WRITER - TRAVELER - CANINE HISTORIAN
BRIAN PATRICK DUGGAN
NEW: General Custer, Libbie Custer and Their Dogs:
A Passion for Hounds from the Civil War to Little Big Horn
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SALUKI
The Desert Hound and the English Travelers Who Brought It to the West
(Dogs in Our World Series)
The little known history of General George Armstrong Custer and his wife, Libbie Custer, as wholehearted dog lovers. At the time of his death at Little Bighorn, they owned a rollicking pack of forty hunting dogs, including Scottish Deerhounds, Russian Wolfhounds, Greyhounds and Foxhounds. Told from a dog owner’s perspective, this biography covers their first dogs during the Civil War and in Texas; hunting on the Kansas and Dakota frontiers; entertaining tourist buffalo hunters, including a Russian Archduke, English aristocrats and P. T. Barnum (all whom presented the general with hounds); Custer’s attack on the Washita village (when he was accused of strangling his own dogs); and the 7th Cavalry’s march to Little Bighorn with an analysis of rumors about a Last Stand dog. Custers’ pack was re-homed after his death in the first national dog rescue effort. An appendix discusses depictions of the Custers’ dogs in art, literature and film.
The winner of the Dog Writers Association of America award for Best Breed Book in 2009 (and Alliance of Purebred Dog Writers finalist for Best Non-Fiction Book of 2009), Saluki tells the story of the English soldiers, travelers, and explorers who brought the elite hound of the Bedouin from the Middle East to England in the first half of the 20th century.