The Ballad of Thomas Patrick Downing

A video trailer for the book The Ballad of Thomas Patrick Downing.

The Ballad of Thomas Patrick Downing is a true story. Born into post famine Ireland, Downing moved with his family at an early age from Adare, County Limerick to Savannah, Georgia. There, against the backdrop of the American Civil War, he experienced first hand the cruelty of slavery and then watched the slaves were emancipated around him.

After the war, he enlisted in the army and fate placed him with the US Seventh Cavalry. He spent two years in Kentucky suppressing the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan before being assigned to the remote US Canadian border to protect the US Boundary Commission's survey of the area. It was here that he had his first brush with the native Indians.

Finally, at the age of just twenty, Thomas Patrick Downing marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory with General George Armstrong Custer in search of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. A month later they found them at the Little Bighorn in Montana.

BOOKLIFE REVIEW
Ryan retells the Battle of Little Bighorn of 1876, also known as Custer's Last Stand, from the point of view of a real soldier in General George Custer's 7th Cavalry. Drawing on records, diaries, and eye witnesses, Ryan pieces together a remarkable work of lived-in history that traces Thomas Patrick Downing's life from his early years in Ireland to his eventual death in battle. Ryan naturally takes some liberties in imagining Downing’s life in the form of a first-person narrative, but he's careful not to get facts wrong while giving the reader a deeper understanding of what this young man experienced—and, in graceful prose, what he may have thought and felt.

Ryan opens Downing's story at its end, with the narrator’s death at the hands of a Lakota fighter. The story that follows is deeply humane and sympathetic for both the rank-and-file soldier and the variety of oppressed peoples encounters. Downing’s narrative covers his birth in the village of Adare in 1856, the reasons behind his family’s emigration, the grueling journey to their new home in Georgia, and how Downing was raised to hate slavery, in part because of the Irish’s treatment by the English. Ryan examines tension and poverty in Savannah during the Civil War era, including a lynching, and young Downing witnesses a speech in which Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens confirms a truth too often obscured: that slavery was the chief reason for secession.

Downing ultimately lies about his age to join the army and is subsequently assigned, among other missions, to rein in Kentucky’s Ku Klux Klan. But when land and gold led the federal government to war against Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other Native Americans who refused to leave ancestral lands, Downing faces serious doubt about the justice of the cause. This humanizes Downing, especially as readers will understand he will die in a conflict that was largely the fault of greed, poor intelligence, and stubborn leaders. An engrossing historical narrative.

Takeaway: Convincing, compelling narrative of real Irish at Little Big Horn.

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