Chapter 6

6 The Battle of the Little Big Horn

Q. “Is the steady fire of dismounted troops greatly superior in its execution to that of savages mounted on horseback?”

A. “Yes, but if the Sioux can surround a smaller body they surely will annihilate it. The Fort Phil Kearney massacre, in which the brave Fetterman fell, illustrates their prowess.”—Interview with a newspaper editor, “An Editor's Sentiments,” New York Herald, May 20, 1876

“When Crook, with thirteen hundred men, was unable to follow up a fight with Sitting Bull we may well be anxious over the fate of either of Terry's detachments, numbering less than seven hundred men, if they should meet the Sioux single handed.”—Editorial, “The Hide and Seek for Sitting Bull,” New York Herald, June 27, 1876

“Custer was a well-made man, rather lean and lithe, with clean limbs and strong hips, and a slender, almost womanly body. His yellow hair, generally worn long, gave him the appearance of a Danish or Norwegian hero—some Viking's son. Few men had less of military hauteur and more military chivalry.”—Unknown, “Reminiscences of Custer,” New York Daily Graphic, July 7, 1876

“[Major] Reno was already engaged in the valley below, and as Custer rode along the ridge above him he raised his hat, and a cheer to their comrades burst from the throats of the 250 men who were following the standard of their beloved commander. On down the ridge with Custer they rode, over a little ridge, disappeared from sight, and we never saw them again alive. That cheer was the last sound we ever heard from their lips.”

—Anonymous soldier with the Seventh Cavalry (In Camp at the Mouth of the Big Horn), July 5, 1876, New York Herald, July 30, 1876

“Sitting Bull is regarded as a very able leader and skillful evolutionist. His tribe is as thoroughly trained as any civilized crack corps. In past seasons he has been drilling his braves, imitating the movements of our men while at parade or practice. The way he surrounded Custer was masterly.”

—Interview with Thomas Harrington, late of the Seventh Infantry, New York Herald, August 21, 1876

“Custer alone, with half a dozen men, was making his last stand. Then Custer remained alone for a moment, finally falling, pierced by numerous bullets and lying undisturbed among that yellow horde, which regarded him with awe as some powerful agency of the Evil Spirit. There he lay, even as did the Custer of a quarter of a century ago, his yellow locks undisturbed, his face marred only by the battle smoke, and his sword in his hand even in death. Such was the mimic battle given at Sheridan last Friday, at once the first and the most lifelike attempt to reproduce the Custer massacre.”—“Reproduction of the Custer Massacre,” New York Times, July 6, 1902

“Permit me to be very plain….There was no massacre. There was no killing of defenseless people. The Little Big Horn affair was a real fight in which the whites were badly worsted. They were out to get the Indians, and the Indians turned the tables and got the whites.”—Historian Patrick Edward Byrne, Bismarck, North Dakota, January 2, 1924, New York Times, January 13, 1924

On July 6, 1876, the headlines in the New York Herald abruptly announced details about a deadly Indian battle that had taken place in the western territories not even two weeks before:

“A BLOODY BATTLE”

“AN ATTACK ON SITTING BULL ON THE LITTLE HORN RIVER”

“NARROW ESCAPE OF COLONEL RENO'S COMMAND”

Some of the headlines were hard to believe:

“GENERAL CUSTER KILLED”

“A HORRIBLE SLAUGHTER PEN”

“OVER THREE HUNDRED OF THE TROOPS KILLED”

On June 25, 1876, the same day that Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and five companies of the Seventh Cavalry were engaged in the fight of their lives on the bluffs overlooking the Little Big Horn River, the New York Herald printed an editorial with the headline “The News from the Frontier—A Centennial War.” Ironically, considering what was then taking place one thousand seven hundred miles to the west, it stated:

The Indian, even now, is as much of a romance to us as the caliphs of the “Arabian Nights.” We do not know him. We never see him. We are indifferently acquainted with his manners or customs. We question if one in twenty, even of our educated people, could tell where the Apaches, the Utes or the Sioux inhabit. We know in a vague, half-informed way, that out in the vast expanse beyond the Mississippi there still wanders a remnant of those savage men who once ruled and dwelt here.

