American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  Growing expansive, Custer stretched his buckskin-clad legs, threw his head back, and shook out his golden curls.

  “Moran, Custer prides himself on his knowledge of men and his judge of character. And he has made up his mind about you. And when Custer makes up his mind, nothing in heaven or on earth can change it. Do you know why that is?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “Because of his unswerving and unshakable belief in himself.”

  “What’s in the general’s mind concerning me?” I asked.

  “You are a man fitted by experience and temperament to photograph Custer when he seizes the Black Hills in the name of the United States of America.”

  “I’m grateful to him—and to you, too, General.”

  “Not at all.”

  He waggled the fingers of his right hand at me like a king dismissing a retainer. I withdrew from his august presence.

  Did I know at Fort Lincoln that I would kill Custer? It’s hard to explain otherwise why I sought him out on the frontier and cajoled him with every ounce of guile my baffled heart could summon to take me with him into the last Indian stronghold on the continent. I wasn’t brave, and I had nothing to prove, either to him or to myself. True, I didn’t have what you would call prospects, but I wouldn’t have risked life and limb in the Black Hills to improve my situation— no, not even for photography, however much I was infatuated with the notion that the world could be subjugated by a wooden box fitted with a lens. Custer had become, for me— rightly or wrongly—a shiny emblem pinned over a national disease that had taken the Indian ponies and buffalo, as well as Little Will, Chen, Fire Briskly Burning, a soused, derelict Indian in Omaha—even my own mother. I suppose you think my mind was unbalanced, Jay; and maybe you’d be right. How could it have been otherwise?

  The Black Hills Expedition, July 2–August 30, 1874

  The following day, Custer and his 7th Cavalry, along with a hundred wagons, three Gatling guns, and a sixteen-piece band, left Fort Abraham Lincoln for the Black Hills, the holiest place on earth to the Lakota Sioux. They went in search of gold to ease the national crisis aggravated by drought, yellow fever, and a plague of locusts that could eat the clothes off a body and strip the fields of crops and the houses of their paint. The Black Hills belonged to the Lakota, given to them and their posterity by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. White men were forever barred from them. None cared so long as the darkly forested and stony hills were judged worthless for farming or grazing cattle. But treaty be damned! We had a right to the land by virtue of our need. The panic had worsened, money had lost its value, businesses had failed, factories had shut their doors, and foreclosures were driving folks to the wall or—for those who could stake themselves to the means of emigration—to the West. Some of them had an inkling there were riches in Dakota’s Black Hills: minerals, timber, maybe gold. They hoped for gold.

  Look, if your only escape from a grizzly bear is to jump into a canoe and push out onto the water, you don’t worry whose it is. And if the canoe’s rightful owner tries to stop you, you kill him. That’s what most people believe. More than likely, Jay, you do, too. And if I hadn’t wintered with the Ute, I’d probably believe the same.

  Two weeks later, we crossed the border into Montana and turned south. The next day, we entered Wyoming Territory. We followed the Belle Fourche River into southwestern Dakota and then skirted the north side of the Black Hills. I remember summer meadows brilliant with wildflowers. The men decorated their horses’ bridles, laughing gaily like cavaliers on a picnic. Custer wore yellow monkey flowers in his long golden hair. At the Belle Fourche, I photographed him in his tent. He was writing accounts of the expedition for various newspapers and magazines and wanted a “thoughtful” picture to accompany his stories when he sent them east.

  “Moran, we have discovered a rich and beautiful country,” he said, stabbing the inkwell with his pen—a gesture made to illustrate what he meant to do with the country’s inhabitants. (To tell Custer that the Black Hills had already been discovered by the Lakota would have been the same as a Roman slave’s insisting, “I’m sorry, Caesar, but you haven’t discovered Gaul; you’ve only stolen it.”)

