"My Life On The Plains Or Personal Experiences With Indians" by General George A. Custer" is a first-hand account of General Custer's career from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to approximately 1872. This period of his command of the 7th Cavalry in the various expeditions against the Indians, is the period of his career with which he is most identified in the public imagination.

His organization of the newly formed 7th Cavalry & its training are touched upon, as well as the 7th Cavalry's skirmishes & battles with the Plains Indians, such as the battle of the Washita in November of 1868. The relative ease with which the Indians were defeated by Custer, Indian fighter extraordinaire, in these & similar episodes during these years got Custer believing in his own myth of invincibility. This contributed to the foolhardy decisions and poor strategic planning that led to his death, and the massacre of his command, at the Little Big Horn in June 1876.

Custer serves the purposes of truer-than-life history. For his facts are 1st-hand and indisputable, even if heavily slanted in his favor. His pages are crowded with pictures of a type of life that was almost extinct, even as he was recording it. Washington Irving and George Fenimore Cooper in their fictional Indian stories drew on records of a dead past. General Custer drew on current living records of an intense present.

Here, from an eyewitness, are the events that have captured the imagination of generations of Americans, spawned dozens of books--both fiction and non-fiction--, and numerous movies and TV shows, most of the latter extreme flights of fancy--some racist, while others just downright silly.

There are approximately 167,950+ words and approximately 559+ pages at 300 words per page in this e-book.

NOTE: This book has been scanned then OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been applied to turn the scanned page images back into editable text. Then every effort has been made to correct typos, spelling, and to eliminate stray marks picked up by the OCR program. The original and/or extra period images, if any, were then placed in the appropriate place and, finally, the file was formatted for the e-book criteria of the site. This means that the text CAN be re-sized, searches performed, & bookmarks added, unlike some other e-books that are only scanned---errors, stray marks, and all.

We have added an Interactive Table of Contents & an Interactive List of Illustrations if any were present in the original. This means that the reader can click on the links in the Table of Contents or the List of Illustrations & be instantly transported to that chapter or illustration.

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