Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (5 page)

There has been much speculation about the origin of the American’s penchant for hard work, most of it starting with some reference to Calvinist doctrine. Undoubtedly Calvinism played a role, but few Virginians in Ohio were Calvinists, and yet they evidently worked as long and as hard as did their Yankee neighbors. No dry religious doctrine, not even a burning faith, could account for the way Americans labored. They worked so much that work became a psychic need with them; Americans were fidgety and nervous when they were not “doing something,” anything, as long as it was important enough to be called “work.”

Americans worked because they believed it was godly to do so, because of the vastness of the task facing them, and because the work would be rewarded. They were filled with a feeling that there was much to do—as a western traveler in the 1850s put it, “the forest to be felled, the city to be built, the railroad surveyed, the swamp cleared, political, social, and religious systems to be organized …”
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Americans saw the land different from what it was; looking to the future, they imagined bridges over the rivers, roads over the mountains, the forest replaced by the garden, towns springing up at every bend of every river, great cities growing wherever two rivers came together. They lived in a fantasy world, except that the fantasies were for the most part realistic and came true. With all that work around waiting to be done, Americans were always itchy to get at the job and transform dream into reality.

Ohioans knew that the work would pay off. Nowhere else on the globe, as Henry Steele Commager puts it, “had nature been at once so rich and so generous, and her riches were available to all who had the enterprise to take them and the good fortune to be white.” Ohioans realized, as did every American, the truth of Commager’s statement: “Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America.”
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The riches were there to be had, and everything in the society and the environment encouraged the citizen to think big and work hard. There was a sense of spaciousness, an invitation to mobility—physical, economic, and social—and an encouragement to enterprise that made Americans forever optimists. Progress was no mere philosophical notion or ideal; it was all around, visible everywhere, a commonplace. The American, Commager points out, “planned ambitiously and was used to seeing even his most visionary plans surpassed; he came at last to believe that nothing was beyond his power and to be impatient with any success that was less than triumph” or, one might add, with any success that took longer than immediately.
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The political system protected a man’s right to possess exclusively whatever he had earned or built. Squatters were sometimes forced off the land by speculators and lawyers, to be sure, and often enough a frontiersman had to fight for what was his, but within the organized states a man’s property was secure both in law and custom. That security encouraged him to earn or build more, a process that could go on for a lifetime, for there was no limit on how much property or money a man could possess.

Just as the system encouraged each man to work, so did it encourage him to look out for himself and to hell with others. Nearly every European visitor to the United States before the Civil War commented on the extreme individualism of Americans with regard to matters of money or property and wondered how such a dog-eat-dog society could function. To the American mind, the answer was simple: every individual’s economic advance redounded to the benefit
of the whole. Every tree felled, every bridge built, every industry established strengthened the nation and made it richer, and the richer the nation was, the greater the opportunity for individuals to get rich. Both federal and state governments, meanwhile, would see to it—at least in theory—that the race for riches was fairly run and that to the victor belonged the spoils.

The stability of the political system, the willingness of the men of the West to work, and the persistent image that in the West lay the Garden of Eden, or the marketplace and manufactory of the world, or a combination of both, all led to making the West a prime investment opportunity for European and eastern capital. Very few men in the West itself ever got rich, at least by eastern standards; the largest share of the profits usually wound up in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or London. Speculators of all kinds poured investment capital into the West, as they had from the beginning of the white man’s conquest of the New World. Like the squatters, the speculators saw in the West “a prospect into unlimited empires,”
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or, more succinctly, a pot of gold. Speculators, or rather their agents, were always stirring up emotions in the West, encouraging men to push on even farther west to extend the frontier, to build new towns, new farms, new factories, anything, everything. The settlers hardly had to be convinced, for they shared with the speculators a sense of bigness and of power and an assumption of destiny.

