The uncomfortable truth about Custer
From Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.
Despite his miserable record at West Point, the real-life Custer quickly became a Civil War hero and, at 23, the youngest general in the U.S. Army. After the Civil War, however, there emerged a different Custer, one entirely ignored by the movie. Although still in the army, he was now a postwar lt. colonel who was cruel to his men and hated by many of them. Sent first to Texas to cope with former secessionists and then to Kansas to fight Indians, he became a controversial figure who seemingly thirsted for the fame and glory that had vanished with the end of the Civil War.
It is at this point that the movie runs completely amok historically, turning into a cock-and-bull melodrama. The shift is signaled in the film when Custer takes to drink to soothe his let-down feeling after Appomatox. (The truth: After an 1862 binge when he made a humiliating spectacle of himself on the streets of Monroe, Michigan, Custer swore that he would never take another drink in his life, and he never did.) Skipping the reality -- Custer's duty in Texas, his frustrating campaigns against Indians in Kansas, his court-martial and reinstatement, his massacre of Cheyenne families at the Wash-1ta [IMDb bot is censoring the correct spelling]http://www.nps.gov/waba/index.htm
and his confrontations with the Sioux while guarding Northern Pacific Railroad surveyors in the Yellowstone Valley - the picture has Libbie, with the help of Sheridan, snapping Custer out of his alcoholic gloom by getting him back on active duty...
On his way to Fort Lincoln, the film Custer and his entourage are attacked by Sioux, led by a goofy-looking, goofy-talking Chief Crazy Horse (in reali life, even today, perhaps the most revered patriot of the western Sioux.) After being captured and then escaping, the ersatz Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn in an atrocious wig) sues for peace, and in a fictitious meeting with Custer (Crazy Horse never parleyed with whites) the chief announces that the Indians will give up all their lands to the whites (!) except the sacred Black Hills, which the united tribes will defend to the death. Seeing the folly of risking a disastrous war, the film Custer now suddenly becomes a noble friend of the Indians, promising to protect teh Black Hills for the Sioux.
Of course, he fails. Evil developers who want to open up the Black Hills spread rumor that start a gold rush (in truth, the gold rush was started by Custer himself), and the Indians prepare to fight. The film Custer, meanwhile, strikes one of the villains and is ordered to Washington.... Custer finally persuades Grant to send him back to the Seventh Cavalry....
In an egregious final scene, Libbie visits General Sheridan and reads him a letter left by the fallen Custer, demanding that the government "make good its promise to Chief Crazy Horse. The Indians must be protected in their right to an existence in their own country." Sheridan, the man who in real life was purported to have said, "The only good Indian is a dead one," replies solemly to Libbie that he has the promise of the Grant administration... that Custer's demand will be carried out. "Come, my dear," he says in the film's most incongruous and shamelessly fraudulent line, "your soldier won his last fight after all."