The Little Bighorn

One Crowded Hour, Book 1

By: David Larson

Narrated by: David Pappas

Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

William Benet Sterling and his best friend Jacob (Jake) Brown grew up together on small farms on the Kansas prairie. Their future as farmers seemed simplistic, comfortable, inevitable, and boring. The day they rode into the sleepy town of Manhattan the air was electric. The famed Seventh Cavalry and it's dashing war hero commander, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer were going to parade along Denison Street in front of Kansas State University.

The crowd fell silent as the commanding sound of a drum roll spilled into the street demanding undivided attention. The drumming slammed to a stop leaving a deciduous silence. Men could be heard issuing clipped orders then the first notes of The Girl I Left Behind Me floated on the warm hazy air and caressed the sense of martial glory and the romance of combat in the teenagers' psyche.

As Custer and his command staff pass in front of Jake and Will Custer looks directly at the boys and winks. From that infinitesimal and seemingly innocuous moment the boys' lives change forever. They enlist in the Seventh Cavalry the next year, April 1876, just in time to ride into the valley of the Little Bighorn to etch their names into the stone tablets of history.

The two teenagers gallop headlong into battle with Major Reno and A company as they mount a breath-taking charge against the Sioux and Cheyenne village along the river. They live the terror of being forced back into a small grove of cottonwood trees helplessly watching wounded friends being butchered and brutalized. As the fighting builds to an impossible pitch, it becomes clear that the only way out of this killing box is to charge into the enemy and race for better cover. Three companies of cavalry blast out of flimsy cover and into the open valley. The Indians realize the advantage and turn the breakout into a buffalo chase. Troopers endure a running gun battle through the valley, across the Little Bighorn River, and up a coulee to a flat, but defensible portion of the rolling bluffs.

Over the next 36 hours the boys fight for their lives, and the lives of those around them as Indians occupy the heights around them. Death stalks every second they stay on that hill. When it becomes clear men are going to start dying of thirst they volunteer to be part of a water party that must sneak back down the coulee, dart across 300 yards of open ground that is defended by the enemy, fill canteens, and make it back up hill safely.

Both boys become men on the hill and are forced to see the unvarnished reality and maddening futility of armed combat. Only one of them will live to tell the story.

©2021 David Larson (P)2022 David Larson

Entertaining and educational at the same time

Eye opening, highly descriptive account of the battle at the little big horn. I found myself looking things up, cheating as it were, to see who survived. The people truly came to life in this work. I could almost see the sights as I read. The narrator's mispronunciation of several words was quite jarring, reveille-- it's rev al ee, not revay, is most irritating. Otherwise, his voice is pleasant and easy to listen to. That is the reason for 3 stars for the performance.

A good work ruined by the narrator

I've read about twenty or more history books on the Indian Wars including at least five on the Little Big Horn battle.

I am impressed with the amount of research the author did to be able to pack as much detail into the narrative as he did. I didn't find anything major to criticize from a historical perspective. His characterizations for both the historical and fictional individuals ring true.

There are some minor quibbles like referring to the Springfield 45-70 as a rifle rather than a carbine is inaccurate. He seems to switch the terms alternately. Cavalry bugles were smaller and stubbier than infantry instruments and were referred to as trumpets and the musician as a trumpeter. But these are just minor issues and don't detract from the story.

The narrator nearly ruined the book for me. His near constant mispronunciations of military terminology is daunting. He can't pronounce simple terms like brevet and reveille correctly. He pronounces the Arikara as (a ri kara') accent on the last syllable when it should be (a rik' ara) from all I've read, but again a minor glitch; You don't hear it a lot. In reality, the troops normally referred to them as simply Ree scouts.

However this is a book about a cavalry regiment and he constantly mispronounces it as if it was cal' vary with the L before the V. I can't tell you how grating this becomes because it's so ignorant and the word appears on virtually every page so you're listening to him butcher the key word in the book every minute or so. It was beyond annoying.

I'm unfamiliar with how these works get produced. So how did this doofuss get past screening if he can't say cavalry?