George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars. He worked closely with General McClellan and the future General Alfred Pleasonton, who both recognized his qualities as a cavalry leader, and he was brevetted brigadier general of Volunteers at age 23. At Gettysburg, he commanded the Michigan Cavalry Brigade, and defeated Jeb Stuart’s assault on Cemetery Ridge, while greatly outnumbered. In 1864, Custer served in the Overland Campaign and in Sheridan’s army in the Shenandoah Valley, defeating Jubal Early at Cedar Creek. His division blocked Lee’s final retreat and received the first flag of truce from the Confederates, Custer being present at Lee’s surrender to U.S. Grant at Appomattox. After the war, Custer was appointed a lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army, and sent west to fight in the Indian Wars. On June 25, 1876, while leading the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana Territory against a coalition of Native American tribes, he was killed along with over one third of his command during an action later romanticized as “Custer’s Last Stand”. “Frederic F. Van de Water has written the Custer book to end all Custer books....[It is] based upon profound research...[and a] thorough understanding of the motivations which shaped Custer’s meteoric career.”—Books. “Mr. Van de Water has accumulated evidence until it can hardly be questioned. There is enough of it to damn the man as hard, cruel, and irresponsible....At any rate, the story has an epic movement, and at last is heart-stirring and somberly beautiful.”—New York Times. “General Custer was a tangle of contradictions. His wife ‘enshrined her husband in the folklore of America.’ Now Mr. Van de Water, without fear or favor, gives us a complete and unsparing analysis of the man.”—William Rose Benét, Saturday Review of Literature.