The Fights on the Little Horn Companion

Gordon Harper’s remarkable book, Fights on the Little Horn: Unveiling the Mysteries of Custer’s Last Stand (Casemate Publishing, 2014) was conceived, researched, compiled, and written over a fifty-year period. After becoming fascinated with the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Gordie (as he was known) discovered that many of the stories, secondary publications, and accounts of the battle were based on erroneous information. Gordie’s stated goal in writing the book was to compile all of the primary sources related to the battle and campaign—letters, reports, interviews, testimony, diary entries, and contemporary newspaper articles—and glean from them the information that was reliable, factual, and untainted by subsequent embellishment. His intent was to have all of those primary sources, plus the book he compiled based only on those sources, published simultaneously. The problem with that plan was that there were more than 1,700 pages, nearly