George Armstrong Custer

An account of the author's travels in the Levant (Near East) during World War II and after, and his impressions of persons and places in Arab lands.

The personal letters of General Custer and his wife Elizabeth Bacon, are well worth reading for their picture of frontier army life and for tracing Custer's career on the western plains. Both Custers were prolific and prolix letter-writers. Although the letters wer edited and pre-selected, they, along with Merington's running commentary, make this work deserving.

Taken from George Armstrong Custer's own writings, An Autobiography of General Custer is the true story of one of the most praised and most despised - though surely among the most remembered - American military heroes. Indeed few figures in ancient and recent history were as wildly cheered and roundly hated as General Custer. In the evenings, on post and during his various leaves, Custer would sit at the dining room table with his beloved wife, Libby, and together they would compose the various stories of his exploits. These stories would eventually become the book My Life on the Plains. A bestseller in its time, My Life on the Plains is the basis for Custer's autobiography. In the years following the Civil War, Custer had gained a reputation as a bold and inventive leader of the calvary. After being temporarily forced into retirement, Custer was given command of an expedition to help subjugate the native people of the Great Plains and to force them onto reservations. Along the way, he enlisted the help of and eventually befriended many Indians, including Little Robe, Mo-nah-se-tah, and the son of Satanta, chief of the Kiowas. Through An Autobiography of General Custer, Custer provides many descriptive details about military life and events such as the establishment of Camp Supply, the Battle of Washita, and the rescue of Miss Morgan and Mrs. White, two women who had been kidnapped and help prisoner by the Cheyennes. Custer's last entry comes in the form of a report written during the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873. He is about to embark upon the campaign that would eventually lead to the Battle of Little Bighorn and "Custer's Last Stand" when his story comes to an end. As Custer was unable to write about his most famous battle, the Autobiography concludes with a newspaper journalist's account of an interview with Sitting Bull, who had since escaped to Canada. In this interview, which took place during the 1880s, the great Chief looks back on the battle and offers his own description of Custer's Last Stand.