The First Code Talkers: Native American Communicators in World War I by William C. Meadows (review)

Abstract

coverage he earned through success in battle and his natural talent for publicity— like creating a character through designing his own uniform. “The Little Bighorn simply took the story out of his hands. . . . [and] the Custer legend factory began production” (302– 3). The authors’ contribution to the Custer story is not unique in emphasizing his Civil War career nor in looking at his life as a whole rather than its end on a Great Plains battlefield. Other recent authors, such as T. J. Stiles in Custer’s Times, have taken a similar approach. The authors’ main achievement instead is an encyclopedic review of the literature, skillfully using press accounts, works of fiction, and histories to show how, as the title says, these widely divergent sources were inventing Custer. For example, they analyze the imagined scenes of Quentin Reynolds’s 1951 juvenile biography, Custer’s Last Stand, which gave kids growing up during the Cold War a Western hero to worship. They look at the sensationalistic coverage of Custer’s 1874 Black Hills expedition, which they compare to the “modernday hokum of celebrity outdoorsmen taking fellow celebrities to exotic locales” (173– 74). Caudill and Ashdown have written a lively, thorough study of Custer’s life and the various interpretations of it that have created a legend. Anyone who wants to better understand Custer’s role in Great Plains history would do well to read it.