George Armstrong Custer is one of those divisive historical figures that Western aficionados either love or hate. I fall into the latter category as a lot of men died because of his arrogance, so it was fun to take my own shot at him in Bluster’s Last Stand, the fourth novel in my Memoirs of H.H. Lomax comic series. Here’s how my protagonist viewed the ill-fated commander of the 7th Cavalry in the novel’s opening:
“My aim was to shoot George Armstrong Custer, not to make him famous. Maybe I shot him and maybe I didn’t. I never knew because it was hard to confirm if you hit your target when hundreds of screaming Sioux and Cheyenne warriors were also firing at him—and at me. But the fact is, I held more rancor for Custer on that hot, dusty day in June of 1876 than I did for the Indian braves committed to scalping me. In the end, you might say that both God and the devil saved me from the fate of the other white men on the hill above the Little Bighorn that afternoon. I didn’t care for Custer, general or colonel or lieutenant or whatever his rank was. Fact was, I called him ‘General Bluster’ because there weren’t enough mirrors in the world to adequately reflect his opinion of himself.”
Lomax even notes that if you ordered a thousand sons of witches from a Chicago mail-order house and only received him, you’d mark the order received in full. My protagonist just didn’t care for Custer.
Writers have to amuse themselves during the tedious process of writing a novel over a hundred thousand words, and I had devious fun with Bluster’s Last Stand. I had two dear friends who directed the Information Technology department where I worked at Angelo State. They had begged me to put them in a novel for some time, but I was hesitant, doubting they would read the novel, them spending more time on screens than on pages.
So, I slightly disguised their names and made them telegraphers—the 1870s equivalent of IT personnel. My problem was I wanted to make certain they read the entire book, so I had them meet their demise offstage in a manner so horrible that my protagonist couldn’t identify their remains for burial.
Fortunately, the guys read all the way through the book and discovered the joke was on them. They did survive after all, and lived to tell the story, unlike George Custer. If you want to see how I tricked the telegraphers, check out Bluster’s Last Stand and three other Lomax novels for $2.99 in the Wolfpack Publishing omnibus of the same name in Volume 1 of the memoirs of H.H. Lomax at https://www.amazon.com/Blusters-Last-Stand-Complete-Tales-ebook/dp/B082T117PP/