From the time of the founding of Jamestown, Americans had been optimists, but the size and shape of their optimism were intensified in the 1840s. A world was beginning to open for them, justifying the high hopes of the past and enriching the fantasies about the future. Before the 1840s those who crossed the mountains and descended into the valley of the Ohio cut themselves off from regular contact with the outside world. But the coming of the railroad made travel back and forth, and within the valley, much easier. New printing techniques, meanwhile, cut printing costs and made penny newspapers available to the Ohio people, and the telegraph provided the mass circulation papers with all the news from Europe and the East Coast. In 1828 there were sixty-six newspapers and periodicals published in Ohio; in 1840 there were one hundred twenty-three; by 1850 there were two hundred thirty-seven.
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The forties were a time of increasing specialization of labor. The sewing machine, patented in the decade, relieved women of the task of making men’s clothing by hand; factories took over that job. Saddles and shoes were also factory made. The frontiersman, who could do a tolerable piece of work on any job that needed to be done, gave
way to various specialists, who by sticking to one task did it better and simultaneously released time for his customers so that they could concentrate on their specialties. Custer’s father was part of the process, and of the westward movement; in the 1830s he left Maryland to become a blacksmith in the village of New Rumley, Ohio.

New uses for steam power, and new iron boilers to hold the steam inside, extended the American’s power over his environment and provided something of a symbol for the most dynamic people the world had ever seen. Max Lerner sees dynamism as the key to the American character, for it permeated everything. There was the dynamism of the pioneer and the mechanic, the farmer and the inventor, the financier and the managers, the salesmen and the speculators, the lawyer and the politician, the intellectual and the soldier.
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It was a dynamism dedicated to transformation, and nowhere was it seen more clearly than in the assault on nature. The magnificent forests of the Ohio Valley, unsurpassed anywhere, were in the eyes of Ohioans nothing more than obstacles to progress. Standing trees were an affront to Americans because they were worse than useless—they took up sunlight and soil nutrients that could better be used by corn. Although everyone used wood as a source of heat or as building material, few thought of the forest in productive terms since there was more wood than could ever possibly be used, or so the settlers believed. Ohioans were united in their desire, nay passion, to destroy the forest, and much of their working time went into the task.

Clearing the land challenged even the Americans’ capacity for work. One began by girdling the big timber, which would kill the tree in a year. Meanwhile the settler grubbed out all bushes less than six inches in diameter and cut down and burned all saplings. It took a good farmhand sixteen days to clear an acre for the plow. The heavy deadened timber remained. These half-cleared fields were a familiar sight to anyone living in Ohio before the Civil War. One Ohio resident, David S. Stanley, who later attended West Point and then became a major general and served with Custer in the Indian-fighting Army, described the scene: “Huge trees dotted over the field, their bare bodies and naked limbs in the dusk of the evening or the pale light of the moon, having a most dismal and ghost-like appearance.”
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Beautiful black walnut, oak, maple, and other prime lumber stood dead and pathetic—and hated—wherever one traveled in the Ohio Valley.

Removing the huge crop of dead trees was an arduous task. Workers
cut the tree down, then chopped the top limbs into ten-foot lengths. These they piled on the main trunk and set afire. Once the great log had burned in half, a team of horses or oxen swung the sections around so that they were parallel to each other. Then came the hardest job of all, rolling the largest logs together. The aid of half a dozen or more neighbors was necessary because one or two men could not handle the big logs. When that task was accomplished, the men piled smaller logs crosswise on the trunks, with all the smaller timber and limbs thrown on top, and started the fire.

