How do you describe the types of stories you gravitate towards writing?
I like ones that have a lot of complexity and a lot of hidden elements in them. I find myself naturally being pulled in that direction, to that part of the story. I like to find the things that are in contention one way or another and describe what they are like. When I started writing about intelligence agencies, that was the thing that really pulled me forward, the desire to know what the CIA was really like, how does it go about its business, what is the ethos of the people who work there. Intelligence services go to a lot of trouble to hide what they do, but they cannot hide what they are like. You can quickly learn to distinguish between their operational styles. You can read about something in the newspaper and say, that’s the Russians, or that’s the Israelis because you just know how they do it. You can also do that with the CIA. I was interested in that. It’s like following a strange form of animal through the forest and trying to find out where it goes, what it does and after a while, if you pay enough attention, you do find out.
What first drew you to this story, about the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
I got drawn to this in 1994. I started thinking about it when my brother and I visited the Little Bighorn battlefield. That’s something I had always wanted to see as a kid and just in general because I love that type of country. But the first time I went [September 1964] it was in the middle of a blizzard, and I couldn’t see anything. So my brother and I went back. I was astonished at how clearly you could see what happened by just standing on the hill and looking at the crosses and where they are placed. Those crosses are placed approximately where the bodies were found. When you stand on Custer Hill, just about the spot where the last group around him was killed, you can see it. It’s very dramatic. You can sense the scramble and panic of these guys racing up this hill trying to find a place of safety. That caught my attention. When you’re standing on that hill, you look down over the river and down in the flat below, there are tepees that belong to the Crow Indians. Very likely at any given moment there are a lot of horses standing in the river drinking. Those are Crow horses. The Crow, of course, were the scouts of Custer. They sort of ended up with the battlefield. They kind of own it, or big chunks of it and land all around it. When you look out over the landscape, if there doesn’t happen to be a coal train passing down the valley in the distance, which there often isn’t, it looks pretty much the way it looked 130 years ago. You’re sort of there. It’s dramatic, and it’s engaging.
Can you talk about how you went about piecing together the accounts of the Indians?
There are two ways of going about a book of this sort. One is you’re incredibly lucky and somebody shows up on your doorstep with a trunk full of paper. Then you just have a huge start. The other way is you look at everything. That is the way I had to do it. I started to build chronologies, and I started to create a biographical dictionary of the people who were involved. I wanted to know why Crazy Horse was killed. Everybody who was involved in it kind of understood right away that this had been a terrible mistake and a blunder. They were not proud of what they had done by any means. And they all began to explain what they had done. They left lots of accounts behind explaining why they did this or why they thought that. As you start gathering all this material and collating it, the patterns begin to emerge. It’s a lot like trying to find out what the CIA was doing in Cuba. It’s very, very similar in the actual technique of approach. You just come at it from all directions and eventually it stops resisting and reveals itself.
Where did your research trips take you?
I had a nephew who lived in Castle Rock, Colorado, and I left a car out there. For about eight years, I would just fly out to Denver two or three times a year, go down and pick up that car and then drive around for two or three weeks. I was all over Wyoming and Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana, walking the ground. One of the ways that stuff becomes internalized and you feel like you’ve fallen into the story and can see it as if you participated in it is to just spend a lot of time in the places where these things happened. In that part of the country, they are pretty similar to the way they were 130 years ago. So all over the central plains. I made a number of friends out there who are kind of in the military history business. I would go out to history conferences or travel with some of these guys, particularly a guy named Jack McDermott, who was a retired National Parks Service historian. I visited a lot of battlefields with him. I just wandered around. I talked to people. In that part of the world, you can’t just call up Indians on the phone and grill them to try to find out stuff. But if you’re there and you tell people what you’re up to, sometimes they just start to tell you things. Even after all that passage of time, they tell you quite amazing things that are extremely interesting and often quite powerful.
Was there maybe one account or detail of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that you found especially compelling?
