Son of the Morning Star Cronauer. Son of the Morning Star Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn is a nonfiction account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, by novelist Evan S. Connell, published in 1984 by North Point Press. The book features extensive portraits of the battle's participants, including General George Armstrong Custer, Sitting Bull, Major Marcus Reno, Captain Frederick Benteen, Crazy Horse, and others. Originally intending to write a book of essays about the history of the American West, Connell instead developed his essay about General Custer into a book-length examination of the battle
Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the Lakota and the Cheyenne held a Sun Dance that was also attended by a number of "Agency Indians" who had slipped away from their reservations. During a Sun Dance around June 5, 1876, on Rosebud Creek in Montana, Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota, reportedly had a vision of "soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky." At the same time US military officials were conducting a summer campaign to force the Lakota and the Cheyenne back to their reservations, using infantry and cavalry in a so-called "three-pronged approach". Col. John Gibbon's