As hinted at in the editorial's headline, the United States was then celebrating one hundred years of independence, and Philadelphia was playing home to the colossal anniversary bash. Its theme was “A Century of Progress,” and on display were the latest technological advancements. Some ten million visitors got their first look at Alexander Graham Bell's newly patented telephone, a mechanical calculator with more than fifteen thousand moving parts, an early version of a dentist drill, and a cable made by the Roebling brothers, a prototype of the one to be used in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Some even tasted Heinz ketchup for the first time.1

General Sheridan, who was in Philadelphia to visit the Centennial Exposition and to speak at a meeting of the Army of the Cumberland, told a New York Herald reporter that the story of the death of Custer and three hundred soldiers at the hands of the Sioux, news of which was received that morning, July 6, was “so horrible that he could only accept it when it came officially.” It was also his belief that when the truth of the story was known, “it would be found less alarming” than what was first reported.² Outrageous stories of Indian battles were nothing new, and rumors spread quickly. However, to Sheridan's chagrin, news of the disaster was confirmed later that after-noon. Meeting with the journalist once again, he was asked if he “had any information as to the cause or the responsibility of the disaster….The General said, with sorrowful feeling, that it was too soon to pass any judgment upon an action of this extent. It would be unfair to the memory of Custer or of any soldier who loses his life in battle to pass an opinion until the whole story was known.”³

As part of Sheridan's grand strategy to entrap the nontreaty Sioux somewhere south of the Yellowstone and west of the Great Sioux Reservation, the Dakota Column⁴ marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln early on May 17, 1876, to the tune of “The Girl I Left behind Me.”⁵ Their course was due west along the Heart River. Led by Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry, the column consisted of all twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, “the fighting force of the expedition,”⁶ (the next two senior officers after Custer were Major Marcus A. Reno and Captain Frederick W. Benteen) two companies of the Seventeenth Infantry, one of the Sixth Infantry, and three Gatling guns, attended by a small crew from the Twentieth Infantry. They totaled roughly 930 men, about 750 of which were cavalry. There were also 150 wagons with teamsters, 200 pack mules, and about 40 Indian scouts, most of whom were from the Arikara tribe.7 The wagons were carrying supplies for thirty days, by which time the command should have reached the supply depot known as “Stanley's Stockade,” several miles above the mouth of Glendive Creek, one of the southern tributaries of the Yellowstone.⁸ The depot was under the command of Major Orlando H. Moore, Sixth Infantry.

Custer was lucky to be riding along, or so he must have thought at the time. He almost missed the expedition, one he was supposed to lead until he was replaced by Terry at Grant's behest. Custer had brought the president's wrath down upon himself for what was regarded as hearsay testimony in Washington on the selling of post traderships. The Doylestown Democrat of Pennsylvania effectively summed up the situation:

The meanest act of President Grant is the removal of General Custer from his command because he went to Washington in obedience to a subpoena and testified before the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department. His testimony was strongly against Grant's friends [including the recently resigned secretary of war, William W. Belknap], the post traders, and their swindling go-betweens. This displeased the President and he takes his revenge on General Custer.⁹

Commenting on the quality of Custer's testimony, another newspaper remarked: “He…testified vaguely and interviewed copiously.”¹⁰

The newspapers had a field day with the entire fiasco, with editorials appearing almost daily under headlines such as “Custer Sacrificed,” “Grant's Revenge,” and “Grant's Cruelty to Custer.”¹¹

As the headlines illustrate, most of the press was less than favorable to Grant, who was referred to as a “modern Caesar” and a despot.¹² The Hartford Daily Times stated: “The sudden and rude displacement by the President of General Custer looks…very much like a mere act of personal vengeance.”¹³

And from the New York World: “The removal of General Custer from his command by the President is a scandalous performance. There is, unfortunately, every reason to put the worst construction upon it.”¹⁴

And an editorial in the New York Herald declared: “Nothing that the President has done of late proves as this ‘disgracing’ of Custer does how utterly committed he is to the programme of standing by his friends, and it also shows how unfitted he is for the trust reposed in him by the people.”¹⁵

But Custer had his detractors too. The Troy Times of New York commented:

General Custer, upon being sworn, stated no single fact of his own knowledge relative to the alleged corruption. His whole testimony was a glib, bitter partisan repetition of camp stories, colored in the manner best designed to injure the administration, and based upon nothing but the silly twaddle of a Western camp. Many of the stories that he told have been disproved by credible witnesses.¹⁶

And this from the New London Telegram of Connecticut:

