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Did Custer Have Undiagnosed OCD?
Soldiers had seen him “washing his hands again and again”
Was George Armstrong Custer an imperialist lackey who attacked Indians justly angered by broken treaties? Or was he a homegrown Siegfried, “a warrior of matchless strength and purity”? And did he have undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder that may have affected his leadership?
Evan Connell lends plausibility to all three views of the young cavalry officer in Son of the Morning Star: Custer at Little Big Horn, a rambling account of how a band of Sioux and Cheyenne and others killed all of Custer’s men in perhaps as little as 20 or 30 minutes on June 25, 1876.
Connell portrays Custer as an overconfident man-in-a-hurry who led a reckless Seventh Cavalry charge against a vastly larger number of warriors rightly angered by seeing gold miners streaming onto land promised to them by the U.S. government. But he describes enough of the Indian atrocities that preceded the attack, including the murder and scalping of children, to show why 19th-century Americans might have seen him as a noble martyr.
Connell tells Custer’s story with a slack hand absent from Mrs. Bridge, the taut masterpiece that made his reputation. A poem that Walt Whitman wrote right after the Battle of Little Big Horn, he says, is “not very good”: “If he…
