Debra J. Richardson retired as executive director of the Fillmore County Historical Museum and Genealogy Library in southeastern Minnesota. During her tenure she published two books on local history as well as writing numerous newsletter articles. For several years she authored a popular weekly column for the Bluff Country Reader newspaper called "Life in the Past Lane" and wrote free-lance articles for Ancestry magazine. An avid genealogist, her work in family history research led to being honored with the Minnesota Genealogical Society "Pioneer Explorer Award." She proudly counts among her ancestors three cousins who served under George Armstrong Custer. Private William R. Richardson, 2nd Ohio Cavalry, First Brigade, Third Cavalry Division, received the Medal of Honor for bravery at the Battle of Sailor's Creek, Virginia. First Lieut. James E. Porter, Company I, and Private Henry Wyman, Company C, Seventh U. S. Cavalry died June 25, 1876, at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Major Lewis Merrill, Seventh Cavalry, Brevet Brigadier General US Army, is a relative as well, on her Hazen-Osgood line.
from the authors
GARRYOWEN
They say a dead man tells no tales
That silence o’er his tomb prevails
However blow blind Fortune’s gales
In peace or battle gory.
But we can give that phrase the lie
For dead men’s voices fill the sky
And float from Limerick’s towers on high
O’er Garryowen and glory!
—Dr. R. D. Joyce
The Wearing of the Green. Songbook. Boston: Marlier, 1869.
Gary W. Stewart has appeared in docudramas, films, and living history events portraying U. S. Seventh Cavalry officers Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, Capt. Thomas Custer, and Capt. George Yates. Television credits include various historical programs produced by the Smithsonian Channel, Travel Channel, History Channel, Discovery Channel, A&E Entertainment, PBS, and Today’s Wild West with Mark Bedor, as well as foreign productions by the BBC, The Wild West: Custer’s Last Stand and Gedeon Programmes, Little Bighorn: L'Histoire dans la Peau. Most recently he portrayed General Custer in Custer's Strategy of Defeat (2022), a full-length documentary feature. For twenty-three years he has participated in various historical productions including the annual Realbird Reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand on the original battlefield in Garryowen, Montana, with staff of the United States Cavalry School, Fort Harrison, Montana. uscavalryschool.com
During the research stage of this project it came as relief, as much as delight, for the authors to read an insightful lecture delivered in 1989 by Dr. Wayne R. Kime, Professor of English, Fairmont State College, West Virginia. Kime’s intimate account of meeting his own historical subject struck “a resonant chord.”
CHANCE ENCOUNTERS: SCHOLAR MEETS SUBJECT (1990)
https://www.fairmontstate.edu/fsunow/publications/chance-encounters-scholar-meets-subject
Please take a moment to access the link above to read how a young graduate student in the early 1960s met an esteemed colonel straight from the pages of military history. Dr. Kime shares his profound personal encounters with Richard Irving Dodge, career Army officer. Colonel Dodge took the initiative by introducing himself and did so on multiple occasions. This self-described “professional and personal relationship” with Col. Dodge resulted in Kime editing several of his journals, including the Black Hills diaries written while commanding the Jenney Scientific Expedition of 1875. As biographer, he published Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life and Times of a Career Army Officer in 2006. By a fateful day the scholar traveled to Arlington National Cemetery and was able to paid respects at his subject’s grave, he felt he was visiting
“… a private acquaintance … my involvement with him was the result of chance occurrences I simply could not have foreseen.”
The Colonel died in 1895, but to the historian death is a minor inconvenience. On many occasions while immersed in their own work the authors heard and listened to voices from the past. Dr. Kime’s experiences offered assurance that the authors were not alone in those “eerily coincidental, verging into the miraculous” encounters of scholar meeting subject. Individuals in the Fates Change Horses project have become private acquaintances and the foremost intent of this project is honoring their personal histories. Following the frontier trail brought numerous “chance” occurrences and supernatural moments—some beyond wildest expectation and explanation. The authors are indebted to the current landowners of the Heart River campsite property. This warm and gracious family allowed two strangers a frontier time-traveler experience bar none. While walking along the riverbank, wading across the ford, cresting summits of the bluff line, summer breezes bore messages from the past. The words of Leonard Herbert Swett echoed from a distant horizon; an eternal bugle called back Time. For in communing with the spirits of Heart River, the year is forever 1875.