Old Neutriment: Memories of the Custers Book

In 1925 a white-bearded veteran of the Battle of the Little Big Horn was found dead on the porch of his boarding house in Billings, Montana, a smoking gun in one hand and a bag of candy in the other. He was John Burkman, known from Seventh Cavalry days as Old Neutriment, an eccentric recluse whose life had ended, to all intents and purposes, fifty years earlier with the fall of his commander and friend, General George A. Custer.

Old Neutriment, so named for his raids on the kitchen at Fort Lincoln, served as Custer's orderly for nine years and probably knew the general better than anyone else, except Libby Custer. In his last years the illiterate old man shared his vivid memories of the Custers with his only friend in Billings, I. D. "Bud" O'Donnell, whose record of his pictur-esque speech enriches Glendolyn Damon Wagner's book. Old Neutriment takes the reader behind the scenes as the devoted orderly fusses with Custer and cares for his dogs and horses. He relates some marvelous stories and recalls the journey of the Seventh Cavalry from Kentucky to Fort Lincoln as well as Miss Libby's tearful farewell to the general and his own forebodings during the march to the Little Big Horn. In the great battle there the orderly was separated from Custer and his troops. Heartbroken by the news of their fate, Old Neutriment could never pick up his life again. "Seems like they want no use me goin' on," he said, many years before he fired his last salute.

First published a year after Burkman's death, Old Neutriment now appears in a Bison Book edition with a new introduction by Brian W. Dippie, the author of Custer's Last Stand: The Anatomy of an American Myth (1976), who considers the intersection of memory and history, of character and fate.