With Custer on the Little Bighorn: A Newly Discovered First-Person Account by William O. Taylor

In 1872, seventeen-year-old William O. Taylor, barely five feet tall, enlisted in the army at Troy, New York. Almost immediately he was assigned to the Seventh Cavalry. At 12:30 p.m. on the fateful day, June 25, 1876, Taylor's contingent, under the command of Major Marcus Reno, was told to move forward "at as rapid a gait as prudent and charge afterwards." At the same time, General George A. Custer and his force left the trail and moved right. Suddenly, Taylor and his comrades were caught in a furious surprise attack by the Sioux. "The Death Angel," writes Private Taylor, "was very near."
For thirty-six hours, without water, Taylor's battalion was dug in until finally reinforced by other troops of the Seventh Cavalry. It was then they learned that only a short distance away, Custer's force had been annihilated.
Beginning at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of June 27, Private Taylor and the remnants of his regiment attended to the burial of Custer's dead.
"The most that could be done," writes Taylor in his extraordinary account of a military disaster that will never be erased from the American consciousness, "was to cover the remains with some branches of sagebrush and scatter a little earth on top, enough to cover their nakedness, a covering that would remain but a few hours at the most when the wind and rain would undo our work, and the wolves whose mournful and ominous howls we had already heard, would scatter their bones over the surrounding ground."
The memories of that singular event in American history obsessed William O. Taylor for the rest of his days. The result is this moving personal and revelatory memoir published here for the first time since its creation.

On June 25, 1876, as General George Armstrong Custer and his soldiers fell to Sioux warriors, Taylor, a private in Troop A of the 7th Cavalry who had just ridden into battle with Major Marcus Reno, was bunkered down, under siege, in a valley below the Little Bighorn. Three days later, he helped bury Custer's troops. Discharged for reasons of health in 1877, Taylor became a lifelong student of his first and only battle. Six years before he died, he completed this previously unpublished memoir/history, which was purchased by editor Martin in 1995. The text integrates Taylor's personal memories with extensive borrowings from such then standard sources as Elizabeth B. Custer's Boots and Saddles and John Finerty's War-Path and Bivouac. Taylor's clear prose style as well as his handwriting, of which several pages are reproduced, pay tribute to the effectiveness of the common schools of New York State at mid-19th century. The author's sympathy for the Indians, his dislike of Reno and his belief that Custer was a victim of his own overconfidence reflect prevailing turn-of-the-century opinions without adding much to the respective debates. The narrative, on the other hand, offers vivid and original firsthand accounts of both the confused retreat of Reno's battalion across the Little Bighorn River and the grisly process of identifying and interring the already decomposing corpses on the site of the Last Stand. Martin's first-rate editing makes the most of a volume that will delight Custer buffs and engage scholars of the campaign. Photos. Editor tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Joining the crowded ranks of new books about General George Armstrong Custer's now mythic final battle in 1876 is this newfound eyewitness account by a private in the Seventh Cavalry, attached to Major Marcus Reno's command. Unearthed and edited by Martin, the director of the Western memorabilia department of a San Francisco auction house, Taylor's manuscript, completed five years before his death in 1923, vividly recounts the heroics of his badly outnumbered comrades and provides further evidence of Major Reno's incompetence and cowardice on the Little Bighorn. Reno, sent by Custer to flank a suspected Indian force, was attacked and fled the field. Taylor, despite losing his mount and his pistol, and with soldiers dropping all around him, managed to gain the bluff to which Reno's disordered force retreated. Trapped under a broiling sun with little water, surrounded by snipers, they listened to the fusillade of gunshots signaling Custer's last stand. While Taylor recounts such horrifying battlefield details as the mutilation of the bodies of dead soldiers by the Sioux, he speaks with great empathy of the Indians' plight. Upon seeing the body of a Sioux who had been scalped by soldiers, Taylor reflects, ``I could not help a feeling of sorrow. . . . He was within a few hundred rods of his home and family which we had attempted to destroy and he had died to defend.'' Some remarkable materials lend a homely power to Taylor's narrative: statements by army officers and Sioux leaders; period poetry about the battle; photographs of soldiers, Indians, and army scouts; and even a listing of such personal items as soldier's rings and watches recovered from Indians long after the event. This sweeping account by a surprisingly gifted writer is more than a battlefield epic; it is vibrant, living history that easily leaps the 120-year chasm between us and combatants that day at the Little Bighorn. (Editor tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In 1876, William Taylor was a corporal in the Seventh Cavalry, assigned to A Troop, which was part of the battalion at the Little Bighorn. From this vantage point he takes the reader along on a vivid re-creation of his part of the battle and its aftermath. This carefully constructed account is based on his observations and on information gathered from survivors on both sides that withstood his careful scrutiny. His criteria do not allow for any discussion of how Custer's battalion met its end but do permit sympathetic discussion of why the Indians fought. Only Taylor's death in 1923 prevented publication of the completed manuscript, which was subsequently lost for 70 years. The information he collected but did not use in his narrative has been placed in an appendix so that it is available to readers. This valuable documentary source is essential for specialized collections and recommended for others.?Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.