  I bit my tongue and waited. Was it for this that Spotswood had told me to wait? To kill Custer? I’d made up my mind to finish him off, before there was not a bison left anywhere in America, except for those that would be herded into cattle cars and sent east to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. To be honest—a nearly impossible virtue for human beings, no matter if they wear a sheriff’s star or a parson’s collar—the slaughter of the buffalo and the nine hundred Indian ponies on the bank of the Washita River infuriated me more than the reduction of the Indians. I suppose my sympathies are not uncommon even in the present age, when a brute will sometimes weep over a dead dog.

  At the end of July, we stopped at French Creek, after a three-hundred-and-thirty-mile plod from Fort Lincoln, along what the Sioux called “Thieves’ Road”—after Custer, whom Red Cloud had named “the Thief.” On the first of August, the mining engineers found a gold band thirty miles wide that the general might give to posterity, like a wedding ring. The expedition would alchemize the once worthless Black Hills. Speculators and prospectors, store- and saloonkeepers, gamblers and whores, claim jumpers and road agents would pile in, insisting that the “Indian dogs in our manger” be swept aside.

  The general wanted his discovery commemorated, and I obliged with a photograph of him handing a message to Charley Reynolds, his chief scout, who carried the news to Fort Laramie. From there, it lit out by telegraph to the states back east and to the papers. Custer would glory, bask, and wallow in his fame for the rest of his life, which was, thankfully, short.

  By winter, fifteen thousand emigrants had already arrived in the Black Hills—too many for the army to oust or for the Indians to kill. In the spring, Red Cloud and other of the Lakota’s most illustrious chiefs went to Washington to protest against the incursion into their most hallowed ground. They were feted by their Great White Father; they ate off china plates. They were shown the city—even treated to an artillery salute, intended, perhaps, as a demonstration of American military strength. Their entreaties were ignored. Red Cloud and the others returned to the Sioux Reservation, their hope of gaining the president’s sympathy now a forlorn one. Grant issued an executive order to clean out the Black Hills of “hostiles.” It would be open season on the last buffalo herds. After this piece of treachery, I didn’t much care for Grant. I considered sending him my medal once again, but something told me I’d have need of it.

  “Moran, I want you to take a picture of me at the summit of Harney Peak.”

  “A fine idea, General.”

  “I want it to insinuate in the minds of all who see it that at Custer’s feet lie the immense riches of a new world. For that is what it is, Moran. A new and glorious world.”

  “I can do that, sir. I’ll take it with the sun shining on the land, as if God Almighty Himself were sanctifying it for the United States!”

  “So long as the light also shines on me.”

  Increasingly in my presence, he would drop the affectation of referring to himself as “Custer”—most likely because he ceased to regard me as someone apart from himself. I was absorbed into the Custer persona; he expropriated me just as he intended to steal—by force of eminent domain—the Black Hills from the Indians. Or maybe I was no more than a camera operated by his own inordinate egotism.

  “Naturally, General.”

  I’d also make a glass plate of the summit undefiled by Custer’s presence and would later send it to Walt Whitman.

  William Jackson once said that photography makes ghosts of the world and that each picture shrinks the subject. He wasn’t talking about its representation—not entirely; he meant that the subject matter itself grew smaller each time it was photographed. A mountain was diminished by every exposure. After a while, it would have no more substance than cottonwood lint or ideas in the mind of somebody w
ho didn’t much care to use it. If you took enough pictures of the West, the West would disappear. People would prefer to see life through their stereopticons. At the time, I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about; but after having taken so many pictures for so many years, I’ve come to understand him. I regret having allowed myself, through funk and faintheartedness, to shrink before his eyes during that famishing winter when I spent nearly all my life’s allotment of love.

