Product Description

No battle in American history has inspired more debate and conjecture than the one that claimed Custer's command at the Little Bighorn. Starting with the shadowy Mitch Boyer, known as the sole Army scout who followed Custer into battle and died with him, this study fills in the true details of Boyer's life preceding the Sioux campaign of 1876. His career as a guide and interpreter epitomized the advance of white Americans into Indian country, which led to the tragic encounters of that year. Part 2 of the text covers the two weeks during which Boyer served as Custer's key guide and scout. Here the focus and approach change, for the troopers and scouts separated into many parties. Numerous details of the last days, hours and seconds of the campaign, and the final action of Custer's own battalion, are clarified. Using only known primary accounts of the battle and employing topographic research in conjunction with time-motion analysis, the author attempts to produce a coherent picture of events. His method exposes accounts that are blatantly impossible and illuminates the often undervalued interviews with Indian scouts. The resulting reconstruction of the battle illuminates what really happened that day at the Little Bighorn.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #755875 in Books
• Published on: 1991-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From Library Journal
Gray, a retired physician and Little Big Horn aficionado, has produced a book intended to be the final word on the events surrounding Custer's final campaign. He does a good job of highlighting the role of Indian scout Boyer, but most of the book slides toward tedium. The last half is an incredible minute-by-half-minute reconstruction of the movements of virtually every person and horse involved in the battle. Reappraisals such as this are of interest mostly to antiquarians who quibble about who-shot-who-from-which-hill. For Western Americana collections; public libraries will still be better off with Evan Connell's lush Son of the Morning Star ( LJ 9/1/84).
- Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ingram
"Gray challenges many time-honored beliefs about the battle . . . (and) brings in as much as possible the testimony of the Indian witnesses . . . which generations of historians have dismissed. . . . The contrasts in (this) book . . . reinstate the basic components of what still attracts the imagination to the Little Big Horn."--Los Angeles Times Book Review.