Hello All, I just finished reading a really good book that is a very old book also. It is called "Campaigning with Custer 1868-69" by David Spotts. Spotts was a 20 year old boy who signed on with the Kansas 19th Cavalry to help fight the wild plains Indians of Texas Panhandle, western Kansas and Indian Territory. Probably the most important item about this book is that it is the journal of the young lad over his six month enlistment in the Kansas 19th. He logs every day's activity in his journal and really gives a true and dreadful picture of what life was really like in the cavalry in 1868. Those of you interested in this sort of history would really enjoy such a book. Here is the review from the Oklahoma Historical Society dated June, 1928: "Campaigning with Custer and the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry in the Washita Campaign, 1868-69," by David L. Spotts; edited and arranged for publication by E. A. Brininstool. 8vo, 215 pp.; map and 14 illustrations. (Limited edition, each copy numbered and signed by the author). Los Angeles, the Wetzel Publishing Company, 1928. Price, $10.00 (NOTE - this book lists on Amazon.com now for $375.00). ***************************** With General Custer's "Wild Life on the Plains," Governor Samuel J. Crawford 's "Kansas in the 'Sixties" and the contributions of Colonel Horace L. Moore and James Albert Hadley, published in the "Collections" of the Kansas State Historical Society, already furnishing fairly voluminous material pertaining to the Washita Campaign, in Western Oklahoma in 1868-9, it was scarcely to be hoped or expected that much more important material would come to light. In this newly published book, however, the material assumed a different form from previous publications relating to this notable campaign, since it is a reproduction of diary or journal kept from day to day by a lad who was the company clerk of Troop L, of the 19th Kansas Cavalry. Naturally, it contains a wealth of detail that does not appear in any of the previously published writings concerning the incidents of the Washita Campaign. One noticeable error appears in the map, which locates the site of the Battle of the Washita in Custer County, near the present county-seat town of Arapaho, instead of near the site of Cheyenne, county-seat of Roger Mills County, where that action really occurred. Taken as a whole, this book is a valuable contribution to the source material for the history of Western Oklahoma of the period to which it relates. -J. B. T. ********************************* Have a good week, Dennis