Thieves' Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer's Path to Little Bighorn

Historian Mort (The Wrath of Cochise: The Bascom Affair and the Origins of the Apache Wars) turns his eye to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition through the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota and Wyoming. Unlike Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted's guidebook Exploring with Custer: The 1874 Black Hills Expedition, Mort concentrates on Custer's gold-seeking mission on the Great Sioux Reservation; lands that had been formally protected by the Treaty of Fort Laramie as being closed to gold prospectors. However, Custer's mission was a thinly veiled reconnaissance to find a suitable location for a new military fort. The author documents 19th-century American lust for the Black Hills as an encouraging factor in Custer's personal quest, and how Custer's reports of finding abundant gold served to turn public opinion further in his favor. Mort provides a legitimate historic viewpoint sympathetic to Native Americans, in which Custer is the spear point toward the Great Sioux War of 1876 (also called the Black Hills War) and its prominent action, the Battle of the Little Bighorn.