Rather than a hero, immortalized with statues and in movies and books, Gen. George Custer simply appears to be a military failure.
His troops disintegrated into panic and fear, leading to the death of every soldier during a fight against Native Americans on June 25, 1876.
During a talk at Augustana College on Sunday, Richard Fox Jr., professor of anthropology at the University of South Dakota, told of his extensive archaeological study of the mile-square battlefield and what the artifacts found there tell of the battle.
This is actually the first place I'd heard of the term "battlefield archaeology" and the methods they use -- plotting the positions of shell casings and what-not.