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UBC: Son of the Morning Star
Apr. 22nd, 2010 12:56 pmConnell, Evan S. Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984.
Usually when I say a book is interesting, I mean the subject matter is interesting, or the author's insights are interesting. Both those things are true of Son of the Morning Star, but it is also true that the book is interesting, because Connell made some definitely non-standard choices about his narrative.
This is not a linear exploration of the battle; the book starts with the first people to discover the disaster, and then works its way in and out, forward and back, in a set of loops or spirals, reaching back into the biographies of the major and minor players and forward into the survivors' lives and the fates of the bodies of the dead. When I finished it, the first thing I did was turn to the beginning and start reading again, because I know I missed things the first time around.
Not linear, but not disorganized. I never had the feeling that Connell didn't know what he was doing or that he didn't have a reason for his choices, even if I can't see what that reason is.
He tells the story from all sides: the Sioux and Cheyennes, the Seventh Cavalry, the Arikara and Crow scouts. The people who survived, the people who didn't. He talks about Custer's dogs; he talks about the horses--not just Comanche, the legendary "only survivor," but the horses who died, the other horses who survived, the Sioux and Cheyenne ponies. Connell pays attention to everyone. He's excellent at showing the arrogance, greed, self-righteousness, blind bigotry, and gross entitlement issues of most nineteenth-century white Americans (although not all nineteenth-century white Americans--he also searches out the exceptions), but he doesn't idealize the Sioux. The tribes who chose to help the U.S. Army had good reasons of their own, and Connell shows those, too.
Custer is at the center of the book, but Connell is very aware of just how much that center is an absence, of how much of Custer is lost to us and how difficult it is, therefore, to reconstruct his reasoning. He both shows and talks about the difficulties in the eyewitness testimony--the exaggerations and self-aggrandizements from both whites and Native Americans; the damage to the truth done by the aggressive efforts of whites to impose their own narratives and interpretations, until the Native Americans essentially gave in and told the story the whites wanted to hear; the simple actions of time--erosion and conflation--on human memory.
The one thing I wish is that there'd been enough production budget to include pictures. Connell talks about portraits a lot, from Frederick Benteen to Rain in the Face, and I would love for those portraits to be able to accompany the text. To be clear: that's not a flaw in what Connell wrote or something I blame Connell for; it's just something that would be an excellent addition.
Usually when I say a book is interesting, I mean the subject matter is interesting, or the author's insights are interesting. Both those things are true of Son of the Morning Star, but it is also true that the book is interesting, because Connell made some definitely non-standard choices about his narrative.
This is not a linear exploration of the battle; the book starts with the first people to discover the disaster, and then works its way in and out, forward and back, in a set of loops or spirals, reaching back into the biographies of the major and minor players and forward into the survivors' lives and the fates of the bodies of the dead. When I finished it, the first thing I did was turn to the beginning and start reading again, because I know I missed things the first time around.
Not linear, but not disorganized. I never had the feeling that Connell didn't know what he was doing or that he didn't have a reason for his choices, even if I can't see what that reason is.
He tells the story from all sides: the Sioux and Cheyennes, the Seventh Cavalry, the Arikara and Crow scouts. The people who survived, the people who didn't. He talks about Custer's dogs; he talks about the horses--not just Comanche, the legendary "only survivor," but the horses who died, the other horses who survived, the Sioux and Cheyenne ponies. Connell pays attention to everyone. He's excellent at showing the arrogance, greed, self-righteousness, blind bigotry, and gross entitlement issues of most nineteenth-century white Americans (although not all nineteenth-century white Americans--he also searches out the exceptions), but he doesn't idealize the Sioux. The tribes who chose to help the U.S. Army had good reasons of their own, and Connell shows those, too.
Custer is at the center of the book, but Connell is very aware of just how much that center is an absence, of how much of Custer is lost to us and how difficult it is, therefore, to reconstruct his reasoning. He both shows and talks about the difficulties in the eyewitness testimony--the exaggerations and self-aggrandizements from both whites and Native Americans; the damage to the truth done by the aggressive efforts of whites to impose their own narratives and interpretations, until the Native Americans essentially gave in and told the story the whites wanted to hear; the simple actions of time--erosion and conflation--on human memory.
The one thing I wish is that there'd been enough production budget to include pictures. Connell talks about portraits a lot, from Frederick Benteen to Rain in the Face, and I would love for those portraits to be able to accompany the text. To be clear: that's not a flaw in what Connell wrote or something I blame Connell for; it's just something that would be an excellent addition.
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