I read upwards of fifty books—or parts of them—when researching this novel, some better than others but all useful in their own way. The first of these, and the text that drove me to further investigate the role the immigrant Irish played as soldiers in the genocidal conquest of the American West, was Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Set ten years after the events in my novel, it is nonetheless an invaluable and gripping examination of the Battle of Little Big Horn—the Battle of the Greasy Grass. As in Fort Phil Kearny and the Fetterman Massacre, a disproportionate number of the government soldiers killed in that battle were Irish-born, and reading of this in Philbrick’s brilliant book inspired my initial researches into the subject.
The Fetterman Massacre by Dee Brown is a very readable, popular account of the building of Fort Phil Kearny and the events leading up to—and the aftermath of—the Battle of One Hundred in the Hand as seen in this novel. The definitive account of these events, however, is Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth by John H. Monnett, not least because Monnett gives equal weight in his account to the testimony of the Indians who fought in Red Cloud’s War.
For a first-hand account of life at Fort Phil Kearny, Absaraka: Home of the Crows by Margaret Irvin Carrington is a wonderfully written—if sanitized and obfuscating in relation to her husband’s responsibility for the deaths of his troops in the Fetterman Fight—memoir of life as the wife of the commander of a frontier outpost.