Showdown at Little Big Horn

by Dee Brown

Book Overview

On Sunday afternoon, June 25, 1876, Gen. George Custer and 264 members of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry engaged more than 3,000 warriors of the Lakota Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations and were killed in the ensuing battle.

Acclaimed historian Dee Brown traces the events of that day and of the weeks before, through the eyes and ears of seventeen participants from both sides, including Natives, scouts, soldiers, and civilians.

Why did Custer...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803262183
• ISBN13: 9780803262188
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

was not pleased

The cover was torn in several spots (had to tape). Lettering was faded and looked very old! Was hardly in conditioned as advertised

Historical Fiction

The late Dee Brown was a great writer and everyone needs to read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. Showdown at LBH is a quick and easy read. As an amateur scholar on Custer and this episode, I'd kindly call this book entertaining historical fiction. While based on extensive research from diaries, letters, accounts and testimony, I found the sections imagining the dialogue between participants to be distracting and at times rather imaginary. I'm glad I read this book from 1961, but would recommend many others as a better account of the campaign, the personalities, and subsequent events. Look up any top 10 Custer books for a list. Research in the intervening 50 years has led to a much better understanding of those days.

Gripping, Can't Put It Down Tale of the Custer Fight

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.

History can be entertaining

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.