Hello from The Sandbox and welcome to an interesting look at Rod Serling's S5E11 "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms." I have always had a problem with this Twilight Zone episode. I love the concept and its quality, but I struggled with the motivations of our main characters, especially given that Rod Serling penned this episode. I have recently discovered that the problem I have with this episode is one of context and personal perspective. And because of that understanding, my opinions on the episode have changed.

Let me start a little earlier with how I came to write this post. I was seeing this episode appear on lists of people's favorite episodes, or at least an episode people were excited to see during the Syfy Twilight Zone Marathon on New Year's Eve, and it made me think to myself: "Am I missing something?" "Do people not have the same reservations about the episode that I do?"

My problem has always been why soldiers in the 1960s would want to join Custer at his last stand. I even misremembered some details about the episode as I was tweeting about it, which was perhaps my subconscious attempt to rectify my misgivings.

Thinking about that question sparked an idea that solved my dilemma and led me to this post of The Mystic Reader. It's something I briefly read about while researching Twilight Zone player Cliff Robertson and his movie The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid.

 Pop Culture Custer from Hero to Fool 

As I stated before, my issue was always why soldiers in the 1960s would want to join Custer in his last stand. I am sure military solidarity has something to do with it, but that isn’t enough for me because, given how I was taught about Custer, it sounds like a terrible idea.

What I remembered about researching The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) was that it was an anti-Western or a revisionist Western, and these types of Westerns had taken over as the staple in films about the Wild West. So I thought perhaps my mystery lies there—that I live on the other side of revisionist Westerns and the other side of the counterculture movement of the late '60s and '70s.

There is a great way to explain what I’m trying to say by using a piece of 1980s Americana. In Back to the Future Part III, 1955 Doc Brown is sending Marty into the Old West to rescue 1985 Doc Brown. 1955 Doc Brown dresses Marty up as a cowboy as he knows it—as a cowboy from 1950s television: bright, pastel-colored clothes with leather frills, atomic symbols, a bedazzled shiny belt buckle, and an authentic, pristine white hat.

"The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" is 1955 Doc Brown saying, "Haven’t you ever seen a Western?"—and I am Marty McFly wondering out loud, "Yeah, I have, Doc, and Clint Eastwood never wore anything like this."

Our Twilight Zone episode of the day deals with one major detail of the Wild West, which is Custer's Last Stand, so we will explore the different ways Custer has been portrayed in pop culture and, more specifically, in film from the early 1900s to today, so we can discover how Custer turned from a hero into a fool in the span of 100 years. We will briefly touch on the myth and actual history of Custer as well, but mostly just to inform how his portrayal has changed over the years.

Understanding the context and culture in which Serling wrote this episode creates a better appreciation for it and makes it more entertaining from our 21st-century perspective. Whether you are a fan of "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" or not, I hope this will increase your appreciation of it, or at least that you’ll enjoy our little jaunt through history we are about to take—not unlike our main characters.

A Quick Refresher of The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms 

If you need a quick refresher on the episode, here it is: Three National Guardsmen on tank patrol during military war games hear a gunshot in the distance and discover a Native American tepee and a canteen labeled "7th Cavalry." The canteen looks brand new, but the 7th Cavalry and their famous leader, General George Armstrong Custer, died not very far from here almost 100 years ago.

The unit continues to encounter the past until they reach the site of Custer's Last Stand and join in the battle. Their commanding officer sends out search parties for his AWOL soldiers, but only their tank is found. Standing at the memorial site for Custer's Last Stand, among the list of names of the men who died, are the three National Guardsmen—proving they had gone into the past and joined in the battle.

A Bit of History on Custer's Last Stand. 

General Custer was actually Lieutenant Colonel Custer of the 7th Cavalry of the United States Army, sent west to force the Lakota (sometimes called the Sioux) and the Cheyenne back onto the reservation that was allotted to them in a peace agreement—an agreement that the United States government was already backing out of in various ways.

Custer had been a general during the Civil War and gained a lot of popularity among those who served with him, as well as those who heard the grandiose stories and myths that circulated about him. He was a charismatic guy, and those under his command loved him. After the war, many soldiers who had received wartime promotions due to the need for military-trained leaders (of which Custer was a West Point graduate) had their ranks reduced once the war was over. Even though Custer was reduced in rank to Lieutenant Colonel, his men would still call him "General," much to the annoyance of some of his senior officers.

Generally speaking, our main characters do an okay job explaining the movements of the 7th Cavalry—especially considering this is just a 30-minute sci-fi/fantasy show in the '60s and not a Ken Burns documentary. However, the glory and heroics of Custer's Last Stand, which serve as an underlying current and even an important premise of the episode, are not very accurate. But, pop culturally speaking, they were accurate for 1963. To explain this, I'd like to take a look at the growth of Custer's mythos in the years after his death and the many films that have depicted Custer over the years.

