Custer had strode through the War doing what he wanted, which neatly coincided with the wishes of his superiors, foremost of those being Sheridan. Now he felt the brunt of the workaday military that consisted of taking orders. Orders that more often than not were ill-considered.
As soon as he arrived in Kansas, he sensed that General Hancock did not have a grasp of the Indian situation. The tribes were suing for peace, yet Hancock niggled them with petty demands, threatened use of the army against them. How could anyone be won over in such manner? When depredations against settlers occurred, he did not see the obvious, that it was the work of a limited number of young warriors. Instead, he blamed the chiefs for not controlling their men.
Hancock had demanded a parley in a village, but when the army got there the Indians had fled, obviously scared to have soldiers near their women and children after Chivington’s massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory. His response was to burn down the village and send Custer to hunt them down.
* * *
CUSTER CHASED UP one hill and down another, the Indians always managing to stay out of sight. When moving targets were sighted on the horizon, the distance made it difficult to guess the threat. A native scout taught Custer the method of setting up two sticks and sighting over both to see if there was movement. Most often it was simply creosote bushes or boulders that in the mirage appeared to gain motion. Less frequently it would be a pack of lost mules or donkeys. The skeletons of these littered the prairie. Least often of all would appear Indians. Even when his cavalry did trap Indians, they protested they were on their way to a reservation.
—Are you peaceable?
—We are friends.
He guessed they would say the same even as they commenced to separate his scalp from his head.
Orders were to attack nonreservation Indians, but they were hard to find. After a time, any Indians would do. Frontier people screamed for revenge, and Sherman wanted results.
Rumors spread about the Fetterman massacre the previous winter in Wyoming Territory, and it put fear in all. Eighty men dead. There were dark whispers that Fetterman, a war hero, and Captain Brown committed suicide by shooting each other at the moment of capture. It was the worst defeat in army history.
* * *
CUSTER DROVE HIS REGIMENT hard, riding day and night, covering twenty-five miles of territory a day. The land was deceptive in its aspect: choked ravines, dead-end tabletop bluffs, landmarks that appeared to be only a mile away in reality taking ten miles to reach. The uniform terrain, on closer inspection, was gouged by deep ravines that could hide either a whole regiment or an entire Cheyenne war party.
Reduced to using the north star to lead them, his seasoned guides were like compasses with a broken north, regularly leading them astray.
It was a great relief when at last they reached the river and set up camp—the horses put out to graze on tender green grass, the men able to wash for the first time in days. Teamsters rolled in with their wagons, and cooks started fires with the comforting smells of coffee and food. The night sky swung overhead like a great, dark, twisting carousel.
He knew no such contentment as camp after a long day’s ride, the reward of tent and camaraderie. It put Custer in mind of his war days. He looked up and down the tented streets, the canvas glowing from the light within, reminding him of Chinamen’s lanterns. If ever he mustered out of the army he would spend his summer nights sleeping in a tent under the stars, even if it must be in his own backyard.
He’d taught Libbie the joys of sleeping outdoors and believed she loved it almost as much as he. If only she was with him now, he’d feel more himself. In her letters it was clear her torment at their separations weighed on her.
* * *
THE CAVALRY’S NEWEST assignment was to police the stagecoach routes. In the middle of the night he’d sent a veteran officer of the territory with a troop from the west end of camp to determine their exact location on the river vis-à-vis the nearest station they were charged to guard.
Custer was dreaming he was still riding in the saddle, the dream so sharp it was interchangeable with being awake, when a shot went off from the pickets.
—Indians!
Shapes could be seen in the murky distance of near dawn. Mounted warriors appeared spectral and nightmarish in war dress. The shriek of battle cries terrified his men unseasoned to the sound.
Dry throats. Soldiers raced to corral the remuda inside the wagon circle to prevent stampede. The Indians’ first tactic was to steal the enemy’s horses. Rifles loaded, the soldiers formed a skirmish line.
Ponies approached.
A lookout reported a group of eighty warriors. Custer’s cavalry far outnumbered them so he held back for a closer target, knowing his soldiers’ fingers itched.
