Who was General Custer?
General George Armstrong Custer was a cavalry leader who is perhaps best known for leading his men into death at the Battle of Little Bighorn, a seminal event in the Indian Wars which tore apart the American frontier in the late 1800s. At the time, his contemporaries viewed General Custer as a tragic hero, and his wife and others worked to cultivate this image. More modern interpretations of General Custer are a bit less favorable, reflecting a shift in ideas about Native American policy and diplomacy in the early United States. Custer was born in 1839 in Ohio. After completing his basic education, he attended West Point, where he managed to come out at the bottom of his class. Typically, a student with a graduating rank that low would be sent to a fairly obscure posting, but Custer happened to graduate when the military desperately needed officers for the Civil War, so he found himself in command in the South. He distinguished himself during the Civil War, setting the stage for his ro
