Custer's Last Stand Demystified

The shattering news of the Battle of the Little Big Horn swept into the American consciousness with all the fury of a storm at sea surging ashore. For a still-young nation celebrating the centennial of its birth and anticipating the promise of a boundless future, the news of Custer's death ride hovered over the nation's celebrations like a nuclear winter. Ever since, gnawing questions surrounding this epic defeat have haunted the national imagination. How could the most famous regiment in the United States Army, led by a great war hero and its most renowned Indian fighter, succumb so disastrously and totally to the primitive savagery of the Western frontier? Since no trooper or scout who rode with Custer survived, answers to the debacle have never come easy, even for those determined to know the truth. From the first sighting of the massive Indian village, this new account provides a first-class, gut-wrenching historical reconstruction of events that is a model of prodigious research, as it builds, step-by-step, a case for what happened and why on that sweltering afternoon in June 1876. Drawing upon hundreds of personal accounts from both sides, furnishing exhaustive timelines and exquisitely detailed, uncluttered maps, the authors amplify old evidence while plowing untrodden ground in search of elusive clues. The result is a narrative bristling with the unholy cacophony of war, blending the art of superior storytelling with the historian's factual rigor. Unearthing fresh revelations of the great West's most storied and spellbinding encounter, this climactic slaughter along the banks of the Little Big Horn ultimately drove the Plains Indians and their way of life to an unmarked grave-even as other forces forged together a Continental nation of mythical proportions.

The shattering news of the Battle of the Little Big Horn swept into the American consciousness with all the fury of a storm at sea surging ashore. For a still-young nation celebrating the centennial of its birth and anticipating the promise of a boundless future, the news of Custer's death ride hovered over the nation's celebrations like a nuclear winter. Ever since, gnawing questions surrounding this epic defeat have haunted the national imagination. How could the most famous regiment in the United States Army, led by a great war hero and its most renowned Indian fighter, succumb so disastrously and totally to the primitive savagery of the Western frontier? Since no trooper or scout who rode with Custer survived, answers to the debacle have never come easy, even for those determined to know the truth. From the first sighting of the massive Indian village, this new account provides a first-class, gut-wrenching historical reconstruction of events that is a model of prodigious research, as it builds, step-by-step, a case for what happened and why on that sweltering afternoon in June 1876. Drawing upon hundreds of personal accounts from both sides, furnishing exhaustive timelines and exquisitely detailed, uncluttered maps, the authors amplify old evidence while plowing untrodden ground in search of elusive clues. The result is a narrative bristling with the unholy cacophony of war, blending the art of superior storytelling with the historian's factual rigor. Unearthing fresh revelations of the great West's most storied and spellbinding encounter, this climactic slaughter along the banks of the Little Big Horn ultimately drove the Plains Indians and their way of life to an unmarked grave-even as other forces forged together a Continental nation of mythical proportions.