Overview

The Custers and Their Dogs is the first book to seriously explore the little known history of General George Armstrong and Libbie Custer as wholehearted dog lovers. At the time of Custer’s death at Little Bighorn, they owned a rollicking pack of forty hunting hounds—including Scottish Deerhounds, Russian Wolfhounds, Greyhounds, and Foxhounds. Told engagingly through a dog owner’s lens, this biography of the Custers’ life covers their first dogs in the Civil War and Texas, hunting on the Kansas and Dakota frontiers, entertaining tourist buffalo hunters such as a Russian Archduke, English aristocracy, and The Great Showman, P. T. Barnum (all whom presented the general with hounds), Custer’s attack on the Washita village (when he was accused of strangling his own dogs), and the 7th Cavalry’s march to Little Bighorn with an analysis of the many rumors about a Last Stand dog. Duggan also reveals how the Custers’ pack was re-homed after Armstrong’s death in the first national dog rescue effort—and the strange fate of Libbie’s favorite staghound. Included is an appendix discussing depictions of General Custer’s dogs in art, literature, and film.

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9781476669540

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This book is chock-full of photos--many of which I have not seen before--sketches, and paintings, but the meat of it is in the research, which to me is remarkable and clearly establishes Brian as one of the best and most definitive writers on the Custers and their lives together with their animals. The book is even better than its content, for Brian is one fine writer. This is a curl-up-with-a-good-drink book, one of those whose only fault is that it ends. --Frederic C. Wagner III, author of The Strategy of Defeat at the Little Big Horn: A Military and Timing Analysis of the Battle and Participants in the Battle of the Little Big Horn: A Biographical Dictionary of Sioux, Cheyenne and United States Military Personnel, 2d ed.

Author Information

Brian Patrick Duggan is the author of the award-winning Saluki: The Desert Hound and the English Travelers Who Brought It to the West, as well as numerous articles on canine history which have been published internationally and in AKC Family Dog, AKC Gazette, Sighthound Review, Show Sight, The Private Journey, and Greasy Grass: The Journal of the Custer Battlefield Historical & Museum Association. He is a retired university technology educator, an active American Kennel Club judge, and the editor for McFarland Publishers’ Dogs in Our World series.

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