Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

T. J. Stiles built Custer's Trials as a full biography of George Armstrong Custer, deliberately refusing to let the general's death overshadow the rest of his life. Stiles follows Custer from a middling West Point cadet, who graduated last in his class in 1861, through a meteoric Civil War career that made him a brigadier general of volunteers at twenty three, one of the Union Army's youngest generals, celebrated for his cavalry action against Confederate forces at Gettysburg and present at Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865. Stiles reads that wartime fame as the making of a man who spent the rest of his life trying to live up to it.

The book follows Custer into the postwar Army and onto the Plains, commanding the Seventh Cavalry against Cheyenne forces at the Washita River in 1868 and later leading the 1874 expedition into the Black Hills that announced a gold discovery and set off a rush onto land guaranteed to the Lakota by treaty. Stiles gives real attention to Custer's restlessness away from the battlefield too, his debts, his failed business ventures and his 1876 congressional testimony against Secretary of War William Belknap, which damaged his standing with President Grant just months before his final campaign.

Stiles makes a striking structural choice, holding the Battle of the Little Bighorn back to the book's epilogue rather than building toward it as the story's climax, a decision Thomas Powers, writing in The New York Review of Books, called about the boldest purely literary decision he had seen in a long while. Reading the book means meeting Custer as a genuinely contradictory product of a country racing into an industrial, image conscious age, and it suits a reader more interested in that larger portrait than in refighting one afternoon in Montana.