Following the Guidon: Into the Indian Wars with General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry (The Western Frontier Library Series)

Few figures in American history are as arresting as George Armstrong Custer, America s Hostspur. His career ranged back and forth from depths of disgrace to heights of glory. If he was no classroom scholar, he was a magnetic battlefield commander. From dead last in his 1861 class at West Point, he rocketed to the rank of Brigadier General at the age of twenty-three. Along the way, every step of his career was dogged by controversy. Readers will be forever indebted to Elizabeth Bacon Custer for her trilogy of first-hand accounts of life with the General. In Following the Guidon, she covers that period when Custer s career was again in ascendancy. Custer was recalled to duty from "exile," after being court-martialed, to help with the growing Indian wars. The first major engagement, recounted here, is the Battle of the Washita.