The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
New York: Viking, 2010 ISBN 9780670021727
Could this be the definitive book on the Battle of the Little Bighorn? It may well be. Nathaniel Philbrick has brought his considerable talents to bear on the events that occurred between May 1876 when Custer and the Seventh Cavalry headed out to face the Lakota, and early July, when the news of Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn became public. Along the way the reader not only gets an insight into Custer's character and history, but also those around him, and of the Indians, for whom this battle was also a "last stand".
While at times I felt the structure of this book was a little formulaic, with the narrative drive of Custer's demise interrupted by asides into history or culture, there can be no doubt that Philbrick has amassed voluminous sources and presented the reader with an account that has looked at all the evidence at hand (in a book of 466 pages, there are 92 pages of notes and a 27 page bibliography) and explained as near as can be known exactly what happened on the bluffs overlooking the Little Bighorn on 25-26 June 1876.
While many books about this subject have a barrow to push, either excoriating or glorifying Custer, Reno, Benteen or others, Philbrick has let the facts speak for themselves, noting when the "facts" might be passed down to us by someone with an axe to grind. No-one comes out of Philbrick's telling unscathed.
Anyone who has read anything about Custer will know of his rashness and inability to follow orders: Philbrick emphasises that Custer had other worries than Indians on his mind in June 1876. He was seriously in debt after some disastrous investments, and as also in political trouble, coming out for the Democrats in opposition to President Grant. He needed a grand victory to secure himself both financially and politically.
Major Reno perhaps comes out of this telling of the tale worst. His poor leadership and drunkenness during the battle led to the rout of his companies down on the plain, and if it wasn't for Benteen taking control on Reno Hill he too may have been lost with all his men. There is little to be said in his defence, and in fact the most interesting thing about his role in the battle is why Custer put him in charge of the left wing of his divided force to begin with, given the open hostility between the two. Reno could never surmount the misfortunes life threw at him, and died a drunk and broken man.
The most interesting character from the US Army side was Captain Frederick Benteen. A pathological hater, especially of Custer, his mix of disobedience, insubordination, lack of discipline and outright inspiration and bravery in those two days are breathtaking. He truly hated Custer and his decision to stay with Reno rather than go to Custer with ammunition is one of the great "what ifs" of the battle. While we will never know if it would have been decisive for him to join with Custer, we can be fairly sure that if he had moved on and left Reno to his own devices, Reno's battalions would have suffered a similar fate to those of Custer. In the end, it was Custer's desperation for a victory that he wanted to claim for himself and himself alone that led to disaster.
Philbrick, in my opinion, provides the clearest most easy-to-follow account of the fight on Reno Hill, and also reconstructs a very plausible account of what happened to Custer and his men. In the end, after all that has been written over the years, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Custer was simply outnumbered, and would most likely have been overwhelmed no matter what tactics he might have chosen to employ. That the situation came to that is a result not only of Custer's undoubted shortcomings and flaws, but of the machinations of Terry, the tentativeness of Crook, and even the actions of Sheridan and Grant.
What was meant to be a simple victory over a people being dispossessed became instead a symbol of hubris and mismanagement. The victory was merely delayed, and not by very long either. As Philbrick explains, most of the Indians involved in the battle were in reservations by the beginning of Winter 1876. He touches on the tragedy that was to follow, from the deaths of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to the tragedy of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the end of a way of life, if not a people.
For those interested in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and in what actually happened on those summer days in 1876, I can highly recommend this book.
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