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Many years after the event, a Northern Cheyenne chief named Two Moon summed up what took place in the afternoon of June 25, 1876, on a ridge above the Little Bighorn River of Montana Territory.

"We circled all around them," Two Moon said, "swirling like water round a stone." That vivid image captured the furious finale of the battle in which a force of about 2,000 Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyennes annihilated 220 troopers and officers of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry Regiment.

The fight, which occupied about an hour in actual time, has been refought for 132 years in a vast and divisive literature of "Custeriana," so called because most of it centers on the prosecution or defense of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, the flamboyant officer who died with his men in a place the Indians called the Greasy Grass.

In A Terrible Glory, James Donovan's expansive approach to the battle has resulted in the most memorable, readable, maybe best, book on it to date, even considering such standard works as Robert Utley's Custer and the Great Controversy (1962) and Evan Connell's novel-like Son of the Morning Star (1982).

Mr. Donovan, a Dallas-based literary agent, first presents a scrupulous re-creation of the genocidal pattern of white-Indian relations that led to the Custer bloodbath. This series of infamies began with the brazen land-grab of 1830 called the Indian Removal Act (the forced eviction of Cherokees to today's Oklahoma), and included a number of bait-and-switch treaties, lying federal "peace commissions," and the 1874 army expedition, led by Custer, into the Black Hills, sacred lands of the Sioux.

The author is an adept biographer, a fortunate thing because the story of the Little Bighorn is the very definition of history: a tangled skein of intersecting lives. Mr. Donovan provides astute portrayals of Custer and his engaging wife, Elizabeth "Libbie" Bacon, and skillful cameos of the diverse personalities whose paths and Custer's crossed.

Among these are the behind-the-scenes brass, from President Ulysses Grant to Generals William T. Sherman, Philip B. Sheridan and the commander of the 1876 campaign, Alfred H. Terry (who pronounced the Little Bighorn fight, for which he was ultimately responsible, "a sad and terrible blunder.")

Equally fascinating as these are the images of Custer's several enemies, among them Maj. Marcus Reno, the besotted, panicky second-in-command in the battle, and cantankerous Capt. Frederick Benteen, Custer's unrelenting adversary.

Among friends well-sketched: Tom and Boston Custer, who died with brother George on the ridge, and Mark Kellogg, the Bismarck Tribune reporter who on the eve of the last stand, in which he was killed, wrote a dispatch for his paper saying, "By the time this reaches you we will have met the red devils, with what results remain to be seen. I go with Custer and will be in at the death."

To such diverse personalities as these, the author adds rare details on the Indians Custer always underestimated and never knew even when they were killing him and his command: Crazy Horse, Gall, Rain-in-the-Face, Low Dog, Crow King, Hump, Sitting Bull. And too, the scouts who served the troopers, including Bloody Knife, the half-Arikara, half-Sioux who was killed by a bullet in the head, his brains spattering Reno's tunic at the opening of the fight.

The Custer battle has never been as vividly and comprehensibly told as in A Terrible Glory.

Dale L. Walker of El Paso is author of many books on the American West.

Custer and the Little Bighorn – the Last Great Battle of the American West

James Donovan

(Little, Brown, $26.99) MORE 'GLORY': Read an exclusive interview with James Donovan on the Texas Pages books blog, www.guidelive.com/texaspages.

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