  Known by the Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers (the place where Black Elk had his vision of the still point of the turning world), Harney Peak was named for General William S. Harney, hero of the Battle of Ash Hollow, waged against the Sioux, who called him “Woman Killer.” It was renamed Mount Rushmore to honor a New York City pettifogger during a pleasure excursion in 1885. By then, Crazy Horse had been killed, and Red Cloud was an old man living on a reservation, impoverished and forgotten. On Harney Peak, the gigantic likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt will one day be carved in granite. The idea that the head of Red Cloud—the great Lakota war chief who signed the Treaty of 1868 to preserve the land and bison for his people—should be included among them will be rejected.

  Red Cloud said, “God placed these hills here for my wealth.”

  Custer said, “One day this land will be worth so much, you won’t be able to buy its dust.”

  Sitting Bull said, “I won’t sell even so much of my land as the dust.”

  Crazy Horse said, “One does not sell the land on which the people walk.”

  Crazy Horse appeared to me many times during the year when I thought my head would break open like an egg and my addled brain slip out onto the pillow, damp from fever dreams. That was the year I was nearly driven insane by terrifying premonitions.

  Black Elk said, “I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”

  Red Cloud said, “The white men made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they kept one: They promised to take our land, and they took it.”

  I’d promised myself that I would put an end to Custer, but it’s hard to kill a man in cold blood. Especially a man I found—in spite of myself—fascinating. My perfect hatred for him was spoiled by a particle of envy. There was something of Lincoln in my makeup—if you’ll forgive my presumptuousness—and also something of Custer. Later on, Crazy Horse would muddle me even more. I would kill the general, but I’d have to work myself up to it.

  Washington City, March 28–April 21, 1876

  George Armstrong Custer was another American meteor: a man fated to burn brightly, only to be extinguished in the cold sea of time and forgetfulness. The forgetfulness reserved for legendary men and women, whose true characters—good or bad—lie buried beneath the sediment of stories told about them. Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse were also destined for oblivion, and even Lincoln is obscured by the thickets of myth that have grown up around him. Unlike them, however, Custer contrived his own deification. He campaigned against the forces of anonymity that overwhelm all but the most illustrious or infamous of our kind. He exaggerated his virtues and colored his vices, both of which were centered on a morbid courage. He risked his life and, unpardonably, the lives of men under his command. He wrote dispatches to the newspapers and the illustrated weeklies of the day concerning his exploits in order to locate himself at the center of stirring events. The Indians abominated him. Many whites despised him, but I suspect that most admired his dash and recklessness. More than any other man I can name, Custer was the stamp and image of Manifest Destiny and the perfect type of western man: heroic, lawless, and undisciplined.

  After the expedition’s triumphant return to Fort Lincoln, Custer stayed at the fort with Libbie, while Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse began to gather defiant bands of Cheyenne and Sioux up in the Powder River Country of Wyoming Territory, between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. I continued, in effect, as Custer’s personal photographer, recording moments, both public and private, for the history that would one day open its bloody maw to receive him. At his request—a Custer request was a command impossible to refuse—I produced a series of prints for the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia: the general with Bloody Knife, his favorite Indian scout; with the Custers’ pack of eighty dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux; with Libbie in the parlor of their private quarters at the fort; and the general striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoléon’s: arms folded across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent destiny.

  At the end of March 1876, Custer was summoned to Washington to testify at proceedings brought against Secretary of War Belknap, accused of enriching himself by the unlawful sale of civilian contracts at western forts.

  “Moran, I want you to go east with me,” he said while I immortalized him lacing up his cavalry boots. “Heads are going to roll in Washington, Moran, and Custer needs to be seen with his hand on the lever of the guillotine.”

  “Naturally, General.”

  I hadn’t been east since ’65, and the thought of visiting there pleased me.

  “Be sure to take the stereo camera,” he said. “My pictures are in great demand ever since I discovered gold.”

  “Excellent idea, General!”

  “Libbie’s grateful to you, Moran, for sharing your royalties with her. She’s spruced our quarters with new curtains and furniture. Did I ever tell you that the writing table she’s so partial to is the very same one where Lee signed the articles of surrender at Appomattox Court House?”

