General Custer and I were Very Nearly the Same Age and the Best of Friends

After Frederic Remington's unexpected death in 1909, future Taos artist Dunton was asked to complete a series of paintings on the life of General Nelson A. Miles left unfinished by Remington. Dunton completed the 19 paintings to be reproduced with Miles’s autobiography, “The Story of a Stirring Life: My Forty Years of Fighting,” in a series of articles in Cosmopolitan magazine from December 1910 through October 1911. This painting depicts then-colonels Miles and George Armstrong Custer on a buffalo hunt when both were stationed at Fort Hays, Kansas, in 1869. During the Red River War, Miles lead companies of the US 6th Cavalry and the 5th Infantry against the Southern Cheyennes in the Battle of Red River on 30 August 1874.

Purchase funded by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Josserand.

Conservation funded by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Foran
and J. B. Lane.