In his seminal 1950 work, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Henry Nash Smith wrote, “The literary development of the Wild Western hero in the second half of the nineteenth century made the divergence between fact and fiction even greater.” Well over a half-century later, George Armstrong Custer’s life remains the literary subject of numerous historians and novelists, drawn to a legacy that is equally heroic and flawed, tragic, violent and, for many, even villainous. In fac


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