“To see ten or fifteen acres on the day or more particularly on the night of firing,” Stanley wrote of his Ohio boyhood, “was to see a grand sight. … The adjoining woods are lighted up, fences stand out in bright relief, the sky is red with reflected forms and firelight, and saddest part of all, hundreds of cords of the finest firewood and thousands of feet of the most beautiful timber—all consumed and for no purpose but to get rid of it.”
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“Getting rid of it”—with “it” meaning anything or anyone who stood in the way of progress—was a universal American passion and a commonplace experience for all those living in the Old Northwest. It took time; by as late as 1850 nearly half the land in Harrison County, Ohio, where Custer lived, was still uncleared.
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But the determination was there, and the job was finished. Arthur Moore describes the results: “Whole forests of oak, beech, poplar, maple, and walnut, standing since Columbus, collapsed … from girdling and deadening with fire. There was in the heart of the new race no more consideration for the trees than for the game until the best of both were gone; steel conquered the West but chilled the soul of the conqueror. This assault on nature, than which few more frightful spectacles could be imagined, owed much to sheer need, but something also to a compelling desire to destroy conspicuous specimens of the fauna and flora of the wilderness. The origin of this mad destructiveness may be in doubt, but there is no question about its effect. The Ohio Valley today has neither trees nor animals to recall adequately the splendor of the garden of the Indian which the white man found and used so profligately.”
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From the beginning, then, the American tendency was to attack and destroy, then build. The Americans eliminated the forest and the game; even earlier they had eliminated the native human inhabitants of the valley. Twelve years before Custer’s father Emmanuel was born, “Mad Anthony” Wayne had opened Ohio to settlement by defeating the Indians at the battle of Fallen Timbers (1794). Emmanuel Custer was himself a member of the local militia,
which was something of a joke as a military institution by the 1840s but nevertheless a vivid reminder of the day when the settlers had engaged in combat with the Indians. Western boys took as their heroes the Indian fighters; killing Indians was the noblest activity a resident of the valley could engage in. Hunting Indians was, besides, incomparably more exciting than hunting game, as frontiersman Adam Poe candidly admitted. “I’ve tried all kinds of game, boys!” he exclaimed. “I’ve fit bar and painter [panther] and catamount, but,” he added regretfully, with a vague, unsatisfied longing in his voice, “thar ain’t no game like Ingins—no, sir! no game like Injins.”

Arthur Moore, after an intensive study of the thought of the residents of the Ohio Valley, has concluded that although Indian-initiated atrocities doubtless produced many an Indian hater, “the white man’s desire for fame possibly took as many Indian lives as his passion for revenge.” The Indian, Moore writes in a penetrating passage, “was the finest instrument of the hero’s ambition, for notable deeds wrought against him earned the adulation of the public.”
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As the frontier advanced, newspaper reporters kept up with it, to send back East impassioned, heroic stories about the mighty conquerors of the red man. The stock adventure stories of the 1840s, sold in cheap paperback editions by the thousands to eager young readers, including Custer, recounted the deeds of the Indian fighters.

The Indian fighter was the advance agent of civilization, doing good and necessary work for the future benefit and prosperity of the United States. For the American public, as Andrew Jackson’s and William Henry Harrison’s careers illustrated, no reward was too great for those who drove the Indian out of the path of progress.

But if the frontiersman saw the Indian as only a more exciting and challenging obstacle than a tree, in the eastern states there was a growing sentiment that the Indian was a noble savage. The number of Indian lovers grew in direct relationship to the distance from the frontier. Here, as in so many things, Ohio stood in the middle: if there was no Indian threat, there were old Indian fighters around to remind people of what it had been like. So too, however, were copies of the
Leatherstocking Tales,
James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic confession of his own ambivalence toward the Indian.

Like so many of his fellow Americans, Cooper was drawn to the ideas of a primitive, free access to the bounty of nature, the rough equality of all men in a society, and of a natural, intuitive theology. These themes enjoyed something of a vogue in the America of Custer’s youth, especially among intellectuals and reformers, who were disappointed at (or resentful of) America’s failure
to become a “new society” in a New World. In their eyes, the United States had repeated all the mistakes of Europe, with individual appropriation and inviolable property rights locking the many out from access to the wealth of the few, leading to a social stratification based on unequal distribution of property.
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