AS A EUROPEAN COME EARLY to the United States (read: age five), I have long had a fascination with the American West, both as myth and as reality. I believe it is as much a state of mind as a physical place. My mother told me that as a young girl she devoured the pulp fictions of Karl May, a German writer who never ventured outside of Europe but wrote adventure novels about the Old American West, featuring the characters Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Although our current understanding of the time is more nuanced and sophisticated, it is still in many ways as romanticized and unrealistic. I can attest that on a recent visit to Colorado, I saw many galleries featuring depictions of a West that exists no longer. In rural areas wooden wagons were staged in open fields, and I even passed a teepee in a pasture that I used as a landmark to find my way home. The frontier was formative to our national character, and although it disappeared physically as a place with no boundaries, it is very much alive in our national psyche.
What I find even more interesting is the pendulum swing from the simplistic depictions of Indian warfare in the old Hollywood westerns to the opposite but equally false ones in more current books and films. I have to thank the balanced historical writings of both S. C. Gwynne and Peter Cozzens for this insight. We honor the past most when we depict it as accurately as possible without contorting it to contemporary mores. By doing this we allow ourselves to better understand our present.
This is a work of imagination, using as a starting point the life of General G. A. Custer and his wife, Libbie Bacon Custer, from the Civil War till the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or the Battle of the Greasy Grass. The writer Tim O’Brien says “stories are for joining the past to the future,” and that was very much my motivation for writing about this defining moment in our history. While trying to adhere to the historical facts of the period, I have given myself the fiction writer’s liberty of blending and mixing fact and fiction in order to serve the greater story truth. For instance, Libbie Custer was not present at Camp Supply to watch the parade of captives from the Battle of the Washita, or the Washita Massacre, but for my purposes her presence there was essential to the ongoing story of the Custer marriage. Golden Buffalo and Anne Cummins are imagined characters who are based on myriad sources: Lakota and Arikara narratives of the Little Bighorn for Golden Buffalo; captivity narratives for Anne’s story. The use of the numbered Removes as chapter headings comes from the Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. I borrowed from many sources but particularly the story of getting caught in a buffalo stampede from the oral narrative in Pretty-shield by Frank Linderman. De Trobriand’s Military Life in Dakota colored forever my idea of being caught in a blizzard. Following are some of the sources that were instrumental in my research, not only for facts, but for immersion in time and place. For those looking for further reading on the history the book depicts, this may provide a beginning reading list. Although I believe literature by its nature is political in that it gives us empathy for those unlike ourselves, this is a novel and I do not pretend to be a historian. In trying to balance current sensibilities with historical realities, I have found wisdom in the following quote by Kate Atkinson: “Hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing but unfortunately it is unavailable to view in the midst of battle.”
It goes without saying that all mistakes, intentional or not, are mine.