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To Hell with Honor: Custer and the Little Bighorn by Larry Sklenar
The image of the famous "last stand" of the Seventh U.S. Calvary under General George Armstrong Custer has metamorphosed into myth. We picture the solitary Custer standing upright to the end, his troops formed into groups of wounded and dying men around him. In this book, Larry Sklenar analyzes and interprets the widely accepted facts underlying the accepted portrayal of Custer's defeat. His perspective, however, is fresh, and he offers wholly new conclusions about one of the most enduring mysteries in American history -- the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn.Sklenar contends that Custer did have a battle plan, one different from any other suggested by scholars thus far. Custer, he argues, -- had reason to believe that his scheme might succeed with minimum bloodshed, -- made decisions consistent with army regulations and his best instincts as an experienced commander, -- had subordinates who could not overcome the limits of their personalities in a desperate situation, and-- made a selfless commitment to save the bulk of his regiment.Along the way, Sklenar appraises the officers and other men who served in the Seventh, evaluating the survivors' testimony and assessing the intent and motives of each. The movements and decisions of these men, the plans and goals of their regimental leader, and the remembrances and testimony of Indian eyewitnesses form the basis for this narrative history of the Seventh's famous fight.
Mass Market Paperback
First published April 1, 2000
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April 27, 2016
On June 25, 1876, a Civil War hero and Indian fighter named George Custer was killed with 210 men of the 7th Cavalry in a battle with Lakota and Cheyenne warriors on a Montana hillside. In the grand scheme of American history, it was a relatively unimportant event. It did not change the end-result of American-Indian relations, or even alter its speed. Rather, it was one more brutal little fight at the end of a brutal war against the Indians that’d been waged since English colonists started burning Pequot villages in the 1600s.
But the legacy of the fight, known as Custer’s Last Stand, has endured beyond all reason.
If you look at my virtual bookshelf, you’ll see what hopefully amounts to a wide-array of selections, including classics (to show you I’m cultured), contemporary fiction (to show you my cultural velocity), trashy novels (to show you I’m not too cultured), and histories and biographies (because that’s what I like to read when I’m not posturing on Goodreads). If anything stands out on my virtual bookshelf, though, it’s that I have a lot of Custer books.
Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn is the thing I’ve chosen to be obsessed with in my life. I read about it, I think about it, I write about it, I watch documentaries and movies about it, and I often dominate the dinner table with Custer-themed soliloquies. The boxes holding my childhood drawings are stuffed with horrifyingly graphic crayon renderings of Custer’s final moments (I’m considering asking my mom how I learned about evisceration at such a tender age). I once took my then-girlfriend-now-wife on an overnight drive from Nebraska to Montana, so that we could be first in line when the National Battlefield opened. It’s gotten to the point where she is begging me to start fantasy football or take up fishing, if only to stop hearing my theories on the existence of the South Skirmish Line.
Why am I, and so many others, indelibly fascinated by this single, long-ago event that barely rates a mention in Trivial Pursuit?
Well, funny you should ask.
I was just talking about this with my wife at dinner the other day, as I was about to finish Larry Sklenar’s To Hell With Honor. After my wife had left the table to finish her meal elsewhere, it occurred to me that I love reading and learning about the Little Big Horn because of the mystery.
Most history, you see, is consumed passively. If you read about Gettysburg or D-Day, you can sit back and let the information wash over you. We know, as well as can be known (taking into account the obvious fact that humans are poor eyewitnesses, and there is no such thing as an objective historical truth), what happened during those events, and many more like them. We can learn effortlessly.
The Little Big Horn is different. We don’t know exactly what happened. And sometimes, what we do know only adds to the confusion. Yet we have a wealth of clues that offer a tantalizing hope that someone can put all the pieces together. (And if that ever happened, I would be left learning how to put ships into bottles).
The raw materials of the Little Big Horn would make an excellent board game (Clue: White Civilization Expansionism Edition). Assemble all the evidence and devise your own theory.
And there is a lot of evidence to chose from.