The enemy lined up along a ridge, creating a magnificent, pagan phalanx. Custer had not felt such a thrill since he faced a line of Confederates. He recognized it was one of the finest and most imposing displays he’d witnessed: brilliant war bonnets, painted horses, lances, bows and arrows bedecked. Painted faces fierce as the devil. Riders so practiced they seemed a mythical manhorse beast. Worthy opponent indeed.
The sky lightened, though a heavy mist still obscured the scene. His soldiers ached to fight.
The foremost line of ponies halted. Riders parleyed then withdrew to a bluff. Those behind turned and moved farther away.
The camp as a single entity let out a breath of relief, leavened with scorn. They grumbled about the “Injun reveille.”
—Can’t let us civilized sleep?
Custer cursed his own caution, and recognized he’d been bested. More important, he knew the reports he’d received were all wrong. The Indian was a canny fighter, and the army had some catching up to do if it hoped to win.
An hour later the heavy fog carried the sound of running horses on the east side of camp. A trick? Was the retreat a ruse to attack them unprepared?
Soldiers rushed to rearm only to discover they were being attacked by their own—the veteran’s troop sent out the night before. They had drawn their guns as they galloped through the camp, thinking it an Indian one. They had mistaken their own corralled horses for ponies, Custer’s conical Sibley tent for an Indian lodge, certain that they had headed in a straight line toward the overland trail several miles away, the land having tricked even a veteran tracker of the area. The troop had inadvertently circumscribed a half circle and arrived at the other end of camp, the fog hiding the camp’s true aspect until they landed inside it, the head of the column ready to eat its own tail.
After the initial confusion, great hilarity rose among the soldiers at the mistake. Diplomatically, Custer commended the attacking party’s bravery at aggressing against an unknown and much larger camp in order to subdue it. Their mistake, he advised, was in not knowing the lay of the land and the size of the camp before charging. So unlike the chary Indians earlier who had reconnoitered and left. He omitted the likely fact that if the Indians had attacked they would now be dead, as would his misguided troop had the camp been foe instead of friend. Despite his ill-applied courageousness, this gray-haired veteran of many successful campaigns had to endure being remonikered He Who Rides in a Circle to Kiss His Own Arse, and his legend followed him for the next few years until he died at Summit Springs, Colorado, fighting against the Cheyenne.
* * *
UNSUCCESSFUL IN THEIR SCOUT to look for camps, the column limped into Fort Hays. There Custer discovered that Hancock, the harsh “father” to the Indians, had let himself be bamboozled by the oily-speaking Kiowa chief Satanta. He’d gone as far as to let the chief sup at his table. So infatuated was Hancock, he’d gifted the Kiowa with the uniform jacket of a major general, complete with sash and plumed hat, regalia soldiers had to work long and hard to earn the right to wear.
Mere weeks later, Satanta led a war party that attacked a nearby fort, stealing army horses while wearing his military booty. He had the courtesy to tip said plumed hat at his enemy and waggle his uniformed backside at them as he made off.
This was an enemy unlike that of the War. Custer felt sure that his superiors lacked sufficient knowledge of their adversary to successfully defeat them. He would remedy that to his own advantage.
He knew the Indians felt cheated because the government had not kept its treaty promises. Not enough annuities of food, clothing, ammunition, or guns had been issued over the winter when most needed. The presence of surveyors also had the tribes in an uproar. Surveyors meant railroads, meant fewer buffalo, meant starvation. The only item in surplus for the Indians seemed to be whiskey, for which the young warriors had a great affinity, and peddlers managed to find their way through the most dangerous of territories to supply it. If only he could find soldiers as brave.
As his troops waited at Fort Hays for their own supplies, which were long in coming, they watched the cold rain beat down on the flat, iron-hard land without relenting. After days it had liquefied to a sticking muck that hindered the men and horses to the extent that they were discouraged from heading back out.
Custer was impatient at the inactivity, the lost momentum, and the strain of being separated from his Libbie. Everything had happened so fast during the Rebellion, constant battles and skirmishes, and during the rare lulls the distance between Virginia and Washington was short enough to be easily closed to see her.
At a stop on another thousand-mile surveil on the Platte River, he got a letter from Sheridan reprimanding him for his lack of engagement with the Indians. Don’t go soft like Sully and Hancock. I need my fighter. That’s what I brought you here for.
