So what have others missed that I show? First off, the personality of Custer in the movies is wrong. Second, Custer proved himself as the best cavalry officer in the Civil War which was by most accounts, a cavalry war. An opinion shared not only by the Union but also the Confederacy I also studied the history of the best cavalry unit of the Napoleonic Wars and it was the King's German Cavalry. Custer would have studied them and it showed in his engagements in the Civil War. Both the north and south did not make mistakes such as mobbing horses in the attack. Sitting Bull did. Custer would have taken immediate advantage of that mistake and taken out 100's in a single volley which would have been when he sent the note. I did not want to make another non-fiction book on the Little Big Horn as that has been argued into the dust and that is where they have missed many aspects that as a combat Special Forces (Green Beret) officer I know are wrong. My father was head of the Military History Department at West Point when I was a kid and instilled in me the key to historical research is getting the original facts and not the regurgitation of a professor quoting an old newspaper written for impact, not fact. One fact that has been missed is that a brilliant combat commander doesn't suddenly forget everything. What I learned as an FBI Agent was what they told us the first day of new Agent class (Quoting Sir A.C.Doyle) Eliminate the impossible and what's left is the truth. He knew that amateurs like Sitting Bull, fresh from success at the Rosebud battle, would keep making the same mistake, so he needed ammunition. He wasn't defeated. Occam's Razor: He ran out of ammunition. -Why didn't Reno send the ammo? -Why did Custer violate basic protocol and send his troopers out in pairs to be easily picked off by the hostiles? 1.I give a sub plot based on what we know happened: Custer had just testified in congress that President Grant's brother was stealing $400,000 (2012 money) a year from money supposed to go to the Indians. 2.Cavalry was to that time as the Green Beret is to the GWOT, they were the elite. Additionally, the Mexican Government has been at war with the Untied States since Santa Ana was defeated at San Jacinto (in 18 minutes) and kicked back across the border in 1836. With no one watching the border during the Civil War the Mexican senior military commander Porfirio Diaz, who would demand 7 terms as President of Mexico, trained and equipped the once friendly Apache to go back across the border and murder at will using modern weapons, that he supplied.