First, you have the surviving accounts from white soldiers and scouts. These are eyewitness testimonials from the men who rode with the surviving battalion of the 7th Cavalry (Custer had split his force into three columns; his column was destroyed while two others remained relatively intact). However, there’s a twist (this is what makes the game so fun!): there is evidence that many of these white survivors were indulging in a cover-up, either to save their own careers or the honor of the Regiment.
Next, you have the accounts from Indian participants. For years, these accounts weren’t taken seriously, because we didn’t like what they were saying (Essentially, early historians discounted any Indian sources who didn’t verify the fact that Custer ascended to Heaven on a golden horse). In recent years, a lot more attention has been given these primary sources, the result being that Custer-fanatics have even more things to fight about on various list serves. Indian accounts are both enlightening and maddening. While invaluable, they are hampered by cultural factors on both sides of the fence. The Indians, for instance, did not share the same time-concepts as the whites, and they often incorporated their direct perceptions with hearsay they heard later. The whites, on the other hand, were often searching for answers to fit their theories. Thus, interviewer bias plays a big role in all the primary sources from the Lakota and the Cheyenne. To top all this off, all the questions and answers had to be filtered through an interpreter.
Also, there is the battlefield itself. The Little Big Horn is unique in that the casualties (at least the white cavalrymen) were buried where they fell. Today, when you go to the battle site, you can look over the rolling bluffs and ridges and see a white marble marker where each soldier died. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to turn those markers into men, and to see how the battle might have played out: some markers are still in skirmish formation, spaced three feet apart; other markers are a confused muddle, where the men fell in obvious retreat; and saddest still, you see the solitary markers where, 135 years ago, someone died very alone. (Of course, the markers are imperfectly placed, and subject to controversy. At least one marble tablet, belonging to young Lieutenant James Sturgis, was erected without a body. The only evidence of Sturgis’s death was his bloody underwear, later found in the Indian village. His body was never recovered, but a marker was placed to soothe his mother’s visit to the battlefield).
Finally, there is the forensic evidence. After a wildfire, an extensive archaeological survey was done on the battlefield, which recovered bullets and shell casings. This evidence gives an indication of what people were shooting at (the discovered bullets) and where people were shooting from (the discovered casings). Since we know what type of weapons the cavalry used, it is possible to distinguish between Indian positions and that of the cavalry. (The caveat, obviously, is that the battlefield had been extensively picked-over by millions of souvenir hunters for over a hundred years. In fact, the first time I visited the battlefield, as a youngster, you were still allowed to walk off the asphalt paths without getting scolded).
At this point, you’re probably wondering if I have a point. Well, I don’t. I just love talking about this stuff (this is what having dinner with me is like).
I guess the point is this: To Hell With Honor isn’t a Custer biography or a battle narrative; rather, it takes a good long look at the various evidence I mentioned above, and it comes up with a new battle hypothesis. Sklenar hasn’t unearthed any new evidence. Instead, he’s taken a fresh look at all the old evidence, highlighted overlooked statements, and placed these events within a new paradigm. I don’t believe everything that he posits (some of it is quite a stretch) but I found his take plausible and imaginative. This book is a rare thing: a truly fresh interpretation of a well-worn tale.
Sklenar’s theory centers on what is known to Custer buffs as “the Lone Tepee.” This tepee was located well outside the main Indian village and housed an Indian who was mortally wounded at the Battle of the Rosebud. Sklenar argues that the Lone Tepee was actually a satellite village with around 50 or so inhabitants. These villagers had stayed behind with the wounded Indian while the main body of Indians had moved farther down the Little Big Horn Valley. When Custer saw this encampment, Sklenar argues, Custer attempted to attack it in order to capture hostages, which he would then use to coerce the larger mass of Indians to surrender.
This initial sequence is actually quite inspired. It explains why, shortly after Custer had divided his command into three columns, two of those columns (Custer’s and Major Reno’s) came back together a short time later, at the Lone Tepee site. According to Sklenar, the two columns met because they were making a two-pronged attack on the campsite. Sklenar has a lot of primary sources to bolster his view, but he also uses what he knows about Custer’s tactics (at the Washita, Custer used captured women and children to prevent a counterattack) to make reasonable assumptions.
