To America’s distinguished chiefs of staff and Captain Louis McLane Hamilton, the grandson of Alexander Hamilton. The youngest captain in the United States Army and a proud member of the 7th Cavalry, Captain Hamilton, as promising in the early years after the Civil War as his grandfather had been at the beginning of the American Revolution, was killed during a charge by one of the first hostile shots fired during Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s surprise attack on the Southern Cheyenne village on the Washita River on a snowy November 27, 1868.