For a really, really long time, I thought Custer was the Indian. In retrospect, I can see how it happened: The breakout box in my 5th-grade social studies book was titled “Custer’s Last Stand” over a picture of a soldier and an Indian, and since I knew that the soldier’s team won the war, I must have just assumed that the guy making the last stand was an Indian named, apparently, Custer. To all elementary-school children thinking of giving those breakout boxes a little skim on the way to the test questions at the end of the chapter, let me just tell you that setting me straight gave a few friends in college the opportunity for an enthusiastic laugh at my expense.

But all these years later, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer Nathaniel Philbrick’s “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn” (Viking) lends a little credence to my reasoning, even if my conclusion remains stubbornly contradicted by facts. “When it comes to the Little Bighorn,” he writes in the preface, “most Americans think of the Last Stand as belonging solely to George Armstrong Custer. But the myth applies equally to his legendary opponent Sitting Bull. For while the Sioux and Cheyenne were the victors that day, the battle marked the beginning of their own Last Stand. … (I)t is impossible to understand the one without the other.”

For those of us whose education on the conflict between the European settlers and the natives dropped off sharply once we disposed of our American history requirement in high school, the book is a delightful combination of tight storytelling and exhaustive research. It gets at the story itself from a myriad of illuminating angles while also spinning in enough context to anchor it firmly into the larger narrative of our history. But Philbrick’s approach provides something fresh for the “legions of self-described Custer buffs” too: instead of focusing on “military strategy and tactics, the topography of the battlefield and the material culture of the two opposing forces,” he chooses instead to weave his yarn with the threads of the distinct, idiosyncratic personalities involved.

It’s a strategy that served Philbrick well in “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War,” the book that gained him the Pulitzer nod. How did he come to feel that this was the best lens through which to get at genuine history? “I am trained not as a historian but as a journalist,” he said by phone from his home in Nantucket, the inspiration for his three Eastern Seaboard-themed works. “I’ve always been interested in the people, in a sense of life ‘as lived.’ I write narrative histories that focus on the personalities and try to focus on what it was like to live at that time,” with a different set of beliefs, surroundings and technologies. “I’m trying to put the reader there.”

To best do that, he started by putting himself there. “I followed Custer’s trail all the way from Fort Lincoln, which is near Bismarck, North Dakota, to the site of the battle in south central Montana. And there were times when I would look around and was basically seeing what they were seeing. So ‘seeing’ has been a big part of this for me.” This applied not only to the terrain but to the characters, as Philbrick noted that this is the first book he’s written for which photographs existed of the people involved, and the story, as pictographs by Native survivors of the battle help reconstruct their side of the story.(Both are included in the book.) It was also a welcome change from his research into his New England topics, where he reported with a laugh that “there’s always a 7-Eleven across the street” from the historical sites “and you just can’t see it” as it once looked. Not so the rolling bluffs that still flank the Little Bighorn.

Asked how his attention came to be drawn from the waters of the Atlantic to the hills of the Wild West, Philbrick’s answer displays just the combination of personal anecdote rooted in theoretical framework that holds together “The Last Stand.” “Long before I moved to Nantucket and started writing books about the sea, I was a kid in Pittsburgh. And I saw, at the age of 14, ‘Little Big Man,’ which in many ways focuses on the battle of Little Bighorn, and I became fascinated with Custer. After I wrote ‘The Mayflower,’ which ends with a cataclysmic battle with the natives, I thought, ‘That’s kind of the iconic battle — where does that lead?’ And in iconic terms, it leads to the battle of Little Bighorn. Then once I got there, I was surprised to find there were rivers and a boat. So it felt more like a culmination than a departure.”

