Customer Reviews

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

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1 star:		(6)

 

 

Nathaniel Philbrick is normally associated with nautical history, so it might be something of a surprise that in "The Last Stand" he has chronicled the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a military event that took place about as far from the ocean as you can get. But, it might be remembered that a large part of his "Mayflower" book was focused on the violent relations between the Pilgrims and Indians and on the slightly later King Phillip's War. Here in "The Last Stand", the author has returned to the subject of white-Indian relations and has created a vivid, engaging book.

Philbrick's "The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn" quite naturally invites comparison with 2008's "A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn" by James Donovan, about the same subject. Although both volumes present lengthy, quite comprehensive narratives, they do differ significantly. Donovan's book takes a more straightforward approach, while Philbrick's is more consciously "literary" in style, filled with numerous colorful incidents almost cinematic in impact. Additionally, Philbrick's "The Last Stand" devotes somewhat more attention to the Indian side of the story than does Donovan's volume.

Which book is "better"? The answer to that undoubtedly depends on the reader and his/her needs and expectations. Philbrick's volume is perhaps the more suited for random browsing or reading a chapter at a time, while Donovan's is probably better suited for focused, prolonged study. I personally enjoyed both Philbrick's and Donovan's volumes. Both books are representative of a much more balanced, even-handed approach to the Little Bighorn battle than had been characteristic of the past. Originally, accounts tended to overly laud Custer and his soldiers as peerless representatives of Civilization, done to death by a savage, scarcely human foe. By the latter part of the Twentieth century, however, it had become commonplace to reverse roles, depicting Custer and his men as mindless murderers and the Indians as peaceful, innocent victims. We now seem to have finally reached a point, as demonstrated in both Philbrick's "The Last Stand" and also Donovan's "A Terrible Glory", where the participants on both sides can be depicted as three-dimensional, realistic blends of virtue and flaw, neither demons nor angels.

Any serious student of the Little Bighorn battle - I count myself among them - can find elements in Philbrick's book (as in Donovan's) with which to disagree. The events are complex enough and the evidence sufficiently murky that this is inevitable. I cannot say that I learned anything wholly new here, but then again I've been studying the Little Bighorn battle for more than 40 years. An intelligent general reader, previously uninformed about the details, can come away from "The Last Stand" with a good understanding of the events and the people involved on both sides. If that reader should wish to proceed further with studying the battle, Philbrick supplies detailed notes and source lists.

As the owner of over 40 books on the Little Big Horn, I found this book to be a nice, reasonably "light" treatment of the Little Big Horn. If you are new to this particular event in our history, this is certainly a decent primer. I would also recommend "A Terrible Glory" by James Donovan, and "Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn" by Evan S. Connell which was reviewed (quite favorably) in Time Magazine when originally released.

If you aren't new to this topic, and are looking for new insights - they are not here (in my opinion).

This is a well written, pleasant book and recommended to those who have little knowledge of the topic. Recommended for those folks.

Custer, Sitting Bull, and Little Bighorn have become iconic names in American history, but often only through a distorted lens. Like many other students, I learned that George Armstrong Custer was a buffoon who led his troops to disaster at the Little Bighorn and that Sitting Bull was a "noble savage" (to use the term that sums up modern stereotypes of 19th century American Indians).

Nathan Philbrick's The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn certainly provides a more nuanced and interesting account of that history. The Last Stand follows both Custer's 7th Cavalry and the Sioux Indian tribe in the weeks before and during the battle.

Philbrick did an incredible amount of research to reconstruct the events and characters in the famous battle. This is a long book and it is brimming with detail, from the geography of the area to the colors of the 7th Cavalry's horses. At times, I felt like he introduced the reader to every single member of the 7th Cavalry (he pretty much does in the appendices).

If nothing else, The Last Stand will probably force you to reevaluate these men. Philbrick isn't a revisionist and Custer doesn't get off too lightly. Nevertheless, there is much about him that most Americans don't realize. For example, he became a brigadier general at the age of 23 (23!) and played a crucial role at the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. He was also calm under fire and inspired pride among the lower ranks. However, he seems to not have managed his officers well. In the run-up to the battle, he seems surrounded by officers whom he doesn't trust and scouts who are more intent on politicking than providing accurate information.

