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Reviews
Custer and Me: A Historian's Memoir
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By Robert M. Utley
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University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2004. Illustrations, maps, index. 288 pages. $37.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Art Gómez
National Park Service, Santa Fe, New Mexico
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| Since the age of ten, the author confesses, the quixotic persona of General George Armstrong Custer has dominated — if not haunted — his personal and professional life. Saturday afternoon matinees in Lafayette, Indiana, exhilarated an impressionable youngster, frequent ventures to local libraries satiated his curious mind, and excursions west to experience the enduring mystic of his fallen hero influenced the career path of a high-school teenager for the remainder of his life. |
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With every turn of the page, the reader learns much from this candid, highly readable recollection of Robert Marshall Utley — the man, the consummate bureaucrat, and the internationally acclaimed author. With characteristic literary flare, Utley shares personal insight into his family background and admits to less-than-sterling academic and athletic performance during his pre-college years. |
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It is not uncommon to have had exceptional personalities influence the outcome of one's life. Throughout Utley's pivotal career, however, the list of celebrities whom he repeatedly cites as "my good friend" reads like a veritable list of "Who's Who" in the public and the private sectors. The legendary first superintendent of Custer Battlefield, "Captain" Edward S. Luce, former National Park Service directors — Conrad Wirth, George B. Hartzog, and Russell Dickenson — celebrated novelist Norman Maclean, revered western historian Ray Allen Billington, and New York publisher Alfred Knopf (who, with famed journalist Bernard de Voto, served on the Interior Department's advisory board) are among those who interceded at the most propitious moment to further the author's career. Still, with every opportunity that came his way, Utley proved to be deeply resolved and eminently capable to meet each challenge. |
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His brief but extremely productive tenure in the U.S. Army's History Section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff enabled the author to hone research and writing skills that would serve him well throughout his professional life. A fulltime career with the National Park Service, from 1957 to 1980, enabled Utley's personal involvement in forging a revitalized, expansionist federal agency grounded on the premise of historic preservation law. As Southwest Regional Historian, Utley personally certified a half-dozen historic sites suitable for inclusion in the National Parks system. As the agency's chief historian, his ideas and written narrative were incorporated into pioneering legislation for the preservation and protection of officially designated historic structures. Throughout his public life, Utley proved himself tireless and personally committed to the cause of historic preservation. Too often, he found himself in defense of unpopular causes, generally in opposition to upper level managers in the National Park Service and congressional leadership. These philosophical confrontations ultimately contributed to Utley's premature departure from government service. |
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For all of his achievements in public life, Utley's most enduring legacy has been his role as a narrative historian. He committed early on to "keep one foot in two worlds: public history and academia" (p. 84). His ability to meet that promise for nearly a half-century has been nothing short of phenomenal. During one ten-year period, he published monographs that included the masterful Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963) and the two-volume standard on the frontier military, Frontiersmen in Blue (1967) and Frontier Regulars (1973). All the while, Utley served as charter member and eventually president of the Western History Association. Scarcely twenty years later, he duplicated this extraordinary feat with the publication of The Indian Frontier (1984) and three major biographies: Cavalier in Buckskin (1988), Billy the Kid (1989), and The Lance and the Shield (1992). The latter two historical accounts secured Utley's foothold in the global literary community. |
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If there are shortcomings to be found in this book, one might consider Utley's discussion of history as "mediator" between his controversial hero, the Custer loyalists, and the NPS entity that bore Custer's name for more than fifty years. The author's defense of all three — often in opposition to federal policymakers and American Indian activists — is, on the whole, commendable. Generally, a mediator remains more or less neutral on the issues brought forth. Given Utley's lifelong allegiance to Custer and the battlefield memorial, his position on park issues hardly rendered him impartial. He harbors little regard for any of the managers that followed Ed Luce, with the exception of Neil Mangum, who served from 1998 to 2002. Nevertheless, the author has shown a willingness to waver in his resolve to represent the park. Clearly not an apologist for the triumphal interpretation that has dominated the battlefield site virtually since its inception, Utley not only endorsed but also helped facilitate the installation of a memorial to Indian combatants that was dedicated in 1993. |
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This personal memoir is a remarkable contribution to the compendium of western scholarship. First, the book recounts profoundly significant events that influenced the course of preservation policy today. More importantly, the events themselves are a fascinating firsthand account from one of the historical field's foremost contributors. |
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