Custer’s ‘last’ reunion
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was only 20 years past when F Otto Becker of the Milwaukee Lithographing Company turned Cassilly Adams’ painting “Custer’s Last Fight” into a swell advertisement for Adolphus Busch, the beer tycoon.
How a picture of men being scalped might sell beer is lost on modern marketing, but presumably it was a guy thing.
Adams depicted Custer and his men swarmed by Sioux, using a stretch of canvas from a covered wagon. That was in 1884. In 1889 Becker did a fresh painting from which the lithograph was made for the ad, and Busch gave the painting to the US Cavalry’s Seventh Regiment.
The cavalry hung it on a wall at Fort Bliss in New Mexico, where in the 1930s someone noticed that it was in pretty bad shape. Then there was a fire.
Somehow the painting, cut into pieces for the lithography process, ignored in an officers’ mess and then badly singed in a fire, was patched back together by Becker — who promptly sold it once more to Busch, or at least the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Assocation.
Cassilly Adams’ “Custer” lived to fight another day, and last month Sotheby’s New York invited bids for it in the $5,000 range. History marches on.
