AFTERWORD

IT was a time of romance with a capital R. A time in our country when adventure and the mysterious lure of the West had captured the Republic’s attention.

At no other time could the Battle of the Little Bighorn have happened—a tragedy that struck during the very celebration of our nation’s centennial. No novelist could hope to dream up any better drama. Nor any deeper tragedy.

As my friend Will Henry said of the last stand, “Its story has been told in more wrong ways than any other adventure of the Western past.” Considering his deep appreciation of the native culture that found itself in conflict with an onrushing white migration, along with his lifelong dedication to historically portraying the tragic drama of that conflict played out during the Indian Wars, I think Will would approve of this telling of the story.

This novel is the first to deal with the Indian side of the Custer fight itself.

While there have been numerous historical novels dealing with the Reno fight and hilltop seige, with details lifted from the testimony of white survivors, and though there have been some novels devoted to imagining what took place on Battle Ridge—this is the first novel to reconcile the latest in archeological data with the most cogent of “Custer movement” theories, coupling that empirical information with the testimony taken from the only survivors of the day.

The Sioux and the Cheyenne themselves.

For too long white historians and writers have ignored the overwhelming Indian testimony of what happened on Battle Ridge. Simply because they found that testimony at times contradictory! Yet those same battle enthusiasts neglect to apply the same standards to the testimony given by white survivors from Reno’s and Benteen’s battalions. Their accounts evidenced glaring conflicts—both immediately following the fight and years later during the Reno Inquiry.

I don’t find myself alone, therefore, in agreeing with Stanley Vestal (whom I quote at the beginning of this novel), when he called the plains warrior an astute and practiced observer of war. War was, after all, the very focus of his way of life. To listen to a warrior’s rendition of a battle is to see that fight through the eyes of a keen and objective observer, one who views his role in the conflict only through the lens of a very particular microscope: his entry into the fracas, his coups, his wounds.

By piecing together the many of these stories collected over the decades from veterans of that fight against the soldiers along the Greasy Grass River, I have constructed what I believe to be the most plausible rendition of that battle which left no white survivors. In addition to the testimony of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors used in this novel, I relied heavily on the latest archeological and historical research completed as recent as 1990—even while this novel is being prepared for the publisher. So by combining the best that historical research has offered with the results of that methodical combing of the battlefield during the recent research summers, and by painstakingly sifting through the Indian testimony—plotting it all on a tabletop topographical map—I am confident that what I present here is a most plausible scenario to take much of what has been a mystery out of that hot afternoon on Battle Ridge.

Mystery and tragedy both marked George Armstrong Custer’s short life. Mystery and tragedy had been his life long companions even before the moment he led his five regiments away from Major Marcus Reno, marching into history and myth. Many questions and their unspoken answers have gone to the grave with Custer’s two hundred. Even more answers to the puzzling contradictions of his life have gone to the grave with his officers who survived the disaster at the Little Bighorn, but who remained silent out of some nineteenth century code of honor that would not allow them to utter the truth while Elizabeth Custer still lived.

Ironic that Libbie Custer outlived all but one of them!

Gentlemen they were, carrying to their graves their gloomy story of the outcome of Custer’s tragic affair in Indian Territory and how it led him to the banks of the Greasy Grass some seven years later. We amateur historians could not blame these men for their chivalrous silence. It was, after all, a time when soldiers gone off to war were permitted their dalliance with foreign women. A gentleman always kept quiet, for that Gilded Age was, after all, an era when the keeping of a mistress was widely accepted and generally practiced.

Custer had been sexually active as a young man in Monroe, Michigan, before marrying his Libbie.

Following the Civil War he was assigned leadership to clean out the nests of Confederates and hangers-on in Texas, 1865. It is generally believed Custer had a dalliance there with a daughter of the Old South.

Before coming to Fort Riley, Kansas, with Libbie the following year, Custer journeyed through St. Louis, where he shared another indiscretion with the wife of a fellow officer, one of Sheridan’s staff.

And following his court martial and one-year suspension from active duty, Custer returned to the plains in the fall of 1868—only to continue his practice of infidelity, this time with a young Cheyenne woman taken prisoner at the defeat of Black Kettle’s village.*

Finally, during those years Custer was stationed in the northern plains at Fort Abraham Lincoln, he not only appears to have continued his extramarital dalliances, but in fact flaunted them before his wife. Time and again he tells her of his indiscretions and improprieties during his visits to New York without Libbie.

To better understand our culture’s continuing fascination with the man we must remember that Custer was a young hero who had captured the nation’s attention and fancy during a most dramatic time in our collective history: the Civil War. After remarkable yet tumultous years of service on the plains, he became the nation’s darling, a hero cut down at a particular and tragic moment in what had been a brilliant, meteoric career. Cut down in the company of two brothers and a nephew, a brother-in-law and his closest of friends: the Custer inner circle.

The entire family gone in one hot breath of red fury on that yellow hillside.

Perhaps the primary reason this battle remains so vividly etched for all time in the American psyche is that no white survivor lived to tell the story. Yet as dramatic as that may be, history has recorded other military tragedies of far greater magnitude and consequence: the British charge of their light cavalry during the Crimean War, when over six hundred rode hell-bent to their destruction into the fiery maw of enemy cannon; and, the three-hundred Spartans who sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae. Down through our history, there were other, many lesser- known battles in which no man survived.

Most of us in this closing decade of our 20th Century look back on 1876 as a time when “the cavalry to the rescue!” was the stirring watchword of not only the frontier … but a call exciting the pulse of Easterners as well. Still, to put that era in perspective, we must not fail to realize what exciting exhibits thrilled visitors to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that same summer. Not only a device that prepared a “ready-roll,” or tailor-made, cigarette, but Alexander Graham Bell unveiled for the world his improved telephone. On and on, one could list the electronic and scientific marvels that astounded the world that summer. Yet with all that magic accompanying our nation’s headlong rush into its second century, the citizens of the Republic nonetheless turned their eyes to their past, if not focusing their attention on the startling contradictions of their present.

All the more ironic, wasn’t it, that the most popular, well-attended exhibit at the Centennial Exposition proved to be one sponsored by the Central Pacific Railroad—an authentic reconstruction of an 1876 buffalo-hunters’ camp in the Colorado Rockies. The average citizen, east coast or west, trained his eye on the frontier West for glory and romance back then … every bit as much as we do to this day.

While the white man celebrated the Republic’s one-hundredth birthday back East during that fateful summer, the Indian celebrated his most stunning victory for but two days—then disbanded, never to gather again in such strength or numbers. Never to share between them such accord and harmony, such medicine, as they had experienced that hot afternoon in Montana Territory when they ably defended their way of life. What had been the brief high-water mark recorded on every band’s winter count, was for the white man an ugly, gaping, bloody interruption to the self-absorbed celebration back East—a terrible, annoying reminder to the white man of what he had to do before he would truly call this land his.

He had to recommit himself to subduing, if not crushing once and for all, the native cultures of the plains.

The Army of the West reaffirmed its dedication to doing just that only weeks after discovering the bloated, stinking carcasses of some two hundred twenty-five white soldiers on that yellow hillside. With a renewed fervor and blood-vengeance so strong that it echoed shrilly behind the chants of “Remember Custer! Remember the

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