Dime novelist Frederick Whittaker first met George Armstrong Custer in the New York offices of Galaxy magazine, for whom the general was writing a series of articles (later collected as My Life on the Plains). Whittaker had served honorably and well in the Civil War himself; yet despite a serious chest wound received in the Wilderness, his zest for martial glory and his admiration for the glorious had not diminished. He immediately became “The Boy General's” ardent admirer and, after the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, was his fallen hero's most ardent apologist. Within two weeks of the first news of the battle, Whittaker had published eighty lines of creditable doggerel in the Army and Navy Journal—“Custer's Last Charge”; a eulogy in Galaxy appeared shortly afterward (in which he compared “The Yellow Hair,” favorably, to Don John of Austria, the Black Prince, Alexander the Great; Custer was as much the beau sabreur as Murat, as brilliant as Seidlitz; he charged like Murat and died like Leonidas); and then the Grand Finale, a six-hundred-plus page biography, The Life of General George A. Custer, written and put into print within six months of Custer's death. As a writer for Beadle and Adams, Whittaker had learned how to roll out his prose with steam press rapidity; but the tone, the fullness of the narrative, and the ardor which blushes every page show that these various works were de amore.
