Wit & Attitude Quote by Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose lands a whole critique of American mythmaking in ten words by flipping the usual hero narrative inside out. “Custer had dead heroes” points to the kind of glory the U.S. Army and its chroniclers could safely curate after Little Bighorn: valor embalmed, defeat converted into moral victory, a story polished by distance and selective memory. Dead heroes don’t argue back; they can be recruited into national identity. Custer’s legend, in this reading, is less about tactical reality than about what a grieving, expanding nation needed to believe about itself.

“Crazy Horse had only live ones” is the sting. For the Lakota, heroism wasn’t a commemorative industry; it was a present-tense responsibility, carried by people who still had to hunt, protect families, negotiate alliances, and survive the next campaign. Live heroes complicate the clean arc of “noble sacrifice.” They demand political recognition, land, sovereignty - the very things the Custer myth conveniently sidesteps. Ambrose’s subtext is that American culture is better at honoring the dead than reckoning with the living, especially when the living are Indigenous and their continued existence challenges the story of inevitable conquest.

The line also hints at asymmetry in historical record. Custer’s side gets monuments, memoirs, and melodrama. Crazy Horse’s side gets surveillance, forced relocation, and a legacy filtered through outsiders. Ambrose isn’t just contrasting two leaders; he’s diagnosing how power decides whose heroism becomes history and whose becomes a problem.