Some fascinating history came to downtown North Platte when award-winning author Matt Vincent from Yuma., Colo., spoke to about a dozen attentive readers at A to Z Books.

Vincent’s presented his latest book, The Chronicles of Custer: First Stand of a Failed Campaign about the turmoil and violence of the summer of 1867 along the settler’s trails to the Rocky Mountain West.

The road along the Platte River was the California-Oregon Trail. The Smoky Hill Road ran through central Kansas and was also well used. So was the old Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico.

A surge in violence coincided with construction of the Transcontinental Railroad across Nebraska and the Kansas Pacific Railroad in Kansas in 1867. Various groups of Plains Indians adamantly fought the railroads.

To defend the roads and quell the violence and bloodshed, the U.S. military sent a young, inexperienced lieutenant colonel to Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado that spring, in his first western field command. He was George Armstrong Custer, age 27.

Custer served under the commander of the expedition, Gen. Winfield Hancock.

Vincent’s book is the story of the four-month mission that backfired and unnecessarily ignited a full-blown Plains Indian War.

“North Platte became the epicenter of this expansive western drama,” Vincent said.

The author talked about the role of Fort McPherson, which had been built earlier at the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon, and interesting historical figures who passed through the area during that critical four-month window of ‘67, including Pawnee Killer of the Oglala Sioux, Theodore Davis of Harper’s Weekly, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, and others.

Vincent gathered source material from records in the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The records show that Custer was an arrogant, inexperienced and sometimes cruel leader who was equally concerned, if not moreso, about his and his wife’s comforts as his responsibilities as a military commander, Vincent said.

Vincent also recounted an event that secured William F. Cody’s rightful claim to the name of “Buffalo Bill,” which he documents in The Chronicles… involving a shooting contest with another outstanding hunter of the times.

The book is available at A to Z Books in downtown North Platte, along with Vincent’s first book of short accounts, “Wild Times & True Tales from the High Plains,” which was named Colorado’s best general nonfiction last year by the Colorado Authors League.

Vincent stayed at the bookstore through the afternoon, discussing western history with members of the audience. At one point, he said if the real history of the West were taught when he was in school, he would have found it easy to pay attention.

His book leads to understanding the truth.

(This report was first published in the Bulletin’s March 27 print edition.)

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