Revival History

The Battle of the Rosebud on June 17, 1876, is one of the most important engagements in the history of the Plains Wars, and it is consistently overshadowed in popular memory by the Battle of the Little Bighorn that followed eight days later. The Rosebud deserves its own accounting, because what happened there was not simply a prelude to Little Bighorn but a demonstration of the tactical sophistication and personal leadership that made the Lakota and Cheyenne alliance the most formidable military force General George Crook had ever faced. Crook led approximately 1,300 soldiers and allied Crow and Shoshone scouts south along Rosebud Creek on the morning of June 17, moving toward the main Lakota encampment. Crazy Horse led a force of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors that intercepted them in a battle that lasted six hours and covered several miles of rolling Montana grassland. The engagement was marked by the mobility and initiative of the Lakota and Cheyenne fighters, who attacked from multip...

On the morning of March 3, 1876, the wife of farmer Allen Crouch was making soap in the yard of their farmhouse near the small community of Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. The sky was clear. Without warning, chunks of meat began falling from the sky. Most pieces ranged in size from approximately 2 inches square to 4 inches square. They were fresh. They were raw. They covered approximately a 100-yard by 50-yard strip of the Crouch yard and pasture. The Meat Shower lasted approximately three to seven minutes (witness accounts varied). When it ended, an estimated several hundred pounds of meat lay scattered across the Kentucky countryside. Several local residents, intrigued by the unusual event, picked up samples and tasted them. The general agreement was that the meat tasted "between mutton and venison." The story was reported by The New York Times on March 9, 1876. Samples were preserved and eventually analyzed by professional scientists. Dr. Leopold Brandeis of New ...

On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer led five companies of the Seventh Cavalry down toward the Lakota and Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn—the Greasy Grass—and within the hour none of them were left to tell what had happened. The news reached the eastern cities in the first week of July, while the country was still in the middle of its centennial celebrations, and for the rest of the summer the question of how it had gone so wrong crowded nearly everything else off the front pages. There was no wire service feeding the public a steady drip of dispatches, no class of professional commentators standing ready to explain the plains to readers who had never seen them. An editor who wanted a credible opinion needed a man who had actually ridden that country. A man who had fought alongside Indian scouts and against hostile ones, and who knew cavalry from the saddle. Such men were scarce east of the Mississippi in July of 1876. Two of them happened to be in Philadel...