Season 1 • Episode 17
LatestCuster goes in pursuit of a scout who escaped from Army custody after being convicted of theft and killed a trooper while making his bid for freedom.
Custer, also known as The Legend of Custer, is a 17-episode military-western television series which ran on ABC from September 6 to December 27, 1967, with Wayne Maunder in the starring role of then Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. During the American Civil War, Custer had risen to the rank of major general, the youngest in the Union Army. He was demoted after the war during force reductions to the rank of Captain, but was reinstated in 1866 as a Lieutenant Colonel in command of the Seventh Cavalry, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. Many of the soldiers in the regiment were derelicts, former Confederates, or even criminals. The series was cancelled before the script timeline would have reached the Little Big Horn River of southeastern Montana, where all perished on June 25, 1876, in a Sioux Indian ambush, Robert F. Simon played Custer's commanding officer, U.S. General Alfred H. Terry, who disapproved of Custer's long hair and much of his methodology of fighting Indians. Slim Pickens starred as a scout named California Joe Milner. Michael Dante appeared as Sioux Chief Crazy Horse. Peter Palmer played Sergeant James Bustard, a former Confederate soldier. Grant Woods appeared as Captain Myles Keogh. Read Morgan, formerly a cavalry officer on NBC's The Deputy, appeared in the episode "Spirit Woman" in the role of a medicine man.
Acting
Slim Pickens stealing scenes as California Joe, the only authentic chaos.
Production
ABC's expensive sets that outlasted the show's nerve.
Writing
The narrative cop-out: 17 episodes avoiding the ending everyone knows.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Custer premiered months after Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde rewired American violence on screen—making its sanitized approach already obsolete.
Wayne Maunder had just played a young Robert Kennedy in The Late Lamented; Custer was ABC's attempt to make him a weekly leading man. It didn't take.
US
