The Battle of the Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn: Custer’s Last Stand in Memory, History, and Popular Culture by Debra Buchholtz (review)

Debra Buchholtz’s The Battle of the Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn is part of a new series called “Critical Moments of American History” by Routledge. The work not only includes five chapters packed with facts and interpretations about this controversial battle, but also incorporates documents pertinent to this decisive Indian victory. The author gives a balanced view of both sides involved in this conflict, employing the Indian name for the battle site alongside the more familiar name, the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Five chapters chronicle the battle, starting with the events leading up to and including the battle, followed by an account of the army’s vengeance for the defeat, which undoubtedly accelerated the settlement of the Great Plains. The final two chapters cover the Little Bighorn’s significant reverberations and assess the battle’s impact on Americans’ collective memories. Buchholtz is careful to give the conflicting interpretations of each event in a struggle that has been significantly muddled, since those companies of the Seventh Cavalry under Custer’s command were totally annihilated. The defeat deprived historians of the testimony of Custer and his men, only leaving his Indian scouts to give their accounts.

Especially interesting are Buchholtz’s references to the post-battle commemorations which started a decade after the 1876 encounter. The most elaborate was probably held in 1926. General Edward S. Godfrey, a lieutenant at the time of the battle, symbolically reconciled with the Lakota warrior White Bull by returning his saber to his scabbard in response to White Bull’s hand raised in a gesture of peace. This happy consensus was dimmed in 1991. Richard Real Bird, a former Crow tribal chairman, organized the reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Real Bird’s reenactment represented a more Indian point of view than the official Custer’s Last Stand reenactment offered by the chamber of commerce of nearby Hardin, Montana.

The appendix includes the accounts of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors such as Gall and Two Moon, and the testimony of army officers involved in the fight, like that of the controversial Major Marcus A. Reno. The bibliography is adequate but lacking some vital sources. These include Kingsley M. Bray’s biography of Crazy Horse and Gregory F. Michno’s Lakota Noon, which trace the activities of the Indian warriors during each stage of the battle. Given the enormous number of published studies on the Little Bighorn, however, a truly comprehensive bibliography would be difficult to attain.