With Custer on the Little Bighorn: A Newly Discovered First-Person Account by William O. Taylor

Custer mania rides again! Every 20 years or so, interest in the story and legend of General Custer revives. And with the release of a spate of new books--and at least one movie--we seem to be nearing the crescendo of another such outbreak. With Custer on the Little Bighorn is one of the more interesting of this wave's batch of offerings. Written some four decades after the Battle of Little Bighorn by William O. Taylor, a former soldier in Custer's battalion, the book provides a level-headed account of the times--and the day in question--from someone who was there. In the process, Taylor shares his ambivalence over the mission that the army he fought for was engaged. Describing an encounter with a band of Indians he writes: "a howling mass of red warriors, naked to the waist, who, maddened and desperate by the terrified cries of the wives and children whose lives were put in jeopardy for the third time within a few weeks, rushed from their camps . . . They seemed to us . . . like fiends incarnate, but were they?"