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Charles Kuhlman was born on a farm near Davenport, Iowa, on January 15, 1873. When he was five, his family moved to a farm near Grand Island, Nebraska. Kuhlman attended school in Grand Island when he was free from farm work, about three months of the year. He graduated from high school in 1892. To earn money for college, he taught for a year in a rural school and also raised sugar beets for a local sugar factory. He attended the University of Nebraska on a fellowship, receiving his B.A. in 1897 and his M.A. in 1900. Kuhlman's Leipzig-trained professor in the Department of European History convinced him to go to Europe for further study. In Paris he began research on the Breton Club, a precursor of the Jacobin Club of French Revolutionary fame. His thesis was accepted for a Ph.D. by the university at Zurich, Switzerland. On his return from Europe, Kuhlman accepted a position as instructor for the University of Nebraska history department. Unfortunately, his hearing--which had been poor ever since an attack of measles and mumps--began to deteriorate rapidly and he was forced to give up teaching. In 1903, after leaving the university, Kuhlman married Minnie Wilkinson. They moved to Loveland, Colorado, where Kuhlman engaged in sugar beet farming. Unsuccessful in this venture, they moved to Joliet, Montana, but had no better luck with beets there. He next tried truck farming in Billings, which proved profitable until the late 1920s when the bottom dropped out of the farm market. Kuhlman's mortgaged farm was foreclosed. In 1930, his wife Minnie died. Kuhlman went into a deep mental and physical decline. In August 1935, Kuhlman's children convinced him to accompany them on a visit to the Custer Battlefield. While there, Kuhlman discovered a new interest in life. He was especially fascinated with the burial markers and how poorly their locations fit with accepted accounts of the battle. For the next sixteen years, Kuhlman devoted his European academic training to a close analytical study of the terrain to produce a new interpretation of the Custer defeat. In 1940, he wrote a short book on the battle, General George A. Custer: A Lost Trail and the Gall Saga (popularly known as "Custer and the Gall Saga"). His major work, Legend into History: the Custer Mystery, was published by the Stackpole Company in 1951. It quickly became accepted as the most authoritative treatment to date. During the last years of his life, Kuhlman continued to research the Custer battle, producing several booklets and articles. During the 1940s and 1950s, Charles Kuhlman again devoted himself to truck farming, though never again on the scale of the 1920s. Also for a period in the 1940s, he was head gardener for the agricultural education program of the Billings Polytechnic Institute. His writing and research time was thus dictated by the planting and harvesting seasons. Charles Kuhlman died of cancer September 18, 1959, at the age of 86.