Bill Eichenberger: Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: An Interview with Tom Lehman

[Bill Eichenberger was the books editor at The Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio from 1997 through April of 2009. He was voted Best Critic in Ohio in 2000 by the Society of Professional Journalists and in 2001 by the Press Club of Cleveland.]

On July 10, 1876, the New York Daily Tribune published a poem by Walt Whitman entitled,"A Death-Sonnet for Custer."

The poem began,"Far from Montana's canyons, / Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lone-some stretch of silence, / Haply, to-day, a mournful wail -- haply, a trumpet note for heroes."

Whitman called the encounter an"Indian ambuscade," never mind that Custer was attacking the Sioux and Cheyenne encampment (its women and children included) in the early morning, just as the Indians began to stir. He was more accurate in describing the results of the battle a"slaughter," for that, indeed, it was.

Whitman concluded his poem by praising Custer, the architect of the slaughter, painting a romantic picture of the doomed general,"bright sword in thy hand."

In all, 211 members of the"Fighting Seventh" cavalry division lost their lives in what later became known as Custer's Last Stand. From the native point of view, the last stand took place over the next several years as the U.S. government carried out a ruthless campaign to subjugate both the Sioux and the Cheyenne.

Historian Tom Lehman of Rocky Mountain College retells the story of that fateful battle in his new book, Bloodshed at Little Bighorn. The second volume in Johns Hopkins' Eyewitness to History series is told primarily through the voices of the participants and onlookers on both sides of the cultural divide.

The Book Serf asked professor Lehman the following questions:

BS: I'm fascinated by how such a relatively small scale action (211 soldiers and Crow scouts dead) could become such a large part of our national mythology/psyche.

TL: For one thing, the details of the battle are shrouded in mystery. The question of"what really happened?" has had remarkable staying power. For white Americans the idea of the"last stand" represented the Indian wars as primarily defensive, as if the Sioux and Cheyenne were the aggressors that day. Of course, for the Sioux and Cheyenne there was no great mystery. The better side, the ones defending their homeland, simply carried the battle. For them, the real"last stand" was the army's systematic campaign of subjugation that came in the aftermath of the famous battle....