Philbrick writes well, but at times The Last Stand can become a difficult read simply because it seems like he wanted to cram so much detail into the book, even when it didn't advance the narrative. One thing that frustrated me was that the narrative sometimes jumps to different points at time. For example, the Battle of Washita (1868) is recounted after preparations for the Black Hills campaign, but just before the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876).

I wasn't crazy about how Philbrick develops characters. He tends to provide short historical pieces about the soldiers in the 7th Cavalry whenever they figure into the narrative of the battle. That means that sometimes, during the thick of the battle, we hear how some soldier who plays little role in the overall battle was a gambler back home and was married to a certain person. This breaks the flow of the narrative and, especially for readers unfamiliar with the history of the American West, can be confusing. If the character is really so important, we should be introduced to him before he becomes important!

Philbrick also sometimes essentializes characters by taking one piece of background information and claiming it is responsible for that character's personality or decisions. For example, at several times he points out that General Terry was a lawyer, and as such was cautious and phrased his orders in an ambiguous way. But that's also how many officeholders in a bureaucracy think and operate. It probably doesn't matter for smaller characters, but sometimes becomes a bit cliche.

I'd recommend this book to American and military history buffs. However, I would really only recommend this to somebody who was somewhat familiar with post-Civil War American history. This book is definitely not for readers with short attention spans. In retrospect, this might be a book worth rereading twice, once just as an introduction to the people, places, and events, and the second time to really absorb it.

Much has been said about the Battle of Little Bighorn. George Armstrong Custer has been portrayed as both an arrogant imbecile and a national hero. Sitting Bull has been portrayed as a murderous villain and a cultural icon of steadfastness.

Nathaniel Philbrick, as he did in his wondrous MAYFLOWER, digs deep into the heart of the legend. Custer and Sitting Bull were both men--human beings with faults and virtues, men who both appeared to desire peace, on the eve of the Battle--and yet, neither many any great overtures for it. Why? What drove these two men into what can only be described as a massacre? And what really happened at Little Bighorn that day?

Obviously, to the latter question, there is only conjecture, though Philbrick unbiasedly presents the various eye-witness accounts. When it comes to the battle itself, he places more emphasis upon Custer; yet it is clear that the purpose of the book is not just to describe the specific massacre, but to show how it was a last stand for two people: Custer, the most renowned Indian fighter in the West; and the Native Americans of the Northern Plains, who after that day faced a slow decline to reservation life, ridicule, and almost cultural obliteration. Philbrick's prose is smooth and readable; you don't have to be a history buff to enjoy this book. You just have to love a good story, and have an appreciation for what makes mankind both so great and so terrible. THE LAST STAND is another memorable work by Nathaniel Philbrick, and serves as a wonderful introduction into an oft-mythologized segment of American history.

This is a thorough and well written account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or Custer's Last Stand, as it is often called. The author pulls in a lot of interesting sources, like Private Thompson, and he obviously uses the Indian sources to describe the last stand battle. Other positive elements of this book are the maps and the picture sections (of which there are three including a number of Indian drawings of the battle).

His following of the battle is very similar to James Donovan's book, A Terrible Glory - what happened with Custer and his command at each part of the battle. Although I think that book does a better job of following the battle chronologically and logically.

