We recently journeyed near the borderline of Korea, where the remnants of what was once known as “Camp Garryowen” lie. This camp, operating as the early guard system for the United States army against northern infiltrations, shares its name not really with the Limerick district but with a popular military jig and rallying song among the British and US troops.
Teddy Roosevelt, a former US president, labelled this tune as “the world’s finest combat song”, a judgement also appreciated by General Custer. Custer’s 7th Cavalry regiment employed it as their war chant. Conversely, the “Plains Indians,” the individuals on the receiving end of Custer’s campaigns during the 1860s and 70s, viewed the song less favourably, dubbing it “devil’s music”. One analyst contrasted the affiliation between the tune “Garryowen” and the Indigenous Americans with that of “Deutschland Über Alles” with the Jewish community, and we’ll discuss this further later.
The melody, initially a Scottish or Irish jig referred to occasionally as “Auld Bessy,” does not easily provide for associated lyrics. Josephine Patricia Smith, a collector of Irish-American music, grieved over this musical piece. She believed it encompassed an untamed element that resisted conformity. Consequently, she ended up with a disjointed and mostly unsingable song.
She referred to Thomas Moore’s unsuccessful endeavour to convert Auld Bessie into the love ballad, “We May Roam Through This World” (which was later retouched by Beethoven), as a ‘futile attempt.’ Smith also related another unsuccessful attempt to mould “Garryowen” into a tribute to Bacchus, but it merely resulted in a indecent outpour that failed to pay homage to historical Limerick.
To this end, she discussed the ballad that takes pleasure in demolishing lamps in Limerick streets while they are lit among other acts of vandalism, which, in her eyes, evidently brought disrespect to the town’s historical significance.
A rendition of Garryowen became a treasured anthem within regiments on both coasts of the Atlantic. Interestingly, a portrayal of this is seen in the 1941 Western movie, They Died with Their Boots On, which depicts General Custer, played by Errol Flynn, learning the song from an English character, affectionately named “Queen’s Own Butler”.
Butler and Custer, old war companions, reunite and reminisce about past times, and the former ends up performing a verse of the haunting tune, Garryowen, that marked their early camaraderie. In a captivating scene from the film, the song soon echoes through the ranks of soldiers, becoming a heartening accompaniment for the 7th Cavalry on their march to glory. As dramatised in this wartime movie, the anthem Garryowen was instrumental in General Custer’s ability to shape his troops into an organised fighting force.
However, Custer’s campaign, particularly against the Native Indians, was riddled with contentious incidents. The attack on the Washita River in Oklahoma back in 1868 is one such instance, which continues to divisive, being dubbed alternatively as a ‘battle’ or a ‘massacre’. It witnessed the presentation of Garryowen too, before it featured prominently eight years after in several other battles.
In the year 1968, exactly 100 years after Washita, The 7th Cavalry’s descendants remembered the event alongside relatives of the vanquished Cheyenne tribe and participated in a symbolic exchange of gifts. This was reported by Niall O’Dowd in a piece for the Irish Central website, in which he revealed that a representative of the Cheyenne lineage gifted a blanket to the cavalry descendants. The blanket was intriguingly drawn from around the coffin of a child casualty from a battle, only recently buried after a century of being exhibited in a museum.
A gentleman clad in the attire of a 7th Cavalry captain once presented the Cheyenne with a regimental emblem inscribed with “Garryowen”. He swore that the tune would no longer be played by the descendants of the cavalry. Notably, it was likely the ballad, not the location, that James Joyce referenced in Ulysses when he named the dog of his passionate nationalist “Citizen” Garryowen (a name borrowed from his in-laws’ actual Red Setter).
However, returning to Korea, a US military base had or perhaps still has, a military dog with that exact name. As per an Army publication from 2013, Garryowen was still in use as a battle cry by a local 7th Cavalry division. As a symbol of this, a dog at the base was given the title “Command Sergeant Major Echo Garryowen”. The canine seemed to have some aspects of a border collie, based on images. His exact lineage, akin to the ballad, remained somewhat indistinct.