First light was also the time for the women to poke up last night’s cooking fire. The sun was just cracking over the horizon that Sunday, June 25, 1876, as men and boys began taking the horses out to graze. “My purpose in telling the story as I did,” Powers says, “was to let the Indians describe what happened, and to identify the moment when Custer’s men disintegrated as a fighting unit and their defeat became inevitable.” Crazy Horse’s stunning victory over Custer, which both angered and frightened the Army, led to the killing of the chief a year later. In his new book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, veteran reporter Thomas Powers draws on these accounts to present a comprehensive narrative account of the battle as the Indians experienced it. Long-neglected accounts given by more than 50 Indian participants or witnesses provide a means of tracking the fight from the first warning to the killing of the last of Custer’s troopers-a period of about two hours and 15 minutes. This is not true of the Indian version of the battle. (Of about 400 soldiers on the hilltop, 53 were killed and 60 were wounded before the Indians ended their siege the next day.) The experience of Custer and his men can be reconstructed only by inference. But neither he nor the 209 men in his immediate command survived the day, and an Indian counterattack would pin down seven companies of their fellow 7th Cavalrymen on a hilltop over four miles away. military history, and the immense literature on the subject is devoted primarily to answering questions about Custer’s generalship during the fighting. The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the most studied actions in U.S. That June, Custer attacked an encampment of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho on the Little Bighorn River, in what is now Montana. The Grant administration tried to buy the hills, but the Sioux, considering them sacred ground, refused to sell in 1876, federal troops were dispatched to force the Sioux onto reservations and pacify the Great Plains. At the time, the United States recognized the hills as property of the Sioux Nation, under a treaty the two parties had signed six years before. George Armstrong Custer found gold in the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. Editor’s note: In 1874, an Army expedition led by Lt.
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