It Is a Good Day to Die: Indian Eyewitnesses Tell the Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn - Softcover

Viola, Herman J.; Shelton Danis, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803296266 ISBN 13: 9780803296268

Publisher: Bison Books, 2001

Synopsis

"I am an old man, and soon my spirit must leave this earth to join the spirit of my fathers. Therefore, I shall speak only the truth in telling what I know of the fight on the Little Bighorn River where General Custer was killed. Curly, who was with us, will tell you that I do not lie." So spoke White Man Runs Him, a Crow Indian who with five other Crow warriors had served as a scout for Custer's Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, the day of the battle known to generations of white Americans as "Custer's Last Stand." They survived the battle, but Custer and more than 250 troopers did not. Thus their accounts and those of the Lakotas and Cheyennes who triumphed at Little Bighorn (or Greasy Grass, as it was known to the Lakotas) offer the only firsthand picture of what happened that fateful day. These stories—from leaders as renowned as Black Elk and Sitting Bull, warriors such as Wooden Leg, a Cheyenne woman, and Arikara and Crow scouts—at last bring one of the most unforgettable showdowns in American history to vivid, complex, multifaceted life.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

I was not sorry at all.  I was a happy boy.  Those white men had come to kill our mothers and fathers and us, and it was our country (Black Elk, Oglala Sioux). Known to generations of white Americans as "Custer's Last Stand" or the Battle of Little Bighorn, it was, to the Plains Indians, the Battle of the Greasy Grass--a great, if short-lived victory against the whites who would soon overrun their country and destroy their way of life. Now, for the first time in a book for children, the story of the Greasy Grass battle is told from the Indian point of view, in a series of dramatic eyewitness vignettes.  Assembled from the recollections of twelve Indian participants in the battle, the book is divided into thirty brief chapters that, together, create a compelling narrative of the battle and the events that preceded it: Sitting Bull's vision of white soldiers falling into his camp "like grasshoppers," Custer's impetuou

About the Author:

Herman J. Viola was director of the National Anthropological Archives. His many books include Little Bighorn Remembered: The Untold Indian Story of Custer's Last Stand.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0803296266
• ISBN 13: 9780803296268
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 101