UBC: With Custer's Cavalry
Mar. 14th, 2010 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyFougera, Katherine Gibson. With Custer's Cavalry. 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
This book is the memoir of Katherine Garrett Gibson; since it has no critical apparatus, it's impossible to tell how much of what we get is what she herself wrote and how much she was edited and/or expanded by her daughter (Katherine Gibson Fougera). I don't say this because I suspect Fougera of misrepresenting her mother's text, but just to signal that there is no way to tell.
Katherine Garrett Gibson went west to live with her sister, Mollie Garrett MacIntosh, a year or two before Little Big Horn. As Mollie was the wife of one of Custer's lieutenants (also killed at L.B.H.), Katherine's narrative is full of the officers of the Seventh Cavalry; General Custer himself, with his brother Tom, teaches her how to ride and shoot, and her friends are all officers who will die at L.B.H. and their wives. (Her own eventual husband, another of Custer's lieutenants, would have been at L.B.H. except for a premonition which caused her to nag him into rejecting the transfer.)
Katherine Gibson and her narrative are very much products of her time, with all the racism, classism, sexism, and other toxic ideologies that implies; this is not a deep or thoughtful look at Custer's Seventh Cavalry and its fate (she clearly idolizes Elizabeth Custer, and she remains unthinkingly loyal to the closed society she married into, even when her narrative itself suggests points of criticism). But it is keenly observed and full of fascinating details: my favorite is Senora Nash, the Mexican wife of one of the sergeants, the best laundress, cook, and midwife in the regiment--who is revealed upon her death to have been a man. (Katherine Gibson is baffled by this, and offers an elaborate explanation about a Mexican bandit escaping justice and Sergeant Nash's gluttony.) And since apparently I'm researching something to do with Custer, this was an excellent book to have on the plane.
This book is the memoir of Katherine Garrett Gibson; since it has no critical apparatus, it's impossible to tell how much of what we get is what she herself wrote and how much she was edited and/or expanded by her daughter (Katherine Gibson Fougera). I don't say this because I suspect Fougera of misrepresenting her mother's text, but just to signal that there is no way to tell.
Katherine Garrett Gibson went west to live with her sister, Mollie Garrett MacIntosh, a year or two before Little Big Horn. As Mollie was the wife of one of Custer's lieutenants (also killed at L.B.H.), Katherine's narrative is full of the officers of the Seventh Cavalry; General Custer himself, with his brother Tom, teaches her how to ride and shoot, and her friends are all officers who will die at L.B.H. and their wives. (Her own eventual husband, another of Custer's lieutenants, would have been at L.B.H. except for a premonition which caused her to nag him into rejecting the transfer.)
Katherine Gibson and her narrative are very much products of her time, with all the racism, classism, sexism, and other toxic ideologies that implies; this is not a deep or thoughtful look at Custer's Seventh Cavalry and its fate (she clearly idolizes Elizabeth Custer, and she remains unthinkingly loyal to the closed society she married into, even when her narrative itself suggests points of criticism). But it is keenly observed and full of fascinating details: my favorite is Senora Nash, the Mexican wife of one of the sergeants, the best laundress, cook, and midwife in the regiment--who is revealed upon her death to have been a man. (Katherine Gibson is baffled by this, and offers an elaborate explanation about a Mexican bandit escaping justice and Sergeant Nash's gluttony.) And since apparently I'm researching something to do with Custer, this was an excellent book to have on the plane.