General Custer was a brilliant and dashing cavalry officer during the war, but his distinguishing characteristic is his egotism. His testimony before the Congressional committee in the matter of the post traderships, when boiled down, amounted to little. It was made up of assertions and opinions and had no foundation of facts to rest upon. The witness went out of his way to slur the administration and his main object seemed to be to draw public attention to himself. The President's course toward him seems to have had the approval of General Sherman and the Secretary of War, and that this is the case furnishes very strong proof that the President did nothing which he was not fully justified in doing. General Custer is one of that class of men who are better fitted for a time of war than for a time of peace. The time of peace furnishes him but little opportunity to gain the notoriety that he craves. When he was called to Washington as a witness, he thought he saw an opportunity for notoriety, and he made the most of it; and in doing this he made a very unpleasant and ridiculous exhibition of himself.17

However, the Milwaukee Commercial Times gets credit for the biggest miscalculation of the century when it wrote, “General Custer won't get scalped by anybody but the President this year.”¹⁸

On May 6, Custer sent a letter to Grant—ghostwritten by Terry—pleading to be allowed to join his regiment when it was due to take the field shortly.¹⁹ It was accompanied by an endorsement from Terry. In fact, Terry, who had no experience fighting Indians, was keen for Custer to participate in the expedition. As hard-nosed as Grant had been on the issue, he finally relented (but requested that Custer take along no newspapermen, “who always make mischief”).²⁰ Perhaps the negative press also played a role in Grant's decision. Terry and Custer received the news two days later, after which it was telegraphed from St. Paul (where Terry had his headquarters) across the country. The New York Herald printed the notice of the president's sudden turnabout on May 10:

President Grant has partially abandoned his original determination not to permit General Custer to accompany his command in their intended campaign against the Indians. Orders permitting General Custer to take the field were received…from Washington…[on May 8], but General Custer is not to be allowed to go in command of the column, but in a subordinate capacity. It is well known, however, that but for President Grant's interference General Custer would have gone in command of the expedition.

This dispatch was followed up with an editorial from the Herald, which included some additional swipes at Grant:

The outrage on General Custer continues to excite the attention of newspapers everywhere. At least three-fourths of them bitterly denounce the President for his cruel and autocratic action against the gallant Indian fighter. Even the papers friendly to the President speak of the affair as one which need not have occurred, and are sorry that he should have been injudicious at a moment when his party depended upon him for wisdom. Something was due to public opinion, which is just now very sensitive to any needless exposure of private spleen in its servants. There are a few papers which defend the President on technical grounds, but the people will not easily be convinced that in punishing General Custer the President did not really commit an outrage on themselves. President Grant is not at this day in a position to put himself in contrast with any faithful military or civil officer before popular opinion. The odds are against him, and he will suffer with little effort on his own part. That he acted angrily and unwisely seems to be his own late opinion for as will be seen from our St. Paul despatch, he will permit General Custer to accompany the expedition, not as its commander, but as a subordinate—that is, General Custer goes in disgrace, being permitted to fight, but to fight only under punishment. This last bit of news shows weakness and apology on the part of the President, but it does not wipe out the stain with which he has covered himself.21

In reality, for Custer, ever the optimist, riding along “in a subordinate capacity,” that is, second in command, was not such a bad deal. That same day he allegedly told an old friend that he would “cut loose” from Terry as soon as opportunity offered.²² All things considered, Custer must have regarded this as good news.

Fort Abraham Lincoln, established in June 1872, near the confluence of the Missouri and Heart rivers, was all bustle and activity in the weeks preceding the departure of the Dakota Column. An anonymous dispatch to the New York Herald dated April 30, stated:

A Classic View Of Custer

Bismarck Tribune, May 17, 1876

In Camp [at Fort Lincoln], May 14, 1876.

Gen. George A. Custer, dressed in a dashing suit of buckskin, is prominent everywhere. Here, there, flitting to and fro, in his quick eager way, taking in everything connected with his command, as well as generally, with the keen, incisive manner for which he is so well known. The General is full of perfect readiness for a fray with the hostile red devils, and woe to the body of scalp-lifters that comes within reach of himself and brave companions in arms.

