Custer's Last Stand

"Provocative, informative, fascinating, and almost incidentally a bibliographical treasure. Dippie's book is sure to enjoy the favor of all who, like me, are incurably addicted to the history and legend of the Little Bighorn."--Robert M. Utley, American West "Brian Dippie has made an impressive exploration of the folk and popular legends arising from [Custer's] famous defeat...[Custer's Last Stand] is an important contribution to an understanding of this event, so often ignored by historians and so long cherished by the American people."--American Historical Review "[Dippie shows] a flari for his subject that is frequently infectious to the reader...it is a happy review of an American phenomenon."--Pacific Historical Review "Dippie demonstrates considerable versatility as he traces the myth through the various media. His style is marked by flashes of wit...This book is an intelligent exposition of the attitudes toward an episode that is as important in cultural as it is in military history."--Journal of American History Defeat and death at the Little Bighorn gave General George Custer and his Seventh Cavalry a kind of immortality. In Custer's Last Stand, Brian W. Dippie investigates the body of legend surrounding that battle on a bloody Sunday in 1876. His survey of the event in poems, novels, paintings, movies, jokes, and other ephemera amounts to a unique reflection on the national character. Brian W. Dippie, a professor of history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, is a well-known authority on Custer and the author of Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Nebraska).