Deliverance from the Little Big Horn: Doctor Henry Porter and Custer’s Seventh Cavalry

Stevenson celebrates a long-forgotten feat of medical bravery in battle, one she regrets has gone unrecognized by the U.S. government. The only survivor of the three surgeons who traveled with Custer to Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876, was 28-year-old Henry Porter. A civilian contract surgeon, he assumed the medical care of Maj. Marcus Reno’s 350-man battalion as they fought 2,000 Indian warriors. Porter attended the wounds of several dozen soldiers and performed amputations and other surgeries. But American medicine’s dismissal of the germ theory of disease meant that “hands that aimed to cure also continued to infect.” As flies swarmed the foul hospital area, the evacuation of Porter’s patients on mules and hand litters began with a 15-mile trek to a steamboat for a 700-mile river journey to the post hospital near Bismarck in Dakota Territory. Concluding chapters cover Porter’s marriage, his life as a civilian surgeon in Bismarck, and his participation in the 1879 investigation of Maj. Reno, accused of “gross cowardice and neglect of duty.” Stevenson’s medical perspective on Little Big Horn is revelatory, written with an eye for striking details. 9 b&w illus., 1 map. Agent: Don Lamm, Fletcher & Co. (Oct.)