The interesting thing to me was when the Indians won the battle and how did they do it. It was a running fight, and it unfolded in a kind of chaos. But there was a moment when Custer’s command of his men collapsed and the battlefield cohesion, which is a semi-technical military term, was lost. All of the groups began behaving as individuals rather than as military units. At that point, you are finished because you can’t really put on any kind of an organized resistance. That moment came, according to a number of accounts, when Crazy Horse led a charge up over the ridge that separated the site of the first fights around Calhoun Hill from the site of the last fight on Custer Hill. Until those Indians broke the lines, the white soldiers were in a kind of military formation and were in contact with each other and they had the confidence which comes with being in contact with each other. There was a ton of separate, fragmented accounts of what the Indians were doing at various places, and it took a long time to understand how one statement connected to another statement. But if you stuck with it, after a while, you began to get a picture of how those things did add up. And all the various remarks made about Crazy Horse ended up pointing to this moment, when he split that force in two and they collapsed, as the end.
Then, there were lots of small things, especially when you find something that nobody has ever seen before or hasn’t seen for a long time. That’s always an exciting moment. There’s a song in there. A guy named Little Killer sings a song about Custer. Long Hair, I was short of horses, and you brought us many…. I found that. No one had really ever seen it before, except the person who wrote it down. It was vivid. Little Killer is not just anybody. He’s actually somebody who is kind of related to Crazy Horse. There was an intimacy about it that was pleasing.
What challenges did you run into in piecing it all together?
The most challenging thing—I don’t know if this is a smart thing to say or not—is to stop trying to figure out what Custer did and start listening to the Indians. When you do that, everything becomes much simpler. You I’m sure have not read 57 books about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but if you did, you’d find that 56 of them were all about what Custer was doing or not doing. They were all based on deeply serious and informed speculation, but they could never get any closer than that because nobody survived to tell them. If you can just at some point start listening to what these Indians have been saying almost since the day of the battle, then you’ve got something you can work with. It becomes clear. It stops being a mystery. First of all, it shouldn’t be a mystery. There were thousands of Indians and 200 soldiers.
What surprised you the most about the events of the battle?
The relentless nature of it, the rapidity with which it unfolded and the fact that Custer never managed to attack the Indians. He was always receiving the attack. He never managed in any way to start attacking them. He was just on the run from the first minute. All the old pictures and the movies are about Custer’s last stand, and he puts up this desperate resistance, but there are too many Indians. Well, that isn’t what happened. He never attacked the village. He never threatened them. He just kind of went down [the hill toward the river], came close enough to become a target for the Indians and then he started to pull away as fast as he could go and just could never get to a safe place or a place where he could stop and fight. They were just all killed in motion, practically. That was startling to realize, that this thing had been such a complete botch. I promise there will be 10,000 guys out there that will rise up as one in fury and want to lynch me because they don’t like to think of Custer that way.
How does the telling of the Battle of the Little Bighorn fit into the larger context of your book?
If you want to understand why Crazy Horse was killed, you have to understand that the Army was angry at him and afraid of him, and for the same thing. They were angry at him for killing Custer, which was a humiliating thing to have happen to the U.S. Army, and they were afraid of him because he could do it. He was a battlefield genius. He had a natural gift for the right tactical move. He knew what to do in all the confusion, when people were swirling all over a big field and there were people dying everywhere. He sort of knew what to do next, where the weak point was and how to proceed. He was gifted. After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, they recognized that, and they were afraid that he would resume fighting the whites and just cause one hell of a lot of trouble.
What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A sense of clarity about what happened and a sense of the kind of rough justice of that battle. These soldiers raced across country night and day to try to attack these Indians, who were not at war with them from their point of view and were not threatening them in any way and had done nothing to justify this kind of treatment. They were attacked out of the blue, basically by soldiers who were not only obeying orders but also trying to win immortal glory and possibly even nomination for president of the United States. That was certainly passing through Custer’s mind at the time. They got what they had coming to them if you think about it. They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know who they were attacking. They didn’t know what the lay of the land was. They didn’t know how to actually reach the Indians they were trying to hit. And they just utterly botched it. So it’s a clarity of a sense of that, who is the aggressor here? Who is the defender? It’s not to instill people with deep sorrow necessarily, although life has plenty of deep sorrow and Indian history has plenty too, but to see it and appreciate what it was that actually happened. It was an extraordinary event, and to see it is a stirring thing.
Interview with Megan Gambino on September 10 to accompany book excerpt in Smithsonian Magazine of November 2010.
