Adrian Jawort: Oral history of a Cheyenne descendant of Custer

When Rocky Mountain College history professor Tim Lehman decided to include the potentially controversial statement that George Armstrong Custer had a son with a Cheyenne woman whom Custer called Monahseetah (Meotzi) in his book, Bloodshed At Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull, Custer, and the Destinies of Nations, it wasn’t put in to create controversy. It was merely one part of his research garnered from all the best sources he could gather. He couldn’t exclude the research once it was done.

“I just go by the best evidence I can,” he said. “There are a number of oral traditions passed on through the Cheyenne people with different families and branches that all talk about that. It’s consistent with all the evidence.”

But since the time of Custer’s death, propaganda to portray Custer as a Christ-like hero of Manifest Destiny has always been an agenda. Custer’s grieving widow, Elizabeth “Libbie” Custer, garnered so much sympathy from the U.S. public and military—it was rare for anyone to speak ill of Custer. She’d write three books on her husband that according to Lehman “silenced his critics and elevated his claim to greatness.”

Any personal knowledge of a Cheyenne mistress—especially that he fathered a Cheyenne child—would eventually be thrown into the ash heap of history as Libbie would live to be 90, outliving most whites with potential knowledge of the affair.