Killing Custer

General George Custer's ill-fated attack on a huge encampment of Plains Indians on June 25, 1876, has gone down as the most disastrous defeat in American military history. Much less understood is how disastrous the encounter was for the "victors," the Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Sitting Bull. Within fifteen years no American Indians resided outside of reservations and their culture lay in ruins.

Killing Custer is James Welch's poignant and highly personal resurrection of the Indian side of the story from beneath a mountain of myth and misinterpretation. Working from the vast research he and director Paul Stekler undertook for their script for the Emmy-nominated documentary "The Last Stand," Welch relates the pride and desperation of a people systematically stripped of their treaty rights, hounded from their ancestral hunting grounds, herded into wretched reservations. Their many-thousands-strong rendezvous was no less a "last stand," a final celebration of their waning power and freedom. As in his masterful novel of the Blackfeet, Fools Crow, James Welch here bestows humanity and tragic stature to a people once thought fit only for exploitation and extermination. Killing Custer restores a critical missing piece of the American mosaic and rethinks the meaning of the Little Big Horn for a multicultural society.

James Welch's other novels are Winter in the Blood, The Death of Jim Loney, and The Indian Lawyer. He lives in Missoula, Montana. Paul Stekler is a documentary filmmaker who directed and co-wrote the American Experience film "The Last Stand."

1994 / ISBN 0-393-03657-X / 75 illustrations / 288 pages / HISTORY/NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES

• The first nonfiction work by the acclaimed author of Fools Crow and other novels—a moving, highly personal narrative of the battle at the Little Big Horn as the Indians experienced it.