Once we leave the Lone Tepee, however, Sklenar’s case becomes a little less sure-handed. Indeed, I’m not really sure he describes a coherent, over-arching hypothesis for why Custer made the decisions he made while attacking the main village. As best I can tell, Sklenar seems to assert that Custer, faced with superior numbers, attempted to dazzle the Indians with some smoke-and-mirrors. He sent Reno down the valley to pin the Indians on one end, while Custer himself moved towards the other (with the implicit understanding that Benteen would also be on his way). When Custer realized that Captain Benteen, a noted Custer hater, wasn’t coming, Sklenar argues that Custer divided his column once more, in order to give the impression that he had more troops. Finally, Sklenar seems to believe that Custer’s final stand took place in order to draw the Indians from Major Reno’s faltering command with the hope that Benteen would soon arrive with reinforcements.
Suffice it to say, I liked this book. But that enjoyment comes with some major caveats. First, this is a poorly written book. Sklenar is a former State Department employee who spent six years researching Custer and going over the primary sources with a fresh eye. He should be lauded for the way in which he reinterprets events by taking those primary accounts and assessing them with educated assumptions based on the terrain, forensic evidence, Custer’s personality, and standard 19th century cavalry doctrine. Despite all this, however, Sklenar is not a polished writer. He writes passively, ploddingly, with occasionally tortured syntax and constant repetition. The pacing is atrocious. His style is dry, workmanlike, without a hint of literary ambition to match his perspective-changing material. There were far too many times when I had to read a sentence twice to understand its meaning. Often, his sentences were broken into ill-fitting clauses, so by the time you reach the period, you’ve forgotten where you started.
Furthermore, there is a definite pro-Custer bias in To Hell With Honor. In a way, it’s almost refreshing, since there have been so many other Custer books that have gone the other way. Still, Sklenar’s obvious affection for Custer clearly affects his ultimate conclusions.
The farther we follow George Custer down the valley, and the closer Custer comes to his doom, the less we know for certain. Accordingly, when Sklenar is talking about the Lone Tepee and Reno’s aborted attack, he has a lot of evidence upon which to base his informed speculation. However, by the time Custer and his men are surrounded and fighting for their lives, that information flow has slowed to a trickle. We know what the Indians said, and we know what the archaeological surveys discovered, but we don’t know what Custer was thinking.
Sklenar, though, gives Custer every benefit of the doubt. At times, this doesn’t seem warranted. For instance, Sklenar’s explanation for why Custer stopped and made a stand is a bit unconvincing. (Say what you will about Custer, but unlike Reno, he didn’t retreat). He believes that Custer did this to help Reno. I think it’s a bit more likely, based on the various reported movements of Custer’s troopers on Last Stand Hill, that Custer was attempting to maintain an offensive posture, probing and prodding the main village until, quite unexpectedly, he found himself under attack from several directions. This better explains the wide dispersal of his five companies, which made a unified defense impossible.
The pro-Custer bias is bracingly evoked in Sklenar’s handling of what I like to call “the Custer Penis Conundrum.” I suppose a bit of back story is in order. For years, the standard description of Custer’s corpse was as follows: bullet wound in temple; bullet wound beneath the left breast; missing finger; not scalped; not mutilated. It was a very romantic, very Victorian description. Custer, it was said, had a smile on his face. And though all the men around him had been stripped and hacked to bits, Custer – lying in the center of a circle of dead horses – was pristine.
The story never made sense to me, or to many others (And by “many others” I am referring to a small sect of people who care about things like this. We’re a lot of fun at cocktail parties!). A lot of Custer buffs assumed the story had been fabricated to protect Custer’s sensitive wife, Libby. Recently, that suspicion was confirmed, when an old interview with Lieutenant Edward Godfrey turned up. Godfrey reported that an arrow had been inserted into Custer’s genitals, post-mortem. Despite this evidence, which logically coincides with other reports of soldier mutilation, Sklenar is unconvinced. Without any explanation whatsoever (not even in the footnotes), he implies that Godfrey’s recollection is a lie. A certain pro-Custer bias is one thing; becoming the posthumous protector of the General’s junk is quite another.
Quibbles aside, I found To Hell With Honor incredibly compelling. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I know. It is too dryly written, too narrowly focused, and far too reliant on prior knowledge to be tackled by a Custer newbie. If you’re just starting down this road (and you should!), I’d suggest James Donovan’s A Terrible Glory or Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand. Both of them are learned, erudite, and impressively lucid.
