Deliverance from the Little Big Horn
Subtitle: Doctor Henry Porter and Custer's Seventh Cavalry
By: Joan Nabseth Stevenson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Norman
Language: eng
Number of pages: 213
ISBN-13: 9780806142661
Subjects: United States; Surgeons; United States. Army. Cavalry, 7th; Biography; Little Bighorn, Battle of the, Mont., 1876
Description: Of the three surgeons who accompanied Custer's Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, only the youngest, twenty-eight-year-old Henry Porter survived that day's ordeal, riding through a gauntlet of Indian attackers and up the steep bluffs to Major Marcus Reno's hilltop position. But the story of Dr. Porter's wartime exploits goes far beyond the battle itself. As Stevenson recounts in detail, Porter's life-saving work on the battlefield began immediately, as he assumed the care of nearly sixty soldiers and two Indian scouts, attending to wounds and performing surgeries and amputations. He evacuated the critically wounded soldiers on mules and hand litters, embarking on a hazardous trek of fifteen miles that required two river crossings, the scaling of a steep cliff, and a treacherous descent into the safety of the steamboat Far West, waiting at the mouth of the Little Big Horn River. There began a harrowing 700-mile journey along the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers to the post hospital at Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, Dakota Territory.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.