His orders were to continue policing stage stations, farms, and rivers, ridding them of hostiles.
What that meant in fact was long rides accomplished either in the rain or the heat or the wind or some unholy alliance of all three guaranteed to wear down both man and beast. Horses regularly dropped from exhaustion or starvation. No Indians took up residence at the locations reported, so by the time the troop arrived they found only fired houses and mutilated civilians. Not an Indian in sight.
Sometimes they arrived upon great gouged fields that indicated campgrounds recently abandoned, fields scratched by travois poles. Nearby fields shorn of grass by grazing herds. Sometimes they would find a lone teepee erected, a dead old woman inside, and they would wonder at the callousness of such a people. These sightings inspired fear, conjecture, mystery, as if they spoke of ancient beasts long disappeared from the face of the earth and not flesh-and-blood men such as themselves.
In his disgust at noncontact, Custer blamed the men, who in truth were for the most part happy to miss an encounter with the enemy. They marched with only the goal of their next meal. Their pay was paltry and used up on dearly priced alcohol as a palliative against the abuses of the march and their commander. The only thing that would hold them together was battle, and for all Custer’s efforts he could not scrounge them up one.
While camped along the Platte seven soldiers deserted on the strongest horses and another five walked out in plain sight of the command. They were headed for higher pay mining gold, unheard-of mutiny that if continued in such dangerous territory might end the whole troop. The army’s only safety lay in its numbers. Official orders were to shoot deserters, and Custer made sure both officers and enlisted knew this. Now he gave the order to bring the deserters back dead or alive. The horsemen got away. The others were brought in, three wounded, one of whom died later that day. As far as Custer was concerned, the deserters had only themselves to blame.
Unlike the grief he’d experienced over each soldier’s death during the War, writing a separate letter to each family, Custer didn’t spill tears over this callow fellow. How was he supposed to fight with such apathetic talent? Among the Indians there was no such thing as desertion—those were the kind of men he should be leading—and these cowards could chew on that. There was a definite shift in his men’s sympathies away from him, but he knew that would be corrected later in battle.
* * *
MARCHING THROUGH the monotonous distances, what Custer would not have given to lie under the shade of even a single tree. Instead he laid his head under prairie milkweed, coneflower, and goldenrod. He could hardly remember the verdant forests of Virginia; they seemed to belong to someone else’s life. In his current existence, all had turned stunted.
At times he wondered at this great hunger of conquest. The isolation of the plains was a terrible thing. It threw one back on oneself, and some men found themselves sorely failing the trial.
When the cavalry came upon a farmstead, the people were unused to society. They hunched against the wind and turned partly away. The leather-skinned men stood with legs squared apart, as if expecting the next blow of bad news. Their women, worn haggard by endless work, ran to fetch cups and spoons. The children, shy with the wobbly look of colts, stood silent and enthralled. Men in uniform were heroes. Custer recognized these people as his own, bludgeoned by the drear sameness of such a hard life. He felt sucked back into his past.
Custer’s father had been town blacksmith while he saved for years to buy a farm. Their big, always hungry, happy family could have been these settlers. He had been so determined to escape such a fate, but how far from it was he really? Tom, too, followed the call of adventure. The Custer boys were not meant to bend knee to the land. He knew the Plains tribes felt the same way and that the peace agreement, with its intention to turn them away from hunting and fighting to a life of agriculture, was a doomed one.
Permission was asked and granted to water at one particular homestead’s well. The woman of the house offered the officers weak grain coffee, which they gladly accepted. Custer’s hand shook as he reached for a cup, and he steadied it with the other. Out back could be found the small, mounded graves of departed children. It was not a life to which he wanted to subject his Libbie. Conversation centered on the ravages inflicted by the Indians in that part of the state, the cattle stampeded, the houses set afire, the neighbors killed. The army was there to deliver them from such scourges.
At another homestead, a man had his oldest daughter serve homemade bread with blackberry jam while he told of the mother’s abduction months back. She had traveled with neighbors to the nearest town for provisions. Their wagon was attacked. Some were killed, others taken captive. The daughter had tears in her eyes as the father voiced the commonplace that he sincerely hoped his beloved had gone to join the Lord.