—Reporter Mark Kellogg

The grounds surrounding Fort Lincoln recall vividly the scenes witnessed during the [Civil] war. They are dotted with different camps, made by the companies reporting for duty with the expedition. In one portion the cavalry is located, in another the battery of Gatling guns; then there is the infantry camp, and last the immense wagon train with its numerous attendants. Orderlies and messengers may be seen galloping in all directions, seemingly intent on business of some kind; teamsters earnestly arguing with refractory mules and the general condition of the atmosphere surrounding the fort would convince an outsider most thoroughly that the dogs of war were about to be let loose.²³

The dispatch also detailed the reasons behind the expedition:

To cause certain bands of the Sioux nation to curb their warlike propensities and go to the reservations set apart for them is the purpose of an expedition now being organized at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory. In the fastnesses of the mountains on either side of the Big Horn River and in the country adjacent thereto there have been encamped for a number of years bands of Indians who have declined the aid offered them by the government, preferring to maintain an independent life and support themselves rather than submit to the care of agents appointed to exercise a kindly surveillance over their welfare. Unfortunately, however, they have not confined themselves entirely to the chase, but have made raids on the settlers of Montana and Dakota, stealing stock, plundering ranches and killing the inhabitants, until they have inaugurated such a reign of terror that their numbers are popularly supposed to be hundreds of thousands instead of two or three thousand.

At all of the agencies on the Missouri River there are numbers of dissatisfied Indians, whom it would be impossible to please under any circumstances. Then there are certain young men anxious to make a name for themselves in order to gain influence in their tribe, and which, should they remain quietly on the reservation, they could not accomplish. From these classes the hostile Indians receive their recruits, and as they are generally desperate characters, without much to lose but everything to gain, they make good fighting men. In addition to these fighting qualities they are well armed with the improved fire arms, have plenty of ammunition, obtaining these from unscrupulous traders, and living as they do in a section of the country but very little known, it is not to be wondered at that they are feared by the poor settlers of the frontier.24

According to forty-five-year-old reporter Mark Kellogg (who was accompanying the Terry-Custer column against Sheridan's orders to not bring along any newspapermen), when the command departed Fort Lincoln on May 17, it was expecting to meet Sitting Bull somewhere near the Little Missouri River, about 130 miles due west of its current position. This was based on the “latest information brought in by scouts from the hostile camps.”²⁵

But in fact, this information was already outdated. Just seven days earlier, the New York Herald had printed a dispatch from Omaha, dated May 9 (eight days prior to Kellogg's report), that stated, “Sitting Bull's village is reported to be on the Yellowstone, at the mouth of Powder River.” That's an additional ninety-five miles, more or less, west of the Little Missouri. It is hard to believe that Terry was not aware of this latest information. Additionally, it was reported as far back as January that Sitting Bull had “removed from the Little Missouri some time ago.”²⁶ And that report had been addressed to the head of the Department of Dakota—General Terry.

Kellogg's dispatch from the Herald on May 18 went on to say that Sitting Bull had one thousand five hundred lodges and three thousand warriors, typical of the numbers that were making the rounds in the newspapers at the time.²⁷ “By some this estimate is considered large, but there is no doubt that more hostile Indians can be concentrated between the Little Missouri and Yellowstone rivers than at any other point in the country.”28

Even if there were three thousand warriors in the region they were marching toward, no one expected to meet them all at the same time. Sitting Bull's name was frequently used synonymously as representing all of the “hostiles,” and this often created false impressions of his/their fighting strength. After all, if Terry really expected to find Sitting Bull on the Little Missouri, or elsewhere, with such a large number of warriors, then he marched out of Fort Lincoln believing he was already outnumbered three to one.

The way the rain had been coming down in Dakota Territory, it may not have mattered. The ground had turned into a muddy quagmire, the mules couldn't find their footing, and the command made no more than forty miles in the first four days. Despite the fact that they were still so close to Fort Lincoln and there was no sign of Indians, precautions still had to be taken while on the march. As the contemporary frontier expression had it, “When you see no Indians be on your guard, for they are waiting for a chance to catch you napping.”²⁹ Accordingly, every morning Custer would take three companies and ride ahead.³⁰ (Not too bad for someone who two weeks earlier had been banned from the expedition.) Additional companies of the Seventh Cavalry rode on either flank.