  “No, sir.”

  I’d heard it often but pretended otherwise. I needed to stay on his good side if I was to get close enough to kill him.

  “Sheridan gave it to me at the McClean house—a gift for Libbie. He doted on her.”

  The Civil War began in Wilmer McClean’s front yard in Manassas and ended in the parlor of his house in Appomattox, where he’d moved his family to escape the strife. There is a thread to tie together the most divergent events or the most unlikely persons, if one can find it.

  We rode to Washington on the transcontinental railroad. My apparatus was packed in the baggage car. When we arrived at the Baltimore & Ohio Depot, where I’d set out with the body of Mr. Lincoln eleven years before, Custer waited inside the car until I could arrange the camera, prepare a negative, and take his picture as he descended onto the platform. I never saw a bigger ass than George Armstrong Custer! That morning in Washington, you might have thought it was Jesus arriving in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, so laden with a tragic nobility did he appear. While we attended the impeachment hearings, I photographed him in his fancy regimentals, with a hand on the Holy Bible, swearing to tell the truth—a feat for someone used to embroidery; on the Capitol steps; outside Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse and in the Arsenal courtyard, where she was hanged; by the Potomac, ready to throw a silver dollar across it—he’d have chopped down a cherry tree if he’d had a hatchet—and in a number of other poignant tableaux.

  One picture I didn’t take was of Custer knocking at the White House door; Grant refused to let him inside. He was furious with Custer for having implicated his brother Orvil in the trading-post scandal and, on the twenty-first of April, relieved him of his command. Happily, it was restored in time for the Little Bighorn. Later on, Orvil was committed to an insane asylum in New Jersey for a “monomania for large speculations.”

  “Moran,” said Custer while we stood at the hotel bar drinking lemonade. He had taken the pledge in ’61, after a disgraceful exhibition in front of his sweetheart, Libbie, and her starched father.

  “Yes, General?”

  “I want to go to Philadelphia to see the exposition.”

  “What about the Sioux War?” I asked.

  “The Sioux will await Custer’s ple
asure. I want to see my pictures.”

  Camden, New Jersey, April 22, 1876

  While Custer was admiring himself in Philadelphia, I crossed the Delaware on the Camden ferry and visited Whitman. A grievous stroke suffered three years earlier had obliged him to leave Washington and move into his brother George’s Camden house. When George showed me into the front room, I found Whitman slumped on a sofa, scratching at foolscap with a pen. I thought he must be composing new verses for his Leaves, but on closer inspection, I saw what appeared to be a genealogy, perhaps the Whitman family tree. We had believed his book, like the poet himself, to be unstoppable; that even in death, he would manage to enlarge it with editions as natural as the rings marking a tree’s annual increase. But now he was done with it and looked like a man preparing to give up the ghost. His rude health and rough manner had deserted him. He was worn-out, like the nap of a corduroy suit. I saw the bones of his winter and—when he lifted his gaunt face to mine—the remnant light that time conspired to quench. I thought then that he must be a great soul, however much his imperfections kept him human.

  “I’m Stephen Moran,” I said, since he didn’t recognize in me the boy he had consoled in the Armory Square Hospital. I thought my name would be sufficient to bring to mind the author of the western photographs I’d been sending him ever since Bear River City.

  “Stephen Moran . . .” he repeated in bewilderment.

  I hunted the room with my eyes; saw an oil painted by his friend, the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins, and on the wall, above a fernery, a photograph of William Henry Jackson that I’d taken in the Wasatch Range, after our winter sojourn with the Ute.

  “I took this picture,” I said. “Six years ago, in northern Utah.”

  “Ah! Now I recall the name. It’s a fine photograph, Mr. Moran. I’ve admired the others you’ve kindly sent to me. I took inspiration from them.”

  “Do you know why I sent them?”

  His bemused look grieved me, for it spoke of the slippage of a great mind toward its end.