Within a few years of their most complete victory over U.S. They had grown more and more irate over the government's Indian policies, and by July 1876, had allied under the leadership of the remarkable mystic/politician Sioux chief, Sitting Bull. Philbrick contends that the battle was also, in a real sense, the last stand for the Plains Indians. He's done it again here, by treating the battle as a prism of those relations' end game.įor Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (who was always referred to as "General," his Civil War rank), it was obviously the last stand, since he and his entire battalion of over 250 men were wiped out by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. He did it in Mayflower, offering the wide picture of the Pilgrims' struggle to survive in Massachusetts, and how they fit into the early history of Euro-Native relations.
Philbrick's specialty is synthesizing huge bodies of information and then creating a compelling, driving narrative that makes what he's reporting seem brand new again. And, lo and behold, he also connects old sources that, if accurate, place Custer's role in a whole new light.
In the excellent The Last Stand, however, Nathaniel Philbrick, the author of acclaimed books of well-researched popular history like Mayflower and In The Heart of the Sea, has produced a riveting book on the intricacies of that day, while adding some new takes on a few elements of the battle.
There are also so many conflicting accounts of the details of that day, no one can reconstruct a definitive account of everything that happened. What's left for writers today are different ways to place the battle in context, or subtle arguments about who in Custer's 7th Cavalry was to blame for the slaughter. Since then, it has become so deeply ingrained in American history and imagination, and so much minutiae has been examined, you'd think it was impossible to find anything new to write about it. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, or Custer's Last Stand, took place in Montana on the afternoon of June 25, 1876.
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