A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the Last Great Battle of the American West
by James Donovan
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Book Summary Information
Author: James DonovanEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-24
ISBN: 0316155780
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the Last Great Battle of the American West
Book Review: Is it the wind or Garryowen whispering through the buffalo grass?
Summary: 5 Stars
"Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs." - Custer's last communication before riding forth to a terrible glory.
Anyone of a certain age and cultural background, born and educated in the United States, is likely to know of George Armstrong Custer's last stand with his Seventh Cavalry against overwhelming numbers of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in June, 1876. Who among us hasn't seen at least one of the several fanciful paintings of the event by various artists?
The core of A TERRIBLE GLORY is James Donovan's masterful and absorbing account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The book also includes a summary of Custer's military career and personal life prior to 1876, the personalities of the principal Native American leaders (primarily Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse), the tense post-Civil War relationship of the federal government and the U.S. Army with the Sioux, and the battle's aftermath, including the Army's 1879 Court of Inquiry into the Seventh's conduct of the engagement and Major Marcus Reno's performance in particular, the ultimate fates of the main characters in the drama, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee, which can be argued was the Seventh Cavalry's revenge for the Little Bighorn debacle.
Those chapters of A TERRIBLE GLORY concerned with the 1876 encounter place it in the context of that summer's three-pronged Army advance (Gibbon, Terry, Crook) on the tribes that were roaming the Montana and Wyoming territories outside the reservations. Then, for June 25-26, the narration comprises the three phases of the Battle: Reno's ill-starred attack on the south end of the Indian village, the annihilation of Custer and five of the Seventh's twelve companies, and the siege of the Reno-Benteen force dug in on their hill. In the prefatory Author's Notes section, Donovan is careful to point out that his accounts of the first and third phases are based on primary sources. The second phase, once Custer and his 210 men rode off down Medicine Tail Coulee, is reconstructed mainly from reasonable supposition and battlefield archeology since the eyewitness testimonies of the victorious Sioux and Cheyenne warriors are "sketchy and often contradictory". That said, the narrative of the clash as a whole flows seamlessly. Indeed, it's riveting.
The volume includes several useful maps, fourteen pages of photographs, and lengthy Notes and Bibliography sections.
A couple of years back, I had the great good fortune to gaze out from the summit of Last Stand Hill over the marker stones of Custer and his troopers set amidst the rippling buffalo grass. Was that a faint echo of "Garryowen", the Seventh Cavalry's official marching air, that I heard on the wind? Well, perhaps not, but only sounds from a radio in a car passing behind me. But, as the author closes his wonderful narrative:
"After the tourists have gone, the ridges and ravines overlooking the river below are still and eerie. Today, if one stands there alone as the wind sighs through the buffalo grass, it is hard not to believe that the spirits of the men who died there ... perform their own ghost dance: clasping hands in a circle, moving ever to the right ..."
After nearly six decades of life, I feel I've finally arrived at a proper understanding of what transpired on those hills in southeast Montana just to the east of Interstate 90 on two hot summer days nearly 133 years ago. A TERRIBLE GLORY is a superb volume worth the attention of any casual or serious student of the Battle of the Little Bighorn wishing to know its place in the context of that period of American history.
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