W. Britain's title for this figure is more accurate than most of the books written about him. Custer was a lieutenant colonel. He graduated from West Point in 1861 ranked thirty-fourth in a class of thirty-four — last, out of a class that had started with seventy-nine — and then rose faster than anyone else in it. On June 29, 1863 he was made a brevet brigadier general of volunteers at twenty-three, and days later his Michigan brigade was fighting J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry on East Cavalry Field at Gettysburg. By April 15, 1865 he was a major general of volunteers, aged twenty-five. Then the war ended and the arithmetic reversed. The volunteer army that had produced those ranks was dissolved; he was mustered out of it on February 1, 1866, and on July 28 that year he was appointed lieutenant colonel of the newly created 7th Cavalry. That is the rank he still held on June 25, 1876, when the regiment rode into the valley of the Little Bighorn and met the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho camped there. He was addressed as General to the end, because the army's courtesy was to call an officer by the highest brevet he had ever held — which meant that for the last ten years of his life every "General Custer" was a reference to a rank he no longer had, in an army that no longer existed. He had been a general at twenty-three and was a lieutenant colonel at twenty-six, and he spent the rest of his career being called the first while doing the job of the second.

This is the dress-uniform Custer: dark blue with gold cord and shoulder knots, gold stripe down the trouser leg, plumed dress helmet held in the crook of his arm, and the long fair hair that is half his reputation. That hair is worth a footnote. Before the 1876 campaign he had it cut off — he and Lieutenant Varnum had the clippers run over their heads before the regiment left Fort Lincoln, both of them going bald — so the flowing yellow hair belongs to the earlier Custer, the one the country had been reading about since Gettysburg, rather than the man who rode out that June. For the other end of his story, King & Country's Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer shows him in the field with his revolvers drawn; it is also 1/30 and matte, so the two stand together and read as the same man ten years apart. On the shelf beside them, Major General J.E.B. Stuart was the cavalryman on the other side of that Gettysburg field, and General John Buford was the Union horseman who had chosen the ground two days before.

Model: 32004 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set