Customer Reviews

Showdown at Little Big Horn (Bison Book)

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The late Dee Brown was a master Historian whose writings about the Old West captivated many of us. "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" was a true classic. Dee Brown was NOT a Native American, but his saga of broken treaties, the massacres of Sand Creek and elsewhere, of how the Indian was mistreated, saw their buffalo slaughtered and were forced into war cannot but affect even those who cheered for the Soldiers, Cowboys, and Settlers.

In "Showdown at Little Big Horn" Brown took his masterful storytelling skills, plus his expertise as a Historian and whipped together a dramatic retelling of the Little Big Horn fight as seen through the eyes of many of its major participants.

George Custer, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse are all there; as are Reno, Benteen, the hapless doomed, such as the Scout Lonesome Charley Reynolds and Newspaperman Mark Kellogg, who wasn't even supposed to cover Custer in the first place but took the place of his boss, who gave him a bloodstained belt as a talisman of good luck. The boss had been wounded in the Civil War, but the belt did not bring luck to Kellogg, who took an arrow in the back as he watched the companies of Myles Keogh and James Calhoun be annihilated by the hordes of Sioux and Cheyenne under Crazy Horse and Gall.

The common soldiers like bugler John Martin - Giovanni Martini, the last 7th cavalryman to see Custer and his command alive; and the braves who fought on both sides are there too.

Brown concludes this slim but mighty work by telling how Comanche, Captain Keogh's valiant horse, was found badly wounded on the battlefield, the only known survivor of Custer's immediate command.

The details of how the campaign took shape and how everything went wrong is there, with a dramatic voice created by Brown but taken from the real words of those who fought on that Greasy Grass on that summer day - June 25, 1876.

For those desiring a simple, yet impressive volume of the Custer fight at the Little Big Horn, writen in almost the same dramatic narrative voice style of Shaara's "Killer Angels", this is an extremely good book to begin.

A very entertaining read. A suberb story-teller, Dee Brown takes us into the lives of 19 participants in the slaughter that was Little Big Horn. We get to meet and ride along with some of the most colorful characters that seem to have gotten lost between the pages of history. Dee Brown has used eye witness accounts, diaries, letters, and the testimonies of the civilians,and soldiers that participated in this battle.
It wasn't just Custer's undertaking, but a full Army battle group.

I read this on the heals of the author's superb Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and have mixed feelings about it. Expecting it to be a similar historical account, this time on the Battle of Little Big Horn, it quickly became evident that this was in fact a work of fiction based on eye-witness accounts--so, essentially, a non-fiction novel. Nevertheless, I read it in its entirety, and found it to be, for the most part, a good read. Brown attempts to bring to life the experiences of individual participants, and in this he largely succeeds. However, the story mainly focuses on the American invaders, with only a few chapters devoted to the Indians. This makes the book seem rather unbalanced and incomplete, and therefore somewhat of a disappointment.

this book is written in the style of 'the killer angels'. It ignores facts, figures and strategy. It doesn't specify what kind of weapons the union soldiers had, how many went into battle, or any other important details. i read the book and didnt realize until the end that any union soldiers lived. i subsequently found out from other sources that most of the soldiers involved didn't die, but that wasnt important enough to include in this book. This book is nothing other than pointless speculative minutia presented as fact. I learned absolutely nothing about the battle of little bighorn. dont buy this book, the author is terrible, i want my $15 back.