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Hokahey! A Good Day to Die!: The Indian Casualties of the Custer Fight

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The old story is quickly retold using Indian witnesses to flesh out some specific who shot whom, threading the Red man's perspectives, and recollections with the often-quoted white man's. He disputes Marquis's mass suicide theories, citing contrary statements given Marquis, by his same sources. Hardorff takes a page from Gray, compiling charts of Indian casualties with witness lists, and tribal affiliations. However, it was at least 20 years after the battle before any of the Indian casualty lists were compiled. In the final table, I noticed that later interviews reported lower and lower average casualty numbers. It left me with the feeling that we still do not have a definitive picture of the Indian losses. I admire the hard work that went into this book, and can recommend it to serious Custerphiles.

The author sifts thru numerous Lakota, Cheyenne, and White accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in an attempt to come up with an accounting of the Native American casualties in that battle. Those accounts are often incomplete, contradictory, or altered in various ways by the White interviewers of these veterans. And in some cases the interviews were conducted many decades after the events described. Indeed, some of the Native participants lived into the 1940s and 50s and were still offering memories even then to various interviewers about who was killed when and where. The author concludes that a total of 31 Indian men were killed in the Custer and Reno engagements of this battle. That seems a ludicrously low number, given that several thousand targets were on the field and that several hundred troopers were firing on them. It suggests both superior tactics on the part of the Indians and inferior marksmanship and a breakdown of command on the part of the troopers.