A couple of concerns that I would voice that make it hard for me to give this book the top evaluation though.
1. He continues on and on about the drinking problems that the cavalry officers had especially Major Reno - OK already enough, we read it the first time that he had a drinking problem. And, he berates Benteen about his tendency to criticize his superiors time and again to the point of ad nauseum - OK, already!
2. His use of the different sources sometimes gets him lost in his stories. Although the Private Thompson source was interesting, it caused some confusion about what really happenend, especially when he quotes that Thompson claimed to have seen Custer alone at the Little Big Horn river prior to the massacre. Maybe some of these sources were better handled in the notes instead of being part of the main story.
3. He doesn't use primary notes during each chapter to provide the specific source for his statements in each chapter. Instead, he uses a general discussion on the chapter with the primary sources that he used. In spite of that, his sources are thorough.
4. He mentions at the beginning of the last stand chapter that an Indian source mentioned that Custer was killed or mortally wounded at the start of the battle when he crossed Medicine Tail Coulee crossing of the Little Big Horn river. I read this before in another source in 1960s (David Humphrey Miller's Custer's Fall which is worth the read) and personally, I believe this may be what in fact happened - that Custer was mortally wounded at the very start of the battle (not killed) and then the command broke down. He argues that this couldn't have happened because there were a number of cartridges from Custer's unusual rifle (Remington Rolling Block) on last stand hill but... couldn't someone else have used his gun at the end?
5. Last, his comments on how Custer died - that his brother shot him in the head, has no basis in fact and he doesn't provide a source for his comment in the chapter notes. So, this is conjecture and in fact, Custer's wounding at the Medicine Coulee has at least a source. If the author said that first and then led to this end, that would make more sense, but he didn't, causing me for one to scratch my head.
6. (This was written after I initially published the review.) Further, regarding Custer's death, according to the book, Where Custer Fell, the individuals who buried him mentioned that blood had come out of the head wound and not through the other wounds indicating that he died from the head wound and that the other wounds may have occurred after death. Also, no powder burns were found on his head unlike other suicides or others who were killed by colleagues.

On the positive side, there are some interesting new anecdotes (besides the Private Thompson digression):
1. Herendeen was a civilian scout for Custer who was with Reno. He also served in an ad hoc frontiersman group of about 150 of so men that the Indians kept away from (apparently for fear of getting their butts kicked). These men roamed the eastern face of the Big Horn mountains (e.g. modern Sheridan and Buffalo, WY).
2. One sergeant of Reno's group had a Sharp's rifle that was used for long range sharpshooting.

In short, as some individuals mentioned, this may be a good starting book for a student interested in this battle, but I would recommend James Donovan's book, A Terrible Glory, instead. Although some could say that Philbrick has a better writing style, and that is probably true, his use of the many sources to digress sometimes gets you lost in his story, and he appears to use Donovan's approach to how the last stand progressed. However, it is a good book and recommended for any student of the battle.

The Last Stand, by Nathan Philbrick, is a splendid foray into the past, an examination of not only the Battle of the Little Bighorn but also of two of its more prominent participants, Sitting Bull and Custer. Though he relies on the testimony of those involved whenever possible, he is quick to point out that he "remains an outsider doing my best to make sense of it all."

It needs to be stated at the outset that Mr. Philbrick wastes no time in revealing his bias against George Armstrong Custer; it is to put things lightly to say that he takes a dismal view of Custer as a person, but it should be noted for those Custerphiles he might pick up the book that his judgments seem harshest at the outset than they do later on. He is somewhat more nuanced in his appraisal of Custer the soldier, citing his bravery and dash, but really, these compliments fall to the wayside in the face of such judgments as "His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in way that went far beyond alcohol's ability to interfere with clear thinking." At his point, we are on page 17 out of a 448 page book. At this point I was left with the impression that I could not reasonably expect any sort of impartial study of one of the two central character's of this work.

I would have been mistaken, at least in part.

Even so, in these early pages there is little Custer is not accused of, including infidelity and dishonesty. He is rash, impetuous, and does not think before he leaps. This is an image completely at odds with the Custer of the Civil War (at this point I was left wondering if Philbrick bothered to study Custer's wartime career). Indeed, Philbrick seems to take every charge made against Custer at face value while assuming Custer's own words were invariably self-serving. One example of this process of vilification is that the author mentions the Cheyenne tradition that Custer fathered a child on Indian captive Monahsetah without revealing that the young woman gave birth less than two months after her capture, which makes Custer's fatherhood a thing of myth. He is more than happy to present Custer as a pimp who passed the hapless girl among his officers because "Indian women rape easy."