Libby Custer and Buffalo Bill 

After Custer's death, two main people were responsible for keeping the torch of Custer's legacy and myth alive: his wife, Libby, and the Wild West personality known as Buffalo Bill.

Custer's wife, Elizabeth "Libby" Custer, began a campaign after her husband's death that included articles, speaking engagements, and several books designed to cement her husband's legacy as a war hero and an American martyr for Western expansion. According to the Kansas Historical Society, "She was lobbying Congress for a museum at the Little Bighorn battlefield when she died a few days before her 91st birthday on April 4, 1933."

If Libby cemented Custer's legacy, then Buffalo Bill was responsible for cementing his glory and fame. William Frederick Cody earned the nickname "Buffalo Bill" after being hired by the Kansas Pacific Railroad as it expanded west in the late 1860s. He was hired to hunt buffalo to feed the workers and keep herds away from the tracks. He had previously worked for the Pony Express and served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War.

After his work for the railroad, Cody began performing in Wild West shows—outdoor spectacles featuring horseback riding, stunt tricks, and reenactments of battles and shootouts. Bill eventually launched his own show, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which grew so famous that he toured Europe for a time, making him one of America's first international celebrities.

One of the key battles his show reenacted was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as "Custer's Last Stand." These performances romanticized the West, telling exciting, action-packed stories that often bent the truth. As seen on promotional posters for Buffalo Bill's show, Custer is shown surrounded as Native warriors swarm him and the last of his men.

Kamila Kudelska notes in an article for CenterOfTheWest.org:

"The reenactments in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show really set the template of Custer’s Last Stand, which later would be recreated over and over again in Hollywood TV and movie productions."

We see this template used as early as 1912 in the silent film Custer's Last Fight. Before the final battle scene, a title card reads:

"The horses stampeded with the ammunition—outnumbered 12 to 1, back to back the gallant band faces the contracting whirling circle of death."

This depiction—Custer surrounded, gallantly fighting to the very end—became the primary way film and television would portray the battle for decades. There were no surviving U.S. soldiers (who were mostly European immigrants) left to recount what happened. And while there were plenty of Native witnesses, military officials initially dismissed their accounts as untrustworthy in an effort to control the narrative.

Sadly, while surviving film footage of Buffalo Bill's show exists today, no footage of their Little Bighorn reenactment remains.

They Died with Their Boots On and Custer of the West

Probably the most well-known film about Custer is They Died with Their Boots On, starring Hollywood legend Errol Flynn. The movie portrays him as a charismatic, rebellious commander who takes matters into his own hands to do the right thing. According to Professor Gregory J. W. Urwin in an interview on the Based on a True Story podcast, the movie gets a "C" for accuracy. He says that the one thing they got right was his charm and charisma. Custer—especially during the Civil War—was well-liked by his men. He was always well-dressed and took particularly good care of his flowing blonde hair, which he scented to smell like cinnamon.

But as with all films, the truth of someone's life is far more complicated than can be expressed in two hours. There was actually a book written about Custer that came out not long after his wife's death that showed Custer in a negative light. It was called Glory-Hunter. And while it was a bestseller, They Died with Their Boots On was produced during the start of World War II, and they wanted a film that would create patriotism and love of one's country.

The end is the same whirling circle of death that was portrayed in Custer's Last Fight. The 7th Cavalry is surrounded by the Lakota and Cheyenne, who ride around them on their horses, slowly killing everyone until Custer is left for last.

In 1967, the movie Custer of the West continued the tradition of the whirling circle of death, even turning Custer into a bit of an anti-government hero who tried to speak up for Native Americans being forced onto reservations. Custer was outspoken about his political views, was no friend of the government and its constantly flip-flopping promises and decisions, and he even sympathized with Native Americans who were constantly being lied to—but I don’t think anyone should call him an advocate. The movie's attempt to show the mistreatment of Native Americans while maintaining that Custer was a pure American hero did not sit well with audiences. The filmmakers and writers were attempting to have their cake and eat it too. You cannot speak about the atrocities of westward expansion and continue to pretend that Custer and other legends of the West had no blood on their hands. This was a sign of the public's changing views of the Old West. 

It was only a few years before "Custer of the West " that "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" aired, and it marks a shift in how Native Americans were portrayed in American media. Though it shares the same sentiments as these other films about Custer's glorious last stand, what was different was how Native Americans were spoken about on film and TV. 

The Revisionist Westerns and Little Big Man

Although there were some forerunners in Hollywood Westerns—both TV and film—that portrayed a more realistic view of the West, or ones where Native American characters and themes were the main focus of the stories, it wasn't until the late '60s and '70s that these ideas really hit the mainstream. Growing distrust in the government and anti-war protests fueled a whole new kind of Western.

