Questionable, inebriated art critics have referred to Custer’s Last Fight as the most viewed piece of artwork in the history of America. You may not know the artist, but I can assure most of you that you’ve seen his work in either a bar, saloon, restaurant, garage or rumpus room across the country.
The story of Cassilly Adams’ 1885 painting approaches the drama of the historic moment it represents and is something I’ve wanted to write about for some time. Although I’ve been interested in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, I never have developed the mania that seems to overtake those who fall under the spell of the historic incident that took place on the rolling hills of eastern Montana just up the road from my ranch. There has been so much written and re-written on the subject that I’ve avoided it like a mountain that seemed too tall to have to climb until I stumbled onto a story that triggered my interest.
I have seen reproductions of the painting hanging in every bar and saloon in the West, but I stumbled onto its story in the Norman Maclean Reader, a collection of essays, letters, and other writings by, in my estimation, one of the most eminent men of letters in the West, the man who gave us A River Runs Through It. A portion of the book is dedicated to an unfinished Custer manuscript that the great writer either gave up on, or one which he simply discovered he didn’t have time to write. The Cassilly Adams painting is referred to numerous times and its social implications intrigued me to the point that I started off on the first of many steps in climbing mount Custer.
The trick to approaching any monumental and controversial aspect of history is to find an access point, a facet that provides an entrance that might not have been used before or affords a perspective that endows the subject matter with a fresh point of view.
A shirttail ancestor of the Adam’s family of Boston fame, Cassilly was a Civil War veteran who studied at the Boston Academy of Arts and the Cincinnati Art School before settling in St. Louis. At 9.5 by 16.5 feet, his most epic work took a year to complete whereupon it toured the country where citizens could relive the battle at two bits a pop. The painting, however, didn’t realize the profits the owners imagined, so it was sold to a saloonkeeper in St. Louis where it hung on the wall until the establishment went bankrupt, at which point Adolphus Busch, the head of a fledgling brewery named Anheuser Busch, acquired the painting in exchange for a $35,000 beer bill.
He then rolled it up, stuck it under his arm, and carried it back to the fledgling brewery where he instructed his advertising department that they were going to reproduce the painting in order to advertise their beer. The company began distributing lithographs, prints, and posters wherever Budweiser beer was sold, the theory being that the brewery in St. Louis would be a much greater and going concern once the marketing campaign had run its course—and boy howdy, did it ever.
The eighteen-nineties were an interesting period in American history. Following the depression of ’93 when advertising was just beginning to take hold nationally, campaigns combined with manufacturing to become consumer driven, big business. Even though Libby Custer’s campaign to revitalize her husband’s reputation had been in full swing for decades, it now seemed like a perfect pairing with Budweiser, the beer of action, even if George Armstrong Custer was a teetotaler.
In the painting flaxen tousled Custer is depicted swinging a sabre even though the 7th Cavalry as an expeditionary force had not been issued them and the general had cut off all his hair the night before. The rest of the painting itself is not without controversy, with a number of historical inaccuracies, not the least of which is a somewhat foreign topography that has the Lakota/Cheyenne village on both sides of the Little Big Horn River which may have been borrowed from the highly successful Buffalo Bill’s Wild West recreation backdrops of the day.
The son of the artist, William Apthorp Adams, stated that models were posed by Sioux Indians in their war paint and also by cavalrymen in the costume of the period. If such is the case, the soldiers fared much better in that the warriors of the Northern Plains appear to have arrived via Rorke’s Drift, by way of the Everglades.
It’s no surprise that the influence of the Zulu war in Africa would’ve held stead in the artist’s imagination in that the two comparably technologically advanced and colonializing countries had been knocked for a loop by what were then seen then as primitive tribesman.
The Seminole headdresses are little more difficult to explain.
Even Ernest Hemingway mentions the advertising device in For Whom the Bell Tolls when Robert Jordan remembers his grandfather remarking, “Custer was not an intelligent leader of cavalry, Robert.” His grandfather had said. “He was not even an intelligent man.”
He remembered that when his grandfather said that he felt resentment that any one should speak against that figure in the buckskin shirt, the yellow curls blowing, that stood on the hill holding a service revolver as the Sioux closed in around him in the old Anheuser-Busch lithograph that hung on the poolroom wall in Red Lodge.
With an initial run of over 15,000 prints and 18 subsequent editions totaling well over a million copies, Adolphus Busch, having realized the commercial potential of the painting had waned, presented Custer’s Last Fight to the 7th Cavalry in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1896 in a fit of philanthropic zeal. Later, the headquarters was relocated to Fort Grant and the painting decamped along with them but was then lost or misplaced. Abandoned to antiquity, it was rediscovered by Col. John K. Herr in 1934 while on maneuvers in the abandoned Arizona fort, rolled onto a flagpole and stuffed in the rafters of a derelict building. By then in poor condition, it was restored by the W.P.A. in Boston and was returned to the 7th where it hung on the wall in the officer’s club in Fort Bliss, Texas.
At this point I’d like to tell you where you could visit the painting and access its artistic merits yourself, but such is not the case in that on the velvety night of June 13, 1946, there was a fire in the officer’s club and the painting was destroyed.
Or was it?
Herein lies the better part of being an author of fiction, and my first step up mount Custer.
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