My Gallant Hero: For St. Patrick’s Day

My tongue-in-cheek nominee, had People been around in 1874, when a word like “sexiest” would’ve been bewildering.

I hold no brief for wat where once called. “Indian fighters,” but in the Disney film Tonka, for cryin’ out loud, Keogh was played by Guy Williams. As Zorro, he was my childhood hero. Both Williams and a young Lakota, played, of course (?), by Sal Mineio, were devoted to a gelding who turned out to be the lone survivor, human or otherwise, of Custer’s immediate command. Here’s a still from the film, which impressed the six-year-old me deeply. I”ve been obsessed with the Little Bighorn ever since. And, truth be told, I love any film about the love between humans and animals-–War Horse, so many years later, must’ve rought back memories of Tonka.

Nipomo farmer Charles Bristol served with him during the Civil War. I got to teach his great-great-grandchildren, wonderful young people—one a firefighter, one has just become a mother, and their father, Blake, is a superb high school teacher. So these Bristols’ ancestor would known Myles Keogh, an Irish expatriate, a soldier of fortune, dashing and courtly. Sadly, after the war, he wound up assigned to George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and so was killed on a little rise hafway to Custer Hill along with his Company I. .

Custer was a stickler for appearances, so each company was segregated by the color of their horses—chestnuts, greys, and so on. In the Disney film, Comanche looks too red to be a bay, but it was bayy that made up Keogh’s Company. Comanche, the survivor, was beloved by the Seventh, as was Keogh, so, after the Little Bighorn–the Greasy Grass fight, the Lakota called it—his daily ration, for the rest of his life, included oats and hay. And a bucket of beer. Here he is after the Greasy Grass:

Here is Charles Bristol, and here, at Fort Lincoln, after the war, in his time with the Seventh, is Myles Keogh, on the bottom step at right. Most of the women in this photo became widows.