truepenny | UBC: Gray, Custer's Last Campaign (Reply)

Custer's Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed by John Stephens Gray

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Part of this book is fascinating, but "part," unfortunately, does not equal "all." Gray's writing style is clear and competent (it has to be, because I was able to follow his reconstruction of Custer's campaign), but not engaging, and he makes the mistake that so many nonfiction writers do of putting the explicit articulation of his argument at the end of his book instead of at the beginning. I would have found the biography of Mitch Boyer much more interesting if I'd known what I was reading it for.

So. Gray's purpose in writing this book is to do a time-motion study of Custer's 1876 campaign, especially the battle(s) at Reno Hill and what is now the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. His theses are:

(1) a defense, in general, of the accuracy and reliability of Native American witnesses to the battle, especially the Crow scout Curley who was the last person in Custer's company to leave the Little Bighorn alive, and a repudiation in particular of the accounts of the battle and campaign that make Curley out to be a liar and/or a coward.

(2) a defense, a eulogy, and a championing of Mitch Boyer, the half-Sioux half-French scout. (Mitch is an Anglicization of Mich', being short for Michel, and Boyer is only one of many possible spellings of his surname. I'm sticking with Boyer because that's how Gray spells it, but if you want to learn more about him, Bouyer will get you the Mitch you're looking for from Google.) Gray is especially concerned (he reveals at the end) to refute the rumors and speculation that Boyer betrayed Custer to the Sioux.

(3) a refutation of the persistent rumor that there were 20 to 40 bodies lost. He does patient, careful math and proves that, no, the Seventh Cavalry can all be accounted for, alive or dead. His margin of error is +/- 1, not +/-20.

He also along the way demonstrates that the unreliable witnesses to the Little Bighorn are the commissioned officers of the Seventh Cavalry, especially Major Marcus Reno and MOST ESPECIALLY Captain Frederick Benteen, and that most of the confusion is caused by officers lying outright or lying by omission in order to save their own faces (Benteen and Reno) or to save the faces of their fellow officers (almost all the other commissioned officers, including a steamboat captain who quietly "loses" a day of his chronology in order to avoid having to report an idiotic mistake made by the captain of the boat guard).

Gray's time-motion study is brilliant, and he provided me with all sorts of fascinating and helpful details, such as that the cavalry's "working trot" is 6 mph and that an ox-drawn wagon train can make 15 miles a day, while a mule train can make 20. The way he correlates and cross-checks his witness testimony is seriously beautiful to watch.

I wish he'd made a bigger deal of the part, buried at the absolute end of the book, where the archaeologists excavating the battlefield proved that Mitch Boyer died at the Little Bighorn by taking the pieces of skull they had and superimposing them on the only known photograph of Mitch Boyer. (In my guilty weakness for true crime shows, I've watched several cases of identity proven by this method, including Bun Chee Nyhuis [it's a weird photo of her, because she's making a face at the camera, but look at the way the skull fits her face].)

I don't know why I'm so fascinated by the Battle of the Little Bighorn, since I hate everything about it. I hate that the US Army was out there because President Grant and his Cabinet decided deliberately and with malice aforethought that they preferred breaking their word to the Sioux and Cheyenne over forcing American citizens to obey the law. For that matter, I hate every single one of the American citizens who decided that the possibility of gold was a good enough reason to ignore the fact that the Black Hills were off-limits, a good enough reason to trample all over the rights and beliefs of other human beings. (Do not talk to me about "pioneer spirit." You will not like what I have to say.) I hate the foreknowledge of the Sioux' defeat (Wounded Knee is only fourteen years in the future); I hate knowing that the Native American peoples who chose to honor their agreements and treaties with the American government (especially the Crow and Arikara, who were out there with the Army, scouting and dying for these entitled assholes) are going to get screwed over every bit as badly as the "hostile" peoples. And at the same time, I hate watching the catastrophe befalling the Seventh Cavalry; I hate knowing that Custer is leading his men to a terrible death (and as much as I loathe and despise what those men are out in Montana doing, most of them are not to blame, are merely men trying to do their duty as best they can); I hate--and yet am mesmerized by--watching the process of that catastrophe unfold.

Gray is bitterly lucid about the betrayal of the Native American peoples by the American government and its citizens. He is absolutely forthright about the lies and mistakes he catches the officers of the Seventh Cavalry in, and he is fierce in his championing of Mitch Boyer and Curley.

This is not a good place to start with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but if you are already interested, Gray's time-motion analysis is fascinating.

View all my reviews