In Custer's Last Stand, Texan finds inspiration

 

 

Michael Donahue at the Little Bighorn Battlefield Monument. Photo by Tim Downey

L ike many boys growing up in the 1950s, Michael Donahue played cowboys and Indians, donning a coonskin cap and losing himself in the adventures of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett.

As a high schooler in Baytown, Texas, USA, he became enthralled with sagas of long odds in combat, at places such as the Alamo and the Little Bighorn.

Donahue’s boyhood passion is still part of his life. For 20 years, he has spent his summers as an interpretive ranger at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana. From mid-May to mid-August, he guides visitors along the rolling hills and worn trails, past the grave markers of the more than 200 men in Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh U.S. Cavalry. They walk along the embankments where on 25 June 1876, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and their bands of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors won a decisive but short-lived victory over the forces bent on settling their people on reservations.

A member of the Rotary Club of Temple-South, Texas, and chair of the visual arts department at Temple College – the canvasses he paints abound with battle scenes – Donahue has led his club’s efforts to raise more than $45,000 in scholarships for students of the arts.

Custer was a “rock star of his period,” a hero of the U.S. Civil War, and a publicity hound who sported fanciful scarlet ties and velveteen jackets, Donahue says in the 2007 BBC docudrama Custer’s Last Stand: The Wild West , for which he served as a narrator and historical consultant. Custer, “a natural leader of men, especially in combat,” had been “darned lucky,” says Donahue – he had 11 horses shot under him during his military career. “His luck ran out at Little Bighorn.” The defeat was a touchstone moment in U.S. history, delivering a shock akin to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he says.

Donahue has written a book, Drawing Battle Lines: The Map Testimony of Custer’s Last Fight . The seven-year project, melding his appreciation of battle stratagems and creativity, is a literal art of war, with more than 90 maps, 35 of them never before published. He’s now working on a second book covering all of Custer’s fights with Native Americans.

The battlefield at the Little Bighorn continues to inspire Donahue. “It’s a beautiful place, almost pristine when the wind blows over the field,” he says. “It’s a place where ghosts walk in broad daylight. Everybody seems to be moved by these markers.”

Donahue has spoken to more than 700,000 visitors in his quest to be the monument’s longest-serving interpretive guide. (He’s aiming for at least 24 years.) With his deft delivery, shifting from solemnity to humor, he dispels myths and misinformation in his three or four daily talks, which cover the battle, the life of the soldier in 1876, and Native American village life. “The No. 1 question is, where is the restroom?” he says, but Where’s Custer? Is he buried here? is a close second. (Custer’s body was reinterred at West Point Cemetery in New York in 1877.)

“We have visitors who come specifically to talk with him,” says Ken Woody, chief of interpretation at the National Park Service site. “His interpretive programs are more or less an art form. He can make people cry in his talk, and have ’em laughing as well. He’s a master interpreter.”