“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 who 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.