Title: Wild Geese of the Greasy Grass
The Review
Wild Geese of the Greasy Grass: Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh Soldiers at the Battle of the Liitle Bighorn, by Keith Norman.
Paperback. 122 pages. Black & White illustrations. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2013. Available from Amazon in the UK for £7.93, or £1.97 in Kindle e-book edition.
A curious choice of topic for a U.S. writer, one might think. (Keith Norman is a reporter on a North Dakota newspaper, with two other Custer-related titles already under his belt: George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull, Warriors on the Plains and Service and Controversy, A Narrative Biography of Marcus Reno.)
The first, ungenerous, reaction is to assume that this must just be a cynical attempt to re-slice the same old subject in yet another way, and that the book will be prove to be merely a cut-and-paste job compiled from existing printed sources of biographical information. There are plenty to choose from, after all. Nichols’ Men With Custer, say, or Williams’ Military Register of Custer’s Last Command; Frederic C. Wagner III’s Participants in the Battle of the Little Big Horn; and, not least, Peter G. Russell’s deeply-researched articles in The Crow’s Nest and elsewhere.
That reaction would be unjust. To Mr. Norman’s credit, he appears to have rolled up his sleeves and tackled the work from scratch. In his Introduction, he says of his methodology: “We have used the tools of the modern genealogist to research the lives of these men. Our sources include military enlistments, census records, newspaper accounts and family histories.”* He adds the caveat that “[i]n many cases, the records are difficult to interpret” and that he and his co-researcher “make no guarantee that we have found every detail or interpreted the records correctly.” The impression given is of an honest man making genuine and sincere effort to do the best he could.
Unfortunately, however, virtue is not always rewarded. Had he opted to crib unscrupulously from others’ work instead of nobly doing his own, this would, sad to say, have been a far better book. He might still not have avoided every error — slips such as “Rascommon” for “Roscommon,” “Cornan” for “Cavan,” “County Queens” for “Queen’s County,” and “Alesford” for “Alresford” are firmly enshrined in Men With Custer, with “Alesford” even escaping the more finely-meshed net of Williams’ Military Register — but he would at least have sidestepped some of the deeper holes into which he falls.
The most cavernous of these concerns previous enlistments. A frequent refrain in the text (which leans towards the repetitive to an almost mantra-like degree) is that because on enlistment so-and-so gave his previous occupation as soldier, he must therefore “have served in some other army”. The briefest check into Nichols, let alone Williams, tends to reveal that the individual in question was on his second or even third enlistment in the U.S. Army, and that therefore no mysterious past need be inferred. It is plain that the author has been over-reliant on a single set of enlistment records, with no access to, and possibly no knowledge of, any that preceded.
This would not matter so much (except to those of us who quite like a little accuracy in our history) if it remained within the realms of mere factual misstatement. Where it starts to jar more seriously is when the author’s imagination gets to work, as it does in the case of Sgt. James Bustard, on p. 37. Norman notes that Bustard was enlisted as sergeant by Capt. Keogh on 21 July 1875, listed his previous occupation as soldier, and, the recurring refrain, “had likely served in another army.” So far, so harmlessly misguided; but he then goes on to speculate excitedly that a “case could be made that some previous connection between Bustard and Keogh existed. Keogh handled the enlistment of the trooper and had him assigned to his company at the rank of sergeant. That connection is not evident in the records currently available.” Available to Mr. Norman, clearly not; available to anyone who can reach a book down from the shelf, readily. As per Williams, Bustard had already served three years in the Infantry on varied duties before enlisting as a private in the 7th Cavalry (Co. I, Keogh commanding) in August 1870; was raised to corporal a year later; was reduced to private at his own request in November 1871; then promoted to sergeant a month after that, at which rank he remained until his death in 1876. Mr. Norman’s instincts are correct in that there is possibly a story there — the “own request” business, plus Bustard’s various spells of detached service, do rather get the nostrils twitching — but it is unlikely to be as intriguing a story as he suggests.
Such flights of fancy are few, it is fair to say. Mostly, the book merely plods, in a well-meaning if bumbling way, scattering errors freely along its path. We learn, for instance, that several of its subjects were enlisted by a Lt. Edwin Godfrey, an officer previously unknown to 7th Cavalry history. We learn that Keogh’s initial assignment in the regiment was Fort Riley; Fort Wallace, his actual posting, gets nary a mention. (That howler, at least, is original; the many other mistakes that riddle the chapter devoted to Keogh appear with depressing frequency throughout Custer literature, so are, if not exactly helpful, more or less understandable.) We also learn, to our mild surprise, that the occupation of hostler translates as “someone who works in a hotel”: tangentially true, in that some would have worked for inns and hotels, but ignoring the essential fact vis-à-vis a cavalry regiment that a hostler’s task was to look after horses. While the Seventh may have had its oddities, filling its ranks with disproportionate numbers of ex-waiters and bell-boys was not one of them.
The hostlers get off comparatively lightly, however, by comparison with poor James Akers of Co. G (p. 57). He, we are told, “had worked as a plaster” — one of the more entertaining of the myriad proof-reading oversights. These, it should be said, are comparatively rare in the earlier pages, but they gather pace to positively avalanche proportions as the book progresses. Sensitive readers beware.
In short, this is not by any means a polished production. The facts are iffy, the prose leaden, the proof-reading sketchy; and the illustrations, such as they are, are so small and fuzzy as to be barely worth having. Even in the print edition, they look like e-book illustrations. Furthermore, its roster of Custer’s “Wild Geese” is startlingly incomplete** — in that it entirely omits Lt. Henry J. Nowlan. Whether you count him as Irish (by ancestry) or British (by birth, his birthplace of Corfu being a British protectorate at the time), he surely merits inclusion on either basis.
So, all that said: is there any conceivable reason to buy this book, other than its commendably modest price?
Well, perhaps yes. Where it does score — apart from in its patent sincerity — is in its organisation. The author has mapped it out rather well. After a brief overview of the background, the battle, the Native American leaders, and the weaponry, we get individual chapters on the officers (minus Nowlan, as noted); but then the book comes into its own. He has separated out the alphabetical biographical listings into three sections: (1) those who died at LBH; (2) those who were there but survived; and (3) those who were in the regiment at the time but were not present.
This in itself could make it a boon to researchers: a neat, handy road-map through the warren of the more compendious alphabetical biographies. Which is not a negligible contribution. Buy it expecting nothing more than that, and you should not be disappointed.
Elisabeth Kimber
- [First published in The Crow’s Nest, Autumn/Winter 2013, the biannual journal of the Custer Association of Great Britain, and reproduced here with kind permission of the Editor.]