Custer's Last Stand
In Chapter 17 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans after describing the fictional surrender of a fort in the novel and how the Indians, mutilated women and children afterwards, in his 1826 version, Cooper shifts to a non-fiction aside.
"It is now known that, after the evacuation of Fort William Henry, the Indians, in violation of the terms of capitulation, fell upon the defenseless people, and murdered many of them, particularly the women and children. The number of the slain is variously stated; but it is certain that the massacre was one of the most shocking incidents of the war. The event, though it made a deep impression at the time, is now almost forgotten."
This is the only moment in the entire novel where Cooper explicitly steps out of the narrative to say:
"This fictional massacre you're reading about? It's based on a real one — and in 50 years, it will be forgotten."
In my lifetime, I have seen how a single narrative can shift in just a few years—sometimes in ways that left me stunned.
When I was a boy in the 1960’s, General Custer was a hero. By the time I was a young man in the late 1970’s, he had become an enemy of the people.
These sweeping changes in the American story have been nothing short of mind-bending. I have watched history itself be reshaped—used as a tool to bend an entire culture toward some later, predetermined outcome. Tom Wolfe captured this perfectly in his brilliant book The Painted Word, when he described how culture is painted over, layer by layer, until the original picture disappears and it’s replaced by a tiny group of editors for the New York Times that he called “Culturburg.”
No story shows this more clearly than Custer’s Last Stand.
To a boy with a cowboy hat and a toy gun, Custer was the golden-haired cavalryman who rode bravely into legend (and true story: galloping off from Appomattox with the very table on which Lee and Grant had signed the paper to end of the Civil War.)
Fifteen years later, he is recast as a reckless, glory-hunting monster who got what he deserved.
I’m not wise enough to judge whether these “mind-benders”—the historians, filmmakers, and textbook writers—ultimately serve humanity’s good or its harm.
But I do know what it does to a young boy who once had heroes.