Hokahey! A Good Day to Die!: The Indian Casualties of the Custer Fight

The author sifts thru numerous Lakota, Cheyenne, and White accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in an attempt to come up with an accounting of the Native American casualties in that battle. Those accounts are often incomplete, contradictory, or altered in various ways by the White interviewers of these veterans. And in some cases the interviews were conducted many decades after the events described. Indeed, some of the Native participants lived into the 1940s and 50s and were still offering memories even then to various interviewers about who was killed when and where. The author concludes that a total of 31 Indian men were killed in the Custer and Reno engagements of this battle. That seems a ludicrously low number, given that several thousand targets were on the field and that several hundred troopers were firing on them. It suggests both superior tactics on the part of the Indians and inferior marksmanship and a breakdown of command on the part of the troopers.