The Dakota Column finally reached the Little Missouri River on May 29, almost two weeks after starting. The following day Terry wrote to Sheridan: “Contrary to all the predictions of the guides and scouts, no Indians have been found here, and there are no signs that any have been in this neighborhood within six months or a year….Our progress has heretofore been slower than I could have wished, but the force is in excellent condition.”³¹

That same day Terry gave Custer permission to take four companies of the Seventh Cavalry, C, D, F, and M, and some Indian scouts, to search for Indian trails south along the Little Missouri River Valley. A dispatch, possibly written by Custer, declared:

Custer's scouting party rode fifty miles in about twelve hours, thoroughly examining the valley of the river….Custer states that not only were no signs discovered indicating the presence of Indians in the valley, but…that no considerable body of Indians have visited or passed through the valley within a period of six months.³²

As if they knew where the Indians were all along, a few lines later the same article stated: “Rumor…now places Sitting Bull and all his followers snugly in their villages on Powder River, one of the eastern tributaries of the Yellowstone, and distant from this point about 100 miles.”

But one thing was for certain: with three columns now in the field, “gradually converging upon Sitting Bull's strongholds in the Big Horn and Powder River countries,” the net was tightening around the nontreaty Indians and the many dissatisfied Indians who were leaving the Great Sioux Reservation to join them.33

A freak June 1 snowstorm kept the command in camp for two days several miles southeast of Sentinel Buttes, in present-day North Dakota, but on June 3 they were once again trekking west. That morning three horsemen were seen approaching in the distance, but no one could make out who they were. As reported in the New York Herald on June 27 (again, possibly written by Custer):

The quick eye of Custer was the first to solve the problem. “They are scouts from the stockade,” was his remark to Terry. [Terry:] “What makes you think they are scouts from the stockade?” [Custer:] “We have no men so far to our front as those are; two are dressed in citizens' clothes and one of them is riding a white horse. We have no parties with the expedition answering that description; besides they are approaching us at a gallop, and are coming from the right direction to be from the stockade.”³⁴

The scouts delivered a dispatch from Gibbon to Terry. The news from Gibbon was that he was camped at the mouth of the Rosebud River, that three of his men had been killed on May 23 while out hunting, that Indians had stolen the horses of his Crow scouts, and, almost as an afterthought, that a village was reported “some distance up the Rosebud.”³⁵ For whatever reason, the writer of the dispatch in the Herald included all these details except for the story about the village on the Rosebud. Nevertheless, on two separate occasions, May 16 and May 27, Lieutenant James H. Bradley, Seventh Infantry, from Gibbon's command,³⁶ had led scouting expeditions that discovered a large Sioux village, first on the Tongue, then on the Rosebud.³⁷ In other words, the village (or one of the villages) that the three commands were seeking had been located, and it was moving west.

At this point, with the Indians clearly not between the Dakota Column and the supply depot on Glendive Creek (about thirty to forty miles to the northwest), or along the Yellowstone at all, Terry deemed it best to continue southwest from their current position, Beaver Creek, until reaching the Powder, then strike north, downriver, until they reached the Yellowstone. Though unstated, it was a reconnaissance in force. In the meantime, the scouts were told to return to the Glendive Depot with instructions for Major Moore to reload the supplies on the steamer Far West and to set up a new depot at the mouth of the Powder River (a.k.a. the Yellowstone Depot).³⁸ Terry also offered two of the scouts an extra two hundred dollars each if they would continue on and deliver a message to Gibbon: to halt wherever he was on the river and await further instructions.³⁹

On the night of June 6, the command camped on the South Fork of O'Fallon's Creek. By the following night it could be at Powder River—that is, if someone knew the best route. Even Charley Reynolds, their thirty-four-year-old guide, was unfamiliar with this territory.⁴⁰ Opportunity knocked, and Custer answered:

Taking with him a sufficient number of troops to make a trail, as well as to enable him to leave men on prominent points as guides to the main column, the General started at five o'clock in the morning [June 7], and after a most laborious day and a ride of probably fifty miles, he marked out through the Bad Lands that border Powder River a practicable route for wagons, the distance over which from the camp of the preceding night was thirty-two miles. Custer reached Powder River about half-past three p.m. The main column, under Terry, arrived and was snugly in camp on the right bank of Powder River before sundown. General Terry congratulated Custer immediately upon his arrival upon his success as a guide, and remarked that, in coming along through the Bad Lands, he had not believed it possible that a practicable route could be found to Powder River valley. The point reached on this latter [river] was about twenty-five miles from its mouth.41

