Killing Custer

In his first nonfiction work, the author of The Death of Jim Loney and The Indian Lawyer poignantly resurrects the Plains Indians' side of the story of the Little Bighorn from beneath a mountain of myth and misinterpretation, revamping the meaning of the conflict for a multicultural society.

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.