America had just finished celebrating its 100th birthday, when, on July 6, 1876, the telegraph brought word that General George Armstrong Custer and 261 members of his Seventh Cavalry column had been massacred by Cheyenne and Lakota warriors along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. The news was greeted with stunned disbelief. How could Custer, the “boy general” of the Civil War, America’s most celebrated Indian fighter, the avatar of western expansion, have been struck down by a group of warriors armed with little more than bows and arrows? Like everything else about Custer, his martyrdom was shrouded in controversy and contradictions, and the final act of his larger-than-life career was played out on a grand stage with a spellbound public engrossed in the drama. In the end, his death would launch one of the greatest myths in American history.
Custer’s Last Stand, a new two-hour biography of one of the most celebrated and controversial icons of nineteenth-century America, paints a penetrating psychological portrait of Custer’s charismatic, narcissistic personality, and for the first time on television, explores the fateful relationships within the officers of the Seventh Cavalry that would lead him to his doom. This new biography allows viewers to take a fresh look at Custer’s passionate love affair with his wife Libbie, and their mutually ambitious partnership that made them the power couple of the 1870s. From Custer’s heroic exploits on the battlefields of the Civil War, to his often brutal subjugation of the Indians of the Southern Plains, to his highly publicized expedition into the Black Hills, Custer was a man in a hurry, desperately trying to “be” Custer, struggling to maintain the fame that had come to define him.
Directed by Stephen Ives (Seabiscuit, The West, Panama Canal), Custer’s Last Stand will premiere on witf on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 8 p.m., part of a month-long salute to the West that also includes the premiere of Billy the Kid (January 10) and rebroadcasts of Wyatt Earp, Geronimo, Annie Oakley and Jesse James.
