Among the many memorial plaques adorning the interior walls of St John the Evangelist, a Scottish Episcopal Church at the western extremity of Princes Street, Edinburgh, there is one dedicated to the memory of the splendidly named John Stuart Stuart Forbes, alias Private John S. Hiley, one of the many soldiers of the 7th United States Cavalry Regiment who fell at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as Custer’s Last Stand, on 25th June 1876. Forbes was born in 1849 to Scottish parents at Rugby, in the English county of Warwickshire, and died at the age of age of twenty-seven, participating in an ill-conceived assault upon a mixed force of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. For a systematic reconstruction of his background and extraordinary career, see English by Birth, Scottish by Blood - The Story of John Stuart Stuart Forbes, alias Private John S. Hiley, 7th Cavalry Regt., U. S. Army, by Peter G. Russell and Leslie Hodgson, The English Westerners’ Society, London, 2016. (The Brand Book, Volume 49, No. 2, Spring 2016)

The Diamond’s Ace - Scotland and the Native Americans