Picture-Perfect Custer

There must be five hundred pictures of Custer’s Last Stand, and not two dozen of the Washita,” wrote renowned art historian Brian Dippie in 2009. One of those two dozen sold as the top George Armstrong Custer lot at Heritage Auctions on December 11-12, 2012, an original oil that Frederic Remington painted to illustrate Edward Eggleston’s 1888 book, A History of the United States and its People. Eggleston described Custer’s attack on Black Kettle’s Washita village as soldiers who