About Lance J. Dorrel

My Story

I am a historian and ethnographer living in Missouri, USA. I love to chase history, especially American history concerning the Native American Plains Indians and the American West. A life-long passion to study the Battle of the Little Bighorn developed as a result.

I’ve spent 20 years researching and reading all I can find on the battle, including taking countless trips to the battlefield and to other parts of the American West, where I have been able to meet Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow and Arapaho people.

These incredible folks are historians without peer when it comes to the history of their tribes and ancestors. So many have shared so much with me regarding their tribe’s history and part in the battle.

After one of my many trips throughout the West, I realized if I was to contribute anything new to the research and story regarding the battle, I had to look at old things in new ways.

To fully understand how the battle was fought, it would be necessary to understand the history and ways of Plains Indians. I wanted to know the oral stories passed down from the ancestors who fought there that day.

Comparing and contrasting those stories with the written record, a clearer picture developed.

No battle in American history is more of a mystery than the Battle of the Little Bighorn, because much of what we’ve been told… is wrong.

History, it is said, is written by the victors, but the true story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is the exception to that rule. So much of what happened that day was not told by those who fought there. Other parts were misinterpreted and, in some cases, simply fabricated to fit the writer’s story, or preconceived ideas.

I became compelled to tell a story about a soldier who fought at the Little Bighorn… and I wanted the story to include the Indian side of the fight.

My research led me to Captain Myles Keogh, I Company, Seventh Cavalry, and my first book, the novel A Dance With Death: An Irish Soldier of Fortune at the Little Bighorn.

Few individuals could say they did more in a lifetime than Keogh by the time he found himself in Montana on June 25th, 1876. A veteran of two wars, Myles Keogh had dreamed his whole life of leading men in a battle like this.

With my collaborator Donovan Taylor, I continue to collect oral histories from the Native American and First Nations people whose ancestors fought in the Battle. We share the untold story of the victorious in my latest book, The History They Tell: Oral History from Native American and First Nations People Regarding the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which brings many previously unknown stories and accounts into the public record at last.