There was certainly no shortage of interesting personalities on which to practice his particular brand of historical storytelling. Philbrick calls Custer’s 7th Calvary “a Petri dish of fascinating military personalities” and begins ticking them off: “You have (Major Marcus) Reno, the 2nd in command, who doesn’t like Custer. And (Captain Frederick) Benteen, who also doesn’t like Custer and is almost like Shakespeare’s Iago in a way, always plotting Custer’s downfall. And then you have this group of young Custer acolytes and fans, and then all of Custer’s relatives — not only he dies, but two brothers, a brother-in-law and a nephew died with him. And in many ways most fascinating of them all was Libbie, his wife, who was the spin doctor any hero would want to have after his death. And then” — he’s on a roll now — “on the native side, there’s Sitting Bull and the whole cast of characters there. Like Gall, who’s filled with revenge when he goes into battle, and Moving Robe Woman, the one who said ‘My heart was bad’” before drying her tears and riding her pony into battle against Reno’s soldiers.

Actually, Philbrick’s ability to bring a figment of history to life is so masterful that my own favorite character turned out to be a horse — specifically, Private Roman Rutten’s horse, who was so spooked at the start of the battle that he took off at a dead run directly for the enemy line. It was all Rutten could do to hang on and yank hard to the right, so the pair made 3 wild gallops in a full circle around the advancing regiment. When Rutten and his horse reappear dozens of pages later, things have deteriorated so disastrously for Reno’s men that Rutten has come around to the horse’s way of thinking. “Fear of the Indians was what drove this animal, a fear Rutten enthusiastically endorsed. Best to let the animal do whatever he wanted,” which turned out to be a gravity-defying, whiplash-inducing retreat to relative safety that made me laugh out loud.

Upon hearing this, Philbrick’s voice brightened noticeably. “Thanks! In my other books I like to focus on (the available) technology; in this book, what I found fascinating (were) the horses. Each of them had personality, and it was the most personal, closest relationship these guys had.” He mentioned the Arikara scout Young Hawk, whose last act before he charged into battle was to tell his pony “I love you,” and we shared a laugh so thorough that it was impossible to type over the ornery mule Barnum, who lost his footing while loaded with ammunition and inspired the troopers to speculate on “how much mule would be left” when he finished tumbling to the bottom of the hill. (All of him — he got to his feet, hiked back up the hill “and took his place in line as soberly and quietly as if nothing had happened.”) Philbrick takes particular care in relating the story of Comanche, the horse described as the “only living thing” found on Custer’s battlefield, who suffered 7 separate injuries but was nursed back to health and lived out his days as the 7th Cavalry’s pampered mascot. “In my research, actually, I found out that Comanche lives on,” said Philbrick matter-of-factly. What? “He’s stuffed and on display at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. I’ve seen him. He’s been newly restored, and he looks pretty good for a horse that’s over 100 years old. You can even see his scars.”

This is the kind of field trip that Philbrick enjoys, and it brought him to our neck of the woods for a several-day sojourn in Libbie Custer’s hometown of Monroe, Michigan, where the general himself had family and spent a few childhood years. “That’s a town where there’s really a great Custer presence,” he reported affectionately. “The Monroe County Historical Museum is terrific and has a great archive. And the Monroe Library has one of the best Custer and Little Bighorn collections in the country.”

If you really want to hear his voice light up with the fire of good artifacts, though, try mentioning the University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library. Having heard of it through his previous research (“they have an excellent collection of not only all American stuff but particularly Revolutionary War-era stuff”), he took a recent opportunity to visit it “’in the flesh,’ so to speak. And the archivist gave me a tour, and get this: I’m being shown an image collection, and they took out a guy’s diary, and the guy who kept the diary did sketches, and the 2nd one was of Custer on a horse! Now, I’ve looked far and wide for every image I could find on Custer and I’d never seen that 1.” It’s clear that this was a magical moment of synchronicity — 1 that just might prove lucky for us. “My next book is about Boston and the Revolution, and I know I’ll be coming back to Clements in the fall. … It is a world class collection; a real jewel.”

Nathaniel Philbrick will be at the downtown Borders at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 11 to read from "The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn." It is a wristbanded event, and wristbands will be handed out when the store opens on the day of the event; call the store at 734-668-7652 for details.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for Ann Arbor.com.