A Dispatch to Custer: The Tragedy of Lieutenant Kidder

by Randy Johnson

A Dispatch to Custer tells the little-known story of Lieutenant Lyman Kidder, a young soldier sent on a mission in 1867 to deliver new orders to Lieutenant Colonel George Custer. En route a band of Sioux and Cheyenne ambushed Kidder and his party, killing all eleven soldiers and their Sioux scout. Custer discovered their mutilated bodies a few days later and ordered they be buried in a common grave. When Kidder's father was notified of his son's death, he began the process of recovering his son's remains. Told mainly through the letters of Kidder's family and military colleagues, A Dispatch to Custer conveys a rare intimacy, while the authors' insightful interpretations fill out the story.

119 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 1999

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

LT Lyman Kidder, ten 2nd Cavalry troopers, and a Lakota scout named Red Bead were chased, surrounded, and killed by a large party of Cheyenne warriors near the banks of Beaver Creek while riding with a dispatch for George Custer in Kansas on June 29, 1867. The dispatch party had misread Custer's trail, partly because Custer had, as usual, disobeyed orders concerning his line of march. Johnson has done some useful field work to identify the actual site and to recover artifacts (uniform and equipment bits, expended and unexpended ammunition), and to reconstruct the last minutes of the doomed patrol. He also strings together what little is known of Kidder's life, including his service in the Dakota Uprising campaign in Minnesota, and makes some useful connections between Kidder's congressman father and the founding of the University of Soth Dakota, as well as the opening of theBlack Hills to white settlement, which was a great loss for the Lakota. The book is handomely ilustrated, including the painting reproduced on the cover, but its slim beypnd the bare bones of the story. (Field work aside, most of what we know rests on Custer's "My Life on the Plains," and on his official report.)

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent short account of the massacre of a small cavalry unit delivering messages to Custer that bumbled into a Sioux/Cheyenne party and were relatively quickly dispatched to the last man. Using the little written record that remains, supplemented by archeological work, the authors try to repair early assumptions that Kidder was inexperienced. Sadly, there should have been a little more light shone on the men who followed Kidder to their collective demise. I have always been fascinated with the Custer story, and this provides an extra bit of information and insight.