Legend into History and Did Custer Disobey Orders at the Battle of the Little Big Horn? (The Custer Library)

With the possible exception of Gettyburg, no battle fought on American soil has caused so much discussion or widespread speculation as the epic Custer fiht on the wild, rugged terrain north of the Little Big Horn River in Montana on June 25, 1876. The stories that have been told and retold are legion, some of them lurid and without basis in fact or logic; Legends based on misconceptions and sunsound premises have come to be accepted as fact, and the definitive history can never be written because the 210 officers and men under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's immediate command were all killed. There is no mystery as to what happened, nor approximately when. The intriguing unknown factors have been the how and the why. Charles Kuhlman believed that the broken character of the terrain, unsuited to the irresistible cavalry charge that the Indians feared, played a major and often unrecognized part in the relative tactics of the opposing forces, and that time and space factors, synchronized with know facts painstakingly screened and analyzed, and limned against the background of the actual rerrain, would provide the clues to solve the mystery of why and how