WRITER - TRAVELER - CANINE HISTORIAN
BRIAN PATRICK DUGGAN
PRESS, NEWS RELEASES, & AUTHOR'S EVENTS
Wearing mourning clothes, Libbie Custer sits in for a portrait in New York in 1886. The first of her three enormously popular books, Boots and Saddles, had been published the year before.
Libbie Custer’s favorite dog, a great, cream-colored staghound named Cardigan, is seen here after being re-homed with Rev. Cassius Terry of Minneapolis. After he died in 1881, Cardigan was stuffed and put on display in a university museum
(Library of Congress)
Wearing mourning clothes, Libbie Custer sits in for a portrait in New York in 1886. The first of her three enormously popular books, Boots and Saddles, had been published the year before.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE​
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MEDIA CONTACT: Brian Duggan
(209) 403-7584
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Libbie Custer Re-Homes 40 Dogs after the Battle of Little Bighorn
Unique Biography Tells the Custer Story from
a Dog Owner’s Perspective
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“General Custer, Libby Custer, and, Their Dogs: A Passion
for Hounds from the Civil War to Little Big Horn”
explores new territory for historians, dog folks, enthusiasts
of the West and Civil War.
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TURLOCK, Calif. — June 6, 2020 — Most people know General George Armstrong Custer for his “Last Stand” death at Little Bighorn on June 25th, 1876 while fighting Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in Montana. Little known, however, is that he and his wife, Libbie, were wholehearted dog lovers. After his death, Libbie left Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota for her childhood home in Monroe, Michigan— but she needed to find homes for their rollicking pack of over forty stag hounds and fox hounds. The country-wide effort to help Libbie place the dogs she and her husband so loved, including Lady, Swift, Magdie, Kaiser, and the Custers’ favorites, Tuck and Cardigan, was to become America’s first national dog rescue effort.
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Author Brian Patrick Duggan’s unique biography of George and Libbie Custer covers their life with 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 of whom presented the general with hounds); Custer’s attack on the Washita village in 1868 (when he was accused of strangling his own dogs); and the 7th Cavalry’s fateful march to Little Bighorn where Duggan gives an analysis of the many rumors about a dog on Last Stand Hill.
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Brian Patrick Duggan is the award-winning author of “Saluki: The Desert Hound and the English Travelers Who Brought It to the West,” and numerous articles on canine history. He is a retired university technology educator, an American Kennel Club judge, and editor for McFarland Publisher’s Dogs in Our World Series.
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For more information about General Custer, Libbie Custer and Their Dogs: A Passion for Hounds from the Civil War to Little Bighorn visit https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/general-custer-libbie-custer-and-their-dogs/.