This book is of a different type. It was written by a Custer buff for a Custer buff. If you’ve ever been yelled at for discussing Custer’s penis at the dinner table, To Hell With Honor is required reading.
But the legacy of the fight, known as Custer’s Last Stand, has endured beyond all reason.
If you look at my virtual bookshelf, you’ll see what hopefully amounts to a wide-array of selections, including classics (to show you I’m cultured), contemporary fiction (to show you my cultural velocity), trashy novels (to show you I’m not too cultured), and histories and biographies (because that’s what I like to read when I’m not posturing on Goodreads). If anything stands out on my virtual bookshelf, though, it’s that I have a lot of Custer books.
Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn is the thing I’ve chosen to be obsessed with in my life. I read about it, I think about it, I write about it, I watch documentaries and movies about it, and I often dominate the dinner table with Custer-themed soliloquies. The boxes holding my childhood drawings are stuffed with horrifyingly graphic crayon renderings of Custer’s final moments (I’m considering asking my mom how I learned about evisceration at such a tender age). I once took my then-girlfriend-now-wife on an overnight drive from Nebraska to Montana, so that we could be first in line when the National Battlefield opened. It’s gotten to the point where she is begging me to start fantasy football or take up fishing, if only to stop hearing my theories on the existence of the South Skirmish Line.
Why am I, and so many others, indelibly fascinated by this single, long-ago event that barely rates a mention in Trivial Pursuit?
Well, funny you should ask.
I was just talking about this with my wife at dinner the other day, as I was about to finish Larry Sklenar’s To Hell With Honor. After my wife had left the table to finish her meal elsewhere, it occurred to me that I love reading and learning about the Little Big Horn because of the mystery.
Most history, you see, is consumed passively. If you read about Gettysburg or D-Day, you can sit back and let the information wash over you. We know, as well as can be known (taking into account the obvious fact that humans are poor eyewitnesses, and there is no such thing as an objective historical truth), what happened during those events, and many more like them. We can learn effortlessly.
The Little Big Horn is different. We don’t know exactly what happened. And sometimes, what we do know only adds to the confusion. Yet we have a wealth of clues that offer a tantalizing hope that someone can put all the pieces together. (And if that ever happened, I would be left learning how to put ships into bottles).
The raw materials of the Little Big Horn would make an excellent board game (Clue: White Civilization Expansionism Edition). Assemble all the evidence and devise your own theory.
And there is a lot of evidence to chose from.
First, you have the surviving accounts from white soldiers and scouts. These are eyewitness testimonials from the men who rode with the surviving battalion of the 7th Cavalry (Custer had split his force into three columns; his column was destroyed while two others remained relatively intact). However, there’s a twist (this is what makes the game so fun!): there is evidence that many of these white survivors were indulging in a cover-up, either to save their own careers or the honor of the Regiment.
Next, you have the accounts from Indian participants. For years, these accounts weren’t taken seriously, because we didn’t like what they were saying (Essentially, early historians discounted any Indian sources who didn’t verify the fact that Custer ascended to Heaven on a golden horse). In recent years, a lot more attention has been given these primary sources, the result being that Custer-fanatics have even more things to fight about on various list serves. Indian accounts are both enlightening and maddening. While invaluable, they are hampered by cultural factors on both sides of the fence. The Indians, for instance, did not share the same time-concepts as the whites, and they often incorporated their direct perceptions with hearsay they heard later. The whites, on the other hand, were often searching for answers to fit their theories. Thus, interviewer bias plays a big role in all the primary sources from the Lakota and the Cheyenne. To top all this off, all the questions and answers had to be filtered through an interpreter.
Also, there is the battlefield itself. The Little Big Horn is unique in that the casualties (at least the white cavalrymen) were buried where they fell. Today, when you go to the battle site, you can look over the rolling bluffs and ridges and see a white marble marker where each soldier died. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to turn those markers into men, and to see how the battle might have played out: some markers are still in skirmish formation, spaced three feet apart; other markers are a confused muddle, where the men fell in obvious retreat; and saddest still, you see the solitary markers where, 135 years ago, someone died very alone. (Of course, the markers are imperfectly placed, and subject to controversy. At least one marble tablet, belonging to young Lieutenant James Sturgis, was erected without a body. The only evidence of Sturgis’s death was his bloody underwear, later found in the Indian village. His body was never recovered, but a marker was placed to soothe his mother’s visit to the battlefield).
