Touched by fire

by Louise K. Barnett

For more than a century, Americans have been captivated by the legend of General George Armstrong Custer. Since the end of the long afternoon of June 25, 1876, when his small band of 267 men faced some 3,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in a remote corner of Montana, Custer has held a place in the pantheon of America's great figures, and the Last Stand has endured as one of the primary images of American expansion into the western frontier. Alternately invoked as the personification of absolute folly and pure bravery, Custer resonates in our national imagination yet eludes simple definition - each generation recasts the man and his death according to its need for a particular vision of America. Touched by Fire undertakes the search for, as one historian put it, "a man waiting to be discovered" between the extremes of his experience. Renowned for his love of pranks at West Point, where he graduated last in his class, Custer had a flair for heroic achievement that brought him phenomenal g