a beer. I have read Son of the Morning Star three times, not counting innumerable browsings which threaten to draw me into the entire work yet another time. I've nearly memorized entire passages without intending to. Some may feel uncomfortable at a similarity Connell draws between the Nazi genocide and the European-American destuction of the Native American cultures and way of life. But hey, no one likes an attack on his national mythology, justified as it may be. Connell neither deifies nor demonizes Custer (or any other man or woman in the story), but treats him as a fascinating, flawed human being. His account is compassionate, but unrelenting in its exposure of human frailty and folly, wherever it may be found in the complex mosaic of history. Buy this book, enjoy, re-read, and hope that Connell takes up the historian's pen again