Leighton, Margaret

About the author

Margaret Leighton wrote historic fiction but just one book that focused on a horse, rather than involving horses by virtue of the time in which the book was set.  

Her book Comanche is about a real horse, of mixed Mustang/Morgan ancestry. He was ridden by Captain Keogh at the Battle of Little Big Horn, and was the only member of Colonel Custer’s detachment of the Seventh Cavalry to survive. The horse was nursed back to heath, and then retired. Colonel Samuel D Sturgis issued the following order:

The horse known as ‘Comanche,’ being the only living representative of the bloody tragedy of the Little Big Horn, June 25th, 1876, his kind treatment and comfort shall be a matter of special pride and solicitude on the part of every member of the Seventh Cavalry to the end that his life be preserved to the utmost limit. Wounded and scarred as he is, his very existence speaks in terms more eloquent than words, of the desperate struggle against overwhelming numbers of the hopeless conflict and the heroic manner in which all went down on that fatal day.

Margaret Leighton’s book tells the horse’s story from his birth as a foal on the open range. Hers was not the only book about the horse: David Appel wrote Comanche: Story of America’s Bravest Horse (E M Hale, 1951), on which the Disney movie Tonka was based, and there was a Golden Books tie-in issued to coincide with the movie. The horse became an iconic part of American culture, and is still written about today. Margaret Leighton’s book though became accepted as fact despite being a fictional tale, with some elements (the fictional Clem and Bart Bates) being quoted by the sculptor Rogers Aston in the pamphlet which accompanied his editions of the horse. In 1959, Comanche of the Seventh won the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award.

This book is very much of its time; however heroically the cavalry died in the Battle of Little Bighorn, the climate of opinion has swung firmly behind the Native Indians and against the attitudes of mind that caused the fighting. However, as Susan Bourgeau, who helped me with this section, said, “… No matter how you look at it, the horses were blameless, and their story is one that can and should be told.”

Finding the book
Tends to be expensive, even as an ex-library edition.

Links and sources
Elizabeth Atwood Laurence: His Very Silence Speaks – Comanche
More on Myles Keogh, Comanche’s rider
Terri A. Wear: Horse Stories, an Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, 1987
Many thanks to Susan Bourgeau and Lisa Catz for their help with this section.