Finally, there is the forensic evidence. After a wildfire, an extensive archaeological survey was done on the battlefield, which recovered bullets and shell casings. This evidence gives an indication of what people were shooting at (the discovered bullets) and where people were shooting from (the discovered casings). Since we know what type of weapons the cavalry used, it is possible to distinguish between Indian positions and that of the cavalry. (The caveat, obviously, is that the battlefield had been extensively picked-over by millions of souvenir hunters for over a hundred years. In fact, the first time I visited the battlefield, as a youngster, you were still allowed to walk off the asphalt paths without getting scolded).
At this point, you’re probably wondering if I have a point. Well, I don’t. I just love talking about this stuff (this is what having dinner with me is like).
I guess the point is this: To Hell With Honor isn’t a Custer biography or a battle narrative; rather, it takes a good long look at the various evidence I mentioned above, and it comes up with a new battle hypothesis. Sklenar hasn’t unearthed any new evidence. Instead, he’s taken a fresh look at all the old evidence, highlighted overlooked statements, and placed these events within a new paradigm. I don’t believe everything that he posits (some of it is quite a stretch) but I found his take plausible and imaginative. This book is a rare thing: a truly fresh interpretation of a well-worn tale.
Sklenar’s theory centers on what is known to Custer buffs as “the Lone Tepee.” This tepee was located well outside the main Indian village and housed an Indian who was mortally wounded at the Battle of the Rosebud. Sklenar argues that the Lone Tepee was actually a satellite village with around 50 or so inhabitants. These villagers had stayed behind with the wounded Indian while the main body of Indians had moved farther down the Little Big Horn Valley. When Custer saw this encampment, Sklenar argues, Custer attempted to attack it in order to capture hostages, which he would then use to coerce the larger mass of Indians to surrender.
This initial sequence is actually quite inspired. It explains why, shortly after Custer had divided his command into three columns, two of those columns (Custer’s and Major Reno’s) came back together a short time later, at the Lone Tepee site. According to Sklenar, the two columns met because they were making a two-pronged attack on the campsite. Sklenar has a lot of primary sources to bolster his view, but he also uses what he knows about Custer’s tactics (at the Washita, Custer used captured women and children to prevent a counterattack) to make reasonable assumptions.
Once we leave the Lone Tepee, however, Sklenar’s case becomes a little less sure-handed. Indeed, I’m not really sure he describes a coherent, over-arching hypothesis for why Custer made the decisions he made while attacking the main village. As best I can tell, Sklenar seems to assert that Custer, faced with superior numbers, attempted to dazzle the Indians with some smoke-and-mirrors. He sent Reno down the valley to pin the Indians on one end, while Custer himself moved towards the other (with the implicit understanding that Benteen would also be on his way). When Custer realized that Captain Benteen, a noted Custer hater, wasn’t coming, Sklenar argues that Custer divided his column once more, in order to give the impression that he had more troops. Finally, Sklenar seems to believe that Custer’s final stand took place in order to draw the Indians from Major Reno’s faltering command with the hope that Benteen would soon arrive with reinforcements.
Suffice it to say, I liked this book. But that enjoyment comes with some major caveats. First, this is a poorly written book. Sklenar is a former State Department employee who spent six years researching Custer and going over the primary sources with a fresh eye. He should be lauded for the way in which he reinterprets events by taking those primary accounts and assessing them with educated assumptions based on the terrain, forensic evidence, Custer’s personality, and standard 19th century cavalry doctrine. Despite all this, however, Sklenar is not a polished writer. He writes passively, ploddingly, with occasionally tortured syntax and constant repetition. The pacing is atrocious. His style is dry, workmanlike, without a hint of literary ambition to match his perspective-changing material. There were far too many times when I had to read a sentence twice to understand its meaning. Often, his sentences were broken into ill-fitting clauses, so by the time you reach the period, you’ve forgotten where you started.
