My Service in Custer's 7th Cavalry (Annotated) - Paperback

by General Hugh Lenox Scott (Author)

A newly-minted West Point lieutenant in 1876, he requested posting to George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry just days after the general's death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He accompanied the brother of General Philip Sheridan to recover the remains of Custer and the other officers from the battlefield at the Little Bighorn in 1877. He met and befriended most of the important Plains Indians as well as figures like Buffalo Bill Cody, General Phil Sheridan, Frederick Remington, and others. He met "the idol of the 7th Cavalry," Captain Frederick Benteen, modeled his own style of command after Benteen, and remained friends with him until the latter's death. Fluent in Indian sign language, a true friend to Native Americans, probably no white man of his time was better at communicating with and gaining the trust of the tribes with which he worked than Hugh Lenox Scott. During his time in the west, he more than once turned down assignments to more desirable posts to remain working with the tribes. Of his fellow white citizens, he wrote: "...there is an inborn racial fear of the Indian in our minds, due to our ignorance of his thought, enhanced by the tales of scalping and bloodshed we were fed on in our youth." Many times, Scott put himself at great risk to avoid bloodshed between whites and Indians. This fascinating, exciting, and extremely important memoir is one that every student of American history should own and read repeatedly.