Soldiers Falling Into Camp: The Battles at the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn

The publisher claims that this is the first book to tell the Indian version of the Battle at the Little Big Horn (1876) and the first to be written by Native Americans. Kammen, a writer of Western fiction, joins Lefthand, a Crow historian, and Marshall, a Sioux student of the battle, in an attempt to offer fresh insight into the victory over U.S. troops under Gen. George Armstrong Custer. Based on oral histories and previously published works, the book interweaves accounts of life in the Indian and U.S. military camps, bringing the story to a drmatic yet unsatisfying conclusion. Using imagined dialogue and other fictional techniques, the fanciful history provides little by way of convincing documentation. Ultimately, its substance hanging on little more than gunsmoke, the work fails. (June)