Furthermore, there is a definite pro-Custer bias in To Hell With Honor. In a way, it’s almost refreshing, since there have been so many other Custer books that have gone the other way. Still, Sklenar’s obvious affection for Custer clearly affects his ultimate conclusions.
The farther we follow George Custer down the valley, and the closer Custer comes to his doom, the less we know for certain. Accordingly, when Sklenar is talking about the Lone Tepee and Reno’s aborted attack, he has a lot of evidence upon which to base his informed speculation. However, by the time Custer and his men are surrounded and fighting for their lives, that information flow has slowed to a trickle. We know what the Indians said, and we know what the archaeological surveys discovered, but we don’t know what Custer was thinking.
Sklenar, though, gives Custer every benefit of the doubt. At times, this doesn’t seem warranted. For instance, Sklenar’s explanation for why Custer stopped and made a stand is a bit unconvincing. (Say what you will about Custer, but unlike Reno, he didn’t retreat). He believes that Custer did this to help Reno. I think it’s a bit more likely, based on the various reported movements of Custer’s troopers on Last Stand Hill, that Custer was attempting to maintain an offensive posture, probing and prodding the main village until, quite unexpectedly, he found himself under attack from several directions. This better explains the wide dispersal of his five companies, which made a unified defense impossible.
The pro-Custer bias is bracingly evoked in Sklenar’s handling of what I like to call “the Custer Penis Conundrum.” I suppose a bit of back story is in order. For years, the standard description of Custer’s corpse was as follows: bullet wound in temple; bullet wound beneath the left breast; missing finger; not scalped; not mutilated. It was a very romantic, very Victorian description. Custer, it was said, had a smile on his face. And though all the men around him had been stripped and hacked to bits, Custer – lying in the center of a circle of dead horses – was pristine.
The story never made sense to me, or to many others (And by “many others” I am referring to a small sect of people who care about things like this. We’re a lot of fun at cocktail parties!). A lot of Custer buffs assumed the story had been fabricated to protect Custer’s sensitive wife, Libby. Recently, that suspicion was confirmed, when an old interview with Lieutenant Edward Godfrey turned up. Godfrey reported that an arrow had been inserted into Custer’s genitals, post-mortem. Despite this evidence, which logically coincides with other reports of soldier mutilation, Sklenar is unconvinced. Without any explanation whatsoever (not even in the footnotes), he implies that Godfrey’s recollection is a lie. A certain pro-Custer bias is one thing; becoming the posthumous protector of the General’s junk is quite another.
Quibbles aside, I found To Hell With Honor incredibly compelling. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I know. It is too dryly written, too narrowly focused, and far too reliant on prior knowledge to be tackled by a Custer newbie. If you’re just starting down this road (and you should!), I’d suggest James Donovan’s A Terrible Glory or Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand. Both of them are learned, erudite, and impressively lucid.
This book is of a different type. It was written by a Custer buff for a Custer buff. If you’ve ever been yelled at for discussing Custer’s penis at the dinner table, To Hell With Honor is required reading.
May 19, 2018
I have not read many books of this subject but I have always had a fascination for Custer and his demise at the Little Bighorn. Overall I found that this book attempted to answer all the questions of what went wrong and who was at fault. I think the author did an admirable job in his attempts to reconstruct the events leading up the final battle and the end of Custer and those troops of the 7th Cavalry who followed him.
I would agree that this would not have been an easy task. A lot of conjecture and guess work had to be used to complete the puzzle and although the depth of research certainly shows, it still may be a case that we will really never know what went wrong and why. The main problem that I had with this book was it was a bit dry and tended to drag. The narrative picked up the closer we got to the final battle but reading about the events leading up to that point was slow.
I give the author much credit in putting forward a decent scenario of what he believed happen and why. The research was excellent but I would have liked a few more maps although the few supplied were OK. If he could have livened up the story a bit more it would have been a 5 star book. I would recommend this book to those who have a desire to learn more about this most interesting event in American history.
