Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fate of the Plains Indians

Abstract

General George Custer's 1876 attack on a huge encampment of Plains Indians has gone down as the most disastrous defeat in American history. Much less understood is how disastrous it was for the victors, the Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Sitting Bull: within fifteen years all Native Americans were confined to reservations, their culture in ruins. James Welch poignantly resurrects their side of the story from beneath a mountain of myth and misinterpretation, relating in masterful prose the pride and desperation of a people stripped of treaty rights and hounded from ancestral hunting grounds into wretched reservations. Through this critical missing piece that tells the Indian side of the story, Killing Custer rethinks the meaning of the Little Bighorn for a multicultural society.