On the Plains with Custer and Hancock

Résumé du livre

In this recently discovered first-person account of the Hancock expedition of 1867, Isaac Coates, Seventh Cavalry surgeon, recounts riding beside Custer during the ill-fated Hancock expedition of 1867. To see the untamed frontier, Isaac Coates, a ship's doctor in the Civil War, volunteered as an army surgeon. He was assigned to Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, who took a shine to Coates and invited him to ride at his right side -- a superb vantage, but not one without danger. They took part in an expedition, led by Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg, to pacify the Indians in Kansas and Nebraska. Coates wrote vividly of his experiences. Author W. J. D. Kennedy has richly annotated the journal, comparing it with eyewitness accounts by Custer and correspondent Henry Stanley (later of Africa and Dr Livingstone fame). Sometimes the differences are amusing -- Coates and Custer disagree on the doctor's reaction to sampling dog stew -- and sometimes they are quite significant, as in Coates's verbatim accounts of the speeches by Hancock and the tribal leaders. Background and context for the journal is provided in Kennedy's introduction, and his epilogue fills out both the larger story of the campaign and the further details of Coates's life. --