I would agree that this would not have been an easy task. A lot of conjecture and guess work had to be used to complete the puzzle and although the depth of research certainly shows, it still may be a case that we will really never know what went wrong and why. The main problem that I had with this book was it was a bit dry and tended to drag. The narrative picked up the closer we got to the final battle but reading about the events leading up to that point was slow.
I give the author much credit in putting forward a decent scenario of what he believed happen and why. The research was excellent but I would have liked a few more maps although the few supplied were OK. If he could have livened up the story a bit more it would have been a 5 star book. I would recommend this book to those who have a desire to learn more about this most interesting event in American history.
October 9, 2012
I thought this was a good read. But Sklenar is biased in favor of Custer and against Reno and Benteen. I am what they call a Benteen man and I think that, at times, Sklenar is verging on the unfair in regard to what Benteen could do for Custer, especially once he came upon Reno's battered and disorganized command. While I think Sklenar gives Benteen both barrels, he does provide new a new viewpoint on the insight to Benteen's character, something I am always searching for. Read this, but be warned it's fairly biased.
May 13, 2024
Good, well reasoned analysis. Nice maps, and reasonable hypothesis on how the movements of Custer's command played out.
The author skims over many of the various eye witness accounts prominent in other works. Keeps the narrative moving, but also felt like a way to support his overall premise that Custer executed well and Reno/Benteen did not. I do not necessarily disagree, but the author pushes that narrative almost too repetitively.
I thought the writing style is a little stiff, but that is a matter of personal preference.
The author skims over many of the various eye witness accounts prominent in other works. Keeps the narrative moving, but also felt like a way to support his overall premise that Custer executed well and Reno/Benteen did not. I do not necessarily disagree, but the author pushes that narrative almost too repetitively.
I thought the writing style is a little stiff, but that is a matter of personal preference.
August 21, 2022
Another read by a Custer apologist placing the cause of defeat at the Little Bighorn on Reno and Benteen. Sklenar is especially bitter towards Benteen. Does he really believe the addition of Benteen and his 125 troopers would have changed the course of this battle? Does he believe that Benteen’s force, burdened with 150 pack mules, could have fought its way through thousands of Indian warriors to join up with Custer?
November 30, 2017
I rad this a few years ago, but what I remember was that it was a good read. I enjoyed learning more one of the most historic battles and memorable characters in history. Fact filed and well written I felt like truly understood what went wrong and why.
Brian
Brian
January 28, 2019
I really enjoyed Larry Sklenar's TO HELL WITH HONOR and, wow, it puts a hefty amount of blame on Benteen and Reno, the two officers who led the other companies of the Seventh Calvary into the Little Big Horn, both of whom where given orders by Custer that they did not execute.
Sklenar's history of the battle resonated with what I had been thinking as I plowed through about 30 different books on Custer in the last six months, everything from the Walter Camp, Libbie's memoirs, to Benteen's own letters to his wife (University of Athens archives, Georgia), bios written about Benteen (Harvest of Barren Regrets, Custer's Thorn), as well as those written about Reno (In Custer's Shadow), and of course the Reno Inquiry.
I HIGHLY recommend this book if you are willing to delve deep into the Little Big Horn story, and want to get lost in the nuances and details (like I am). It was refreshing to read something that defended Custer with solid references to his pretty stellar past military career, and minutely combed through all of the discrepancies of the Reno Court Of Inquiry.
Sklenar's history of the battle resonated with what I had been thinking as I plowed through about 30 different books on Custer in the last six months, everything from the Walter Camp, Libbie's memoirs, to Benteen's own letters to his wife (University of Athens archives, Georgia), bios written about Benteen (Harvest of Barren Regrets, Custer's Thorn), as well as those written about Reno (In Custer's Shadow), and of course the Reno Inquiry.
I HIGHLY recommend this book if you are willing to delve deep into the Little Big Horn story, and want to get lost in the nuances and details (like I am). It was refreshing to read something that defended Custer with solid references to his pretty stellar past military career, and minutely combed through all of the discrepancies of the Reno Court Of Inquiry.
November 12, 2012
I think the author spent the whole book trying to lay the blame for the defeat on Reno and beenteen. While these two officers failed in their own right, Custer was not without fault for the results if the battle.
August 4, 2011
This book will change your mind regarding the things you thought you knew about Custer!
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