We see too the old charge renewed that Custer went into the 1876 campaign looking for a big victory to restore his reputation and once again put him before the public as America's hero. That Custer might have had as a goal his duty - to defeat the "hostiles" - seems inconceivable to the author.

Mr. Philbrick for some reason also feels the need to revive the mythical Custer-for-president tale invented by leftist activist Mari Sandoz out of whole cloth. Well before we come to the crucial events of June 25, 1876, Custer's character has been completely trashed.

I had expected better. And as I persevered, I was rewarded with a more thoughtful appraisal of Custer, as a soldier at least, if not as a man.

Custerphobes might be disappointed to learn, for example, that Mr. Philbrick's judgment is that the man most responsible for the "sad and terrible blunder" of the last stand was none other than General Alfred Terry, whose final instructions to Custer left the commander of the Seventh Cavalry "hesitant and depressed", doubting himself for the first time in his very successful career.

Mr. Philbrick makes a thoughtful examination of Terry's orders, pointing to his "lawyer's talent for crafting documents that appeared to say one thing but were couched in language that could allow for an entirely different interpretation should circumstances require it" - his orders to Custer being a case in point. "With these orders," the author tells us, "Terry had managed to protect his reputation no matter what the outcome. If Custer bolted for the village and claimed a great victory, it was because Terry had had the wisdom to give him an independent command. If Custer did so and failed, it was because he had disobeyed Terry's written orders." And of course, Custer did very nearly pull off a brilliant victory (as Mr. Philbrick admits) and Terry did use his cleverly written orders to put all the blame on Custer.

As the author points out, Custer was expected to attack. And as he also points out, even had Custer waited until the 26th (which he was not expected to do), Terry did not arrive until the 27th and his approach was so haphazard it is difficult to see how he could have been any use to Custer at all.

Benteen and Reno, reasonably enough, fail to come across in a sympathetic light, along with many of the officers of the Seventh. Reno was drunk, Benteen disobeyed orders and failed to march to the sound of the guns, as was expected of any commander of the period. Moylan and others broke down or like Reno and Weir, succumbed to the bottle. Mr. Philbrick rightly wonders what would have happened had Reno pressed his initial attack when the Indian participants themselves admit the village was in utter confusion and panic.

Much of the account of the battle itself not unreasonably focuses on that part we know best - Reno's charge, blundering retreat, and hilltop siege. Here we have survivors and abundant if sometimes conflicting testimony. Mr. Philbrick does the best he can with this. If Benteen disobeyed orders, and barely participated in the initial stages of the battle, he more than made up for it once he decided to fight. There is little anyone can do to restore Reno's reputation, though in the author's view he was "not the sniveling coward some later made him out to be."

There is a speculative account of the actions of Custer and his battalion after trumpeter Martini's departure. Here the author follows the outline provided by archaeologist Richard A. Fox's Archaeology, History, and Custer's Last Battle. In a sense, it is disappointed that the account is as brief as it is, as the book's title is, after, the Last Stand. Much more thorough accounts are to be had and I recommend Gregory Michno's Lakota Noon and his The Mystery of E Troop: Custer's Gay Horse Company at the Little Bighorn, which boasts its own speculative account of the movements of this well known company. In brief, Mr. Philbrick argues that Custer's battalion battled for a couple of hours (not mere minutes as detractors claim) and that Custer remained on the offensive almost until the very end.

The author rounds out his study with a brief examination of the aftermath of the Last Stand, including Sitting Bull's efforts to retain leadership of his people once on the reservation and his murder at the hands of the tribal police, and Libbie Custer's efforts to restore and maintain the reputation of her husband as a courageous and upright soldier and loving husband. In this regard, James Donovan in his A Terrible Glory, does a superior job, but this can be put down to the differing agendas of the two authors.

The reader will find rewarding Mr. Philbrick's ample notes, written in narrative style, which are a very useful and informative accompaniment to the text but also an excellent read on their own.

