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The Norman Maclean Reader

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Introduction, by O. Alan Weltzien......................................................................viiTHE CUSTER WRITINGSEdward S. Luce: Commanding General (Retired), Department of the Little Bighorn.........................3From the Unfinished Custer Manuscript..................................................................9Chapter 1: The Hill....................................................................................11Chapter 2: The Sioux...................................................................................26Chapter 3: The Cheyennes...............................................................................40Chapter 4: In Business.................................................................................55Last Chapter: Shrine to Defeat.........................................................................62A MACLEAN SAMPLER"This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon": A Few Remarks on the Art of Teaching................................69"Billiards Is a Good Game": Gamesmanship and America's First Nobel Prize Scientist.....................78Retrievers Good and Bad................................................................................93Logging and Pimping and "Your Pal, Jim"................................................................101An Incident............................................................................................116The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers..................................................................130The Pure and the Good: On Baseball and Backpacking.....................................................136Black Ghost............................................................................................141From Young Men and Fire................................................................................150Interview with Norman Maclean..........................................................................166SELECTED LETTERSLetters to Robert M. Utley, 1955-1979..................................................................183Letters to Marie Borroff, 1949-1986....................................................................212Letters to Nick Lyons, 1976-1981.......................................................................234Letters to Lois Jansson, 1979-1981.....................................................................246Acknowledgments........................................................................................257Suggestions for Further Reading........................................................................A gallery of photographs appears following page 104.

Chapter One

Every battle has something of a personality and a personal after-life. But it is true of battles as of men-only some have a deep personal life of their own with the capacity to affect permanently the lives of those associated with them and to be known everywhere by those who know almost nothing about them. The battle of the Little Bighorn, which from the ordinary historical point of view lacks any great significance, has been an immense personal force altering the feelings, beliefs, daily routines and larger destinies of those who survived it or were related to the dead. It has given a structure to their lives, however harsh the outlines, for (it seems that) the dead who continue to live become abstracted into patterns and are transformed and transform others, as it were, into a kind of geometry.

To the large world outside, the Battle has many personal traits that attract a wide diversity of personalities. It has the power of an endless argument, one of the world's battles destined to be fought forever. More has been written about it than about any American battle excepting possibly the Battle of Gettysburg, and at times with as much fury and general confusion as darkened Custer Hill late in the afternoon of June 25, 1876. Some of its power, undoubtedly, is in its artistry. It is almost a ready-made plot with ready-made characters for that large class of writers who lack the power to invent plots and characters of their own. To painters of similar abilities, it is close to a finished composition-a hilltop in a big sky; repeating the circle of the hilltop, a circle of kneeling men in blue; within the embattled circle a central standing figure highlighted by blond hair; and, surrounding the circle of blue, larger circles of contrasting redskins. The Battle has also had the power to promote business, draw customers and sell beer. And it has had two powers perhaps deeper than all others-the power of horror and of jest. It shocked the nation as nothing had since the death of Lincoln, leaving permanent marks upon the individuals, families and tribes connected with it. Recently-but only recently-we have become enough at ease with it to make it into a joke. The joke has many variants, some of them dirty and all of them grim, but essentially it is one joke and underneath the many variants is a kindly undertone, as if some joke had been played upon the bluffs of the Little Bighorn for which there should be universal forbearance, on the chance that the joke played there is played some time on all of us. Clearly, our dead are delivered from oblivion when they become a joke on us.

The history of the personality and personal after-life of an event is not history of any commonly recognized kind, and this one, for lack of a classification, may be called the biography of a battle. That the Battle still lives and grows, however, is a fact demonstrable by the ordinary kinds of historical and even statistical evidence-by the number of books written about it, the number of times it appears visually in paintings or on the screen or TV, the number of times it is heard in such common sayings as "so-and-so made his last stand" or "too damn many Indians." But a reality of a somewhat different order has to be explored for the sources of its life, and observations about this reality cannot always be documented with footnotes, since life-after-death, at least in this life, depends upon patterns and geometrical extensions and may of course depend upon much more. Yet what lives beyond its natural self is clearly structured for remembrance. The patterns are partly in the natural thing which must have had a higher sense of form than that of most of the living matter surrounding it. The patterns are also partly superimposed and come from us, who strive or at least feel at times that we should strive to make something structural out of our own lives. The history of this life-after-death, however, involves much more than the matching of two sets of fixed patterns. As there is no life in fixities, so each who achieves immortality must retain something of his past and yet take on new meanings with the passing of time. Unless capable of such organic growth, even immortality dies.

The ground itself upon which the Battle was fought has its own history of death and transfiguration, and it seems right to begin with the reality of the earth and to trace first how this isolated piece of it soon after the Battle became known to the whole world and eventually was transformed into a National Monument. On the Hill itself, which is somewhat symmetrical, there are also lines to be traced. The lines are of white-stone markers and they correspond roughly to the Hill's contours and converge near its top. Each stone is indeed an abstraction of what was found there.

1. THE NEWS

News of the Battle was spread first by mysterious smoke...