Richard G. Hardorff

Picked up on the recent Wyoming trip. Subtitled “A Sourcebook”, that’s what it is; a collection of transcripts of interviews with various Sioux and Cheyenne who were at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The transcripts are ordered by date and range from just after the battle in 1876 to the 1930s when historians were trying to find the last native survivors. Author Richard Hardorff is an amateur historian who seems (based on his publication list) to specialize in the Little Bighorn battle; he’s published a dozen or so works on the subject. Hardorff provides no interpretation or analysis of the interviews, merely acting as a compiler, and also provides no background, assuming the reader is already familiar with the details of the battle. There’s a small map provided by the author; surprisingly in this age of computer cartography it’s rather crude, with manually typed legends over a hatched line contour base map. The individual accounts sometimes include maps drawn by the interviewees or by their interviewers; these are usually pretty hard to relate to any actual topography. There’s also no background on Indian customs; for example it’s mentioned that some of the interviewees were “shirt wearers” or members of various warrior societies but not what those titles implied.


The individual interviews are interesting enough. A couple items that come across: in early interviews the Indians generally speak respectfully of Custer and the soldiers with him, while in the later ones they are more likely to call Custer incompetent and his troops cowards. It isn’t clear whether this is because the early interviewees were concerned to make a good impression – most were essentially prisoners at various Army posts – or if perhaps the later interviewees had absorbed some of the changing attitudes toward Custer. However, troops arriving after the battle found Custer naked but unmutilated while many of the other bodies were cut up.


According to the Indians many of the soldiers were drunk and poorly managed; witnesses reported soldiers accidently shooting each other in panic and comment that if Custer’s troops had fought as well as Reno’s they might have survived. Many comment on the huge volume of smoke and dust which made it very difficult to see what was going on; this may have helped the Indians considerably as it limited the effect of the longer range of the soldier’s weapons (some witnesses commented that the soldiers mostly fought with revolvers rather than their carbines). Another interesting comment is that the Indians were not at maximum strength; many of the adult warriors were claimed to be off hunting buffalo leaving older men and youths in the camp. I haven’t read this one elsewhere so I’m not sure how credible it is; the men interviewed for the book all seem to be adults (at least by Indian standards).


Definitely not very useful as a first book about the Little Bighorn, but interesting enough if you can fill in the details from other reading.… (meer)