The bibliography is exhaustive, and the book contains numerous maps and illustrations, both in black and white and in color. There are also two appendices, one on the Seventh Cavalry on the afternoon of June 25, 1876, which lists all the officers, men and civilians mentioned in the text by battalion and company, and another which does the same for Sitting Bull's village on that day, listed by tribe.

The Last Stand may not be the best account of the Little Bighorn but it is a worthy read and I highly recommend it to students of the battle.

I have been a fan of Nathaniel Philbreck for quite some time. The narrative of The Last Stand stood up to my expectations for his writing on the subject. I found his detailed account of events to be educational, enlightening, evocative. As a result, I read through it very quickly and had a hard time putting it down.

However, with that being said, I was highly disappointed in the Kindle Edition. Though it contained maps which were included in the book the plates of photos were not included. I shook my fist at Amazon when I discovered this because I would have found the reading even more enjoyable due to being able to better put faces to the story.

Now I am terribly hesitant to buy more Kindle Books,

(This is the first book i've read on The Battle of Little Bighorn, so i'll leave discussion about technical accuracy to those who know far better than i.)

This book was, in a word, disorganized. I could possibly be charitable and say that it was simply organized in a way that i found impenetrable, but the net effect for me, as a reader, was confusion. The author has a tendency to digress frequently and extensively.

This means that, for example, in the midst of a discussion about why Custer may have made a certain command decision while approaching the Lakota village, we readers are suddenly, and without warning, taking on an 8-paragraph diversion into Custer's family life during his formative years. Then, that anecdote concluded, we're launched right back into his soldiers' response to his command. Similarly, the story of Custer's victory several years earlier in the so-called Battle of Washita is partially told many times, always wedged into a discussion of Custer's tactics or why Reno or Benteen hated him.

At other times, it was clearly a conscious decision made by the author to interleave two narratives, perhaps to juxtapose, but the result is whiplash. Near the conclusion of the book, the stories of the other columns of soldiers arriving at the battlefield in 1876 is interleaved with the story of Sitting Bull's life after the battle, concluding with his death in 1890. A few paragraphs of one, then a few paragraphs of the other, likely intended to provide a shared denouement after the battle, but resulting in a narrative tennis match with the text bouncing from 1876 to 1890 and back and back again.

An unflattering complement to this is the maps included with the text. The author provides detailed maps of the 7th Cavalry's route toward Little Bighorn, lovingly marking each spot where the column split or reunited, camped, had a meeting, stopped to stare into the distance, and so on. But once the action heats up, the maps peter out. The last shows the movements of Custer's soldiers right before the last stand, and where the Lakota harried them. Yet, for no reason i can imagine, and despite the verbal detail of where various soldiers fell, there's no schematic of Last Stand Hill itself, nor was Last Stand Hill marked on any map. A single color photograph shows the grave markers on the hillside, from a distance. You can't even see the one marked with a black badge to show Custer himself.

The author of this book goes into tremendous detail about the motivations and moral flaws of two of Custer's subordinates, Benteen and Reno, while nearly entirely withholding judgment on Custer himself. This is in part due to the fact that Benteen, Reno, and the soldiers around them survived to give testimony, while no one was able to provide such an account for Custer. However, with the mountain of evidence the author heaps up indicating that Custer was a glory-hound attempting to recreate his victory at Washita and get back into the public eye, he maintains an awkward neutrality. It added an odd sheen of Political Correctness to the history that i found obstructive.

Despite these several failings, The Last Stand is an informative history of the battle at Little Bighorn, the events leading up to it, and a glimpse of the aftermath. It should be especially interesting to those who want more character studies and fewer technical discussions of weapons or tactics, as it focuses almost entirely on the men and their operatic social interactions. It is, though, a book on soldiers and war, and readers should be prepared for some discussion of rape, torture, murder, and mutilation of corpses.

