Mr. Donovan has assembled here a wonderful biography of a battle, the last, meaningful battle in the most shameful period in US history. The United States considers itself the standardbearer for democracy and freedom in the world. But while they have done some good in the 20th century, critics of our world's most powerful nation have only to turn the calendar back to the 1870s to find a time when that same nation prosecuted a deliberate genocide against the peoples native to North America, the peoples from whom North America was taken by force. Though Mr. Donovan keeps his opinions on this matter largely to himself, the subject matter speaks clearly, as we journey from the halls of power to the plains of the midwest and beyond, following the policies, the rivalries and the histories which finally culminated in the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Though the battle itself was the single, sweeping, significant victory for the native tribes, it also spelled their downfall. For it gave the government of the United States an opportunity to justify war against a people which had, for the most part, steered clear of the Americans. There were raids and skirmishes, many of which Mr. Donovan is careful to note, but these were largely in response to being forced from land owned and settled by the natives, replaced there by telegraph poles and whiskey saloons. The land was changing against the natives. Even the buffalo, that most talismanic of native creatures, was disappearing from the burning grasslands. The natives' time was coming to an end and many of them seemed to know it. Meanwhile, with immigrants to settle and states to found, the federal government had no reason to be sympathetic to the Indian man who had just put into the ground one of the Civil War's most memorable generals. And so an extermination was organized and packaged as a just war against a people with a fraction of the population and a tenth of the armory.
Though Mr. Donovan does a good job capturing the context of Little Bighorn and its aftermath, his book is also a wonderful portrait of the battle's participants. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are fleshed out to the extent they'll ever be given the oral nature of their culture, making contemporary accounts of the two native chiefs quite scarce. But it's the oft-discussed Custer who truly comes alive under Mr. Donovan's hand. The flaws in the man are endless, from his strivings for money and status, to the contempt in which his comrades seem to have held him. For all of this, his greatest sin was his thirst for glory, tragically built upon a heroic charge he lead as a young soldier while fighting for Michigan during the Civil War. Mr. Donovan shows how that one, perfect charge spoiled Custer for any other tactic. He would spend the rest of his life attempting to replicate that one moment of glory and never finding it. On the contrary, it cost the man his life in spectacular fashion.
This is a dynamic history of a battle, its participants, and the time in which they fought. But it's also a story about David versus Goliath. It's a story about the abuse of power and how it blinds us to our own atrocities. It is a story about glory and tragedy and the end of a way of life, for both belligerents but especially the natives. It is a story which, in Mr. Donovan's capable hands, is beautifully told. (4/5 Stars)
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