Beer Ads and Wild West Shows Hyped the Myth of Custer's Heroic 'Last Stand'
In 1896 , on the nose 20 age after General George Armstrong Custer was pop alongside 261 of his cavalrymen at the Battle of Little Bighorn , thebeercompany Anheuser Busch brewed up a wildly democratic advertising campaign . The company reproduced 150,000 copies of a lithograph name " Custer ’s Last Fight ! " and plastered it in saloons and tap house across America . The lithograph machine , based on an 1888 painting by Cassilly Adams , show a chaotic battle scene on the Montana kvetch with a dozen dark - uniformed cavalrymen laying numb or offend on the ground as war - paint Indians finish them off with clubs and spears before ritually scalping the white work force ’s corpses ....