Two nights ago, due mostly to a casual interest in the folklore surrounding Custer's Last Stand, I attended a reading at a local bookstore by Mr. Nathaniel Philbrick regarding his just released work "The Last Stand". I hadn't read any of his earlier works and I'm not even a casual historian. I purchased his book that night mainly out of curiosity.

This morning I began reading his account of the events and personalities that intersected at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Within the first 20 pages I was gripped by a sustained eagerness to witness the lush detail of the introduction of each character and the unfolding of an historic event in exquisite slow motion. Pausing only for food and other necessities I devoured this book cover to cover. Having just finished the book I can say I found it satisfying on every level.

I certainly agree with other early reviews that Mr. Philbrick's account is painstakingly researched and goes to great length to be even-handed in how it treats both individuals and events. Inevitably, more time is spent focused on General Custer, Major Reno, Captain Benteen and the many other military and occasionally political figures among the "whites", but my sense is that this imbalance stems mainly from the more abundant information (interviews, journal entries, letters home, etc) that exists to flesh out that perspective. In the end Sitting Bull comes off the best overall but that seems to be a reasonable conclusion based on the accumulation of available evidence rather than the result of propagandizing. No character is painted as entirely good or evil and each portrait seems realistic. The addition of innumerable lesser characters adds richness and insight into each facet of the work.

Here is a story with which I was already sufficiently familiar that I knew every main character, knew the political and cultural dynamic, knew the geography and basic time line and, of course, knew how the story ended. Nevertheless, I found "The Last Stand" to be a spellbinding account made vivid not by fictionalizing or flowery prose but by letting the reader watch as what often seem to be minor events and trivial interpersonal relationships culminate in a deadly drama. I never had the impression that these elements were being artificially juxtaposed in such as way as to force them to hold special meaning. Rather, by the end I felt as though I had gotten to know how the strengths and weaknesses of each main character played a role in how the events unfolded. Mr. Philbrick invites conjecture as to how different personalities might have changed the events, prevented the battle or changed the outcome but he is remarkably restrained in indulging such conjecture himself.

I know that other early reviewers, as well as the author himself, have made a point to draw parallels between Sitting Bull and General Custer as charismatic leaders, how this in a way was each man's "last stand" and all that. I don't dispute it, I just didn't care about it. I immersed myself deeply in the sweat and sounds and courage and fear and dust and death that made up this violent entry in America's historic record. I don't have a lot of intellectual insights to add to these reviews. I just loved the book.

There is absolutely no basis for his "theory" that Tom Custer shot George Custer - though it is an expansion of the thoughts in the pro-Indian Humphrey Miller book of the 1950's, which were widely discredited and had no factual basis.

The book is chock full of mis-quotes, mis-attributed quotations and mis-references.

He lists a bibliography 26 pages long containg some 780 listings, of which less than 40 (5%) were originally written prior to 1950, with less than a half dozen being written prior to 1900. Does he really think the reader will believe he gained an intimate knowledge of all these "references" in the two years he studied the battle between writing books? I have studied the battle over 50 years and do not think I have an intimate knowledge of 780 books, though I did spend hundreds of hours reviewing microfilm records of the period. Who is he trying to kid, here?

Among his glaring omissions as sources are Whitaker's biographies of Custer, the reports of the War Department, the Executive Branch and Bureau of Indian Affairs to Congress of the period, the wealth of information contained in the National Archives microfilm records, and the writings of the survivors (including their diaries and letters). It appears all his "conclusions" are merely rehashes of the conclusions of current era writers and researchers, and his version of "research" is to read someone else's work and then recast it his own words, without determining if the theory is true, false or has any factual basis whatsoever. It is doubtful that he cites a solitary primary source in his biography, nor does it appear that he knows the value of primary source documents in a work like this. At best the work is a poor regurgitation of other works.

He brings absolutely nothing new to the table (no new primary source document or fact. no new piece of evidence to confirm or alter an aspect of the battle). How can he when his version is merely a rehash of other writer's opinions, some without any factual basis, inter alia Custer being shot at the river and then Tom Custer killing his brother.

Read it to test your knowledge and find his mistakes.