One of these Westerns would be the first Western film to show Custer in a negative light—to be specific, to make him foolish, arrogant, and a little stupid: Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman. Custer is played by Twilight Zone 1985 player Richard Mulligan (who starred as the Night in "Night of the Meek" in 1985).

It's a dark, satirical comedy that pokes fun at pretty much every Hollywood Western trope of the previous decade and a half. The film can shift from Dustin Hoffman's character—who was raised by Native Americans—trying to save his life from being killed by a soldier by shouting "God bless George Washington!" and exclaiming, "Sure, I'm white. Didn't you hear me say, 'God bless George Washington'?" to a scene where the 7th Cavalry raids a Native village and begins slaughtering people, and our main character watches his wife and the child she is carrying on her back get shot to death right in front of him.

Custer is shown as an unintelligent military man bent on glory, duty, and pride, who is basically tricked into attacking the Native Americans at the Little Bighorn because he is told he doesn’t have enough men to win. There is no "whirling circle of death" either; it's portrayed as the massacre it truly was. After Custer is knocked off his horse, he is seen wandering around the battlefield, babbling like a madman until he is killed.

This is much closer to the real battle, where the 7th Cavalry was outnumbered 200 to as many as 3,000 Lakota and Cheyenne, with at least a fifth of the Lakota and Cheyenne carrying repeating rifles that could fire 13 times in 30 seconds, whereas the Cavalry's standard rifles could only get off 4 shots in that same span of time. We know this today because of modern forensic science done on the battlefield, alongside the eyewitness testimony of Native Americans who were there and whose accounts corroborate the physical evidence.

A Balanced Historical Perspective

Nowadays, in pop culture at least, Custer is often treated as a bumbling caricature with zero intelligence or self-awareness. You can find numerous social media shorts filled with bite-sized historical trivia that portray Custer as the stupidest general ever and label it "educational." Now, I’m not defending Custer at all—his pride and arrogance absolutely led to his downfall—but the sum of a person's life is much more complex than a ten-minute YouTube video designed as clickbait. 

The real story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is found in a balanced approach: taking in all sides and all the depths of the event—especially the living Native American eyewitness testimony of the time, which, as I mentioned earlier, was not considered trustworthy at first.

Today, there are movies and documentaries that tell fuller stories using evidence gathered from all available sources. As a kid, I loved the movie Dances with Wolves. Although that film is rife with its own historical inaccuracies, it does a much better job of showing the real, systemic issues of westward expansion. It's also cemented in my mind because, on a trip to South Dakota in the early '90s, my family stopped at an attraction that had all kinds of props and gear from the movie, including one of the horses used for the main character John Dunbar.

Professor Urwin suggested a made-for-TV movie called Son of the Morning Star (1991), which attempts to show all angles of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the events leading up to it. To this day, there stands a memorial to the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, alongside a memorial dedicated to the Native Americans who died there, and a reenactment of the battle takes place nearby every year.

21st-Century Me and The 7th Cavalry

For me, this historical journey through film and TV has deepened my affection for "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms." It's still not a top-tier episode for me, but seeing it through the pop-culture lens of the mid-1960s allows me to set my reservations aside and appreciate the episode in its own context. Serling seemed to be standing right on the edge of a massive transition in how Native Americans were portrayed in TV and film.

At the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., there is a display about the Battle of the Little Bighorn—also called the Battle of the Greasy Grass by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne. Part of the description reads:

"The Battle of Little Bighorn shook through 19th-century America to the core. Questions began immediately and never stopped. But the way the country thinks about Little Bighorn has changed. Ten years after being deemed a villain, Sitting Bull was giving autographs.  George Armstrong Custer has been seen as a hero and a buffoon. In the 2000s, Little Bighorn is a figure of speech, a metaphor, a punchline."

Right next to this description is a visual showing a three part range of Custer media—stretching from Custer as a national hero to Custer as a bumbling fool—and Serling's "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" sits right in the middle. It sits right between Santa Fe Trail (1940) and Little Big Man (1970).

In the episode, two moments really jump out at me. The first is when Captain Connors is trying to reason with Sergeant Conners. Captain Connors responds to Conners' talk of hearing Indians and gunfire by saying, "If you meet any Indians, will you please take it slow because they're all college graduates and probably doing tests on the soil." Serling's ghost story, moving back and forth from past to present, displays both realities: the historical reality of Western expansion and violence, and the present modern reality of moving forward.

The second moment is when asked what he will do when they find the battle, Sergeant Conners responds, "Stop it... or join it." To me, this line reflects a cultural middle ground—a time of transition in the United States where there were no clear-cut answers anymore. He's not sure what he's going to do or why he's being pulled toward that moment in time. Serling's story was moving in the right direction. Not every story is going to be a "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Sometimes a story can just be a step in the right direction.