On the 8th, taking companies A and I of the cavalry as an escort, under Captains Myles Moylan and Myles Keogh, respectively, Terry trekked down the valley of the Powder River to its mouth. He needed to satisfy his mind. Had the steamer and supplies arrived safely? Had the scouts succeeded in reaching Gibbon? While Terry was checking on these points of interest, Custer was left in temporary charge of the encampment, “Grant's positive orders to the contrary notwithstanding.”⁴²

Terry returned to his command late on June 9 with the latest news (the same day that Crook had had his first skirmish with the “hostiles” at Tongue River Heights). The supplies from the stockade had been transported safely by the Far West to the Powder River; the two scouts he had wanted to reach Gibbon near the Rosebud had turned back after running into a party of Indians (what good is two hundred dollars if you lose your hair or worse?⁴³); Terry had taken the Far West thirty-five miles up the Yellowstone and met Gibbon; and he had instructed Gibbon to retrace his steps to the Rosebud in order to prevent the Sioux from crossing to the north at that point⁴⁴ (assuming they had not already). Terry also brought back the newest member of the expedition, on loan from Gibbon, a thirty-nine-year-old half-Sioux guide named Mitch Bouyer.

Furthermore, the next day, June 10, Terry would send half the cavalry on a scout south along the Powder River “to clear it of any small detached bands of Indians who might be lurking away from the larger village.”⁴⁵

[For this purpose] a column was organized, commanded by Major [Marcus A.] Reno, consisting of Keogh's, Yates', MacDougall's, Smith's, Calhoun's, and Harrington's companies of the 7th Cavalry, constituting the right wing, a Gatling gun under Lieut. [Frank X.] Kinzie, and a detachment of [seven] Indian scouts [plus Bouyer], to proceed on a reconnaissance up the Powder River and then to strike across to the mouth of Tongue River.⁴⁶

While the Powder River scout was in progress, the rest of the command would push on to the mouth of the Tongue River and there await Major Reno's return. Upon that event, Terry had still other plans, these involving his “disgraced” subordinate:

Custer will select nine companies of his regiment and a detachment of Indian scouts, and with a large train of pack mules, loaded with supplies for at least fifteen days, proceed up the valley of Tongue River some distance; then striking west will move quickly to the Rosebud River, upon which stream the Indians are reported to be in heavy force [as seen by Lieutenant Bradley on May 27]; then down the valley of the Rosebud.47

In the interim, the remaining three companies of the Seventh Cavalry, perhaps with Gibbon's four companies of the Second Cavalry, would scout west along the Yellowstone, from the Tongue to the Rosebud, then up the Rosebud until they met Custer's command coming from the opposite direction. A letter sent to the New York Herald, possibly written by Custer, stated: “By these arrangements it will be seen that if the Indians are anywhere in the vicinity where they are reported to be the prospect of discovering them is excellent, or to express it as I heard an Irish cavalryman put it the other day, ‘There's a moighty foin chance for a fight or a foot race.’”⁴⁸

Regarding the latest whereabouts of the Sioux, an anonymous dispatch to the New York Tribune dated June 12 stated: “It is generally supposed that the hostile Sioux are encamped on the south side of the Yellowstone, between the Tongue and Big Horn rivers.⁴⁹

The question now was, with Crook coming from the south and Terry probing from the north, would the Indians hang around long enough until the net was securely in place and there was no chance of escape?

Terry's column reached the mouth of the Powder River at about 6 p.m. on June 11 and set up camp for several days. The next stop was the Tongue River. Terry would travel on the steamer Far West, while Custer went by land, some thirty-five miles west. He departed the morning of June 15 and arrived the morning of the seventeenth, right about the same time of day that the battle of the Rosebud was getting under way. Now there was nothing to do but wait for Reno, word from whom was received two days later:

On the evening of June 19 scouts came in from Major Reno. They said he had reached the Yellowstone some few miles above the Tongue River. He had made a march of about 250 miles, scouted some distance up the Powder River, then crossed the country, and discovered a heavy Indian trail, consisting of nearly 400 lodges, near the Rosebud. Its age was supposed to be about 10 days….The whole command then marched for the Rosebud.⁵⁰

Reno's orders had called for him to advance no farther than the Tongue River, but he pushed on to the Rosebud, the next river west of the Tongue, striking it about twenty-three miles above its mouth on June 16. Here he followed a large Indian trail up the valley for about ten miles—three and a half miles that night and six and a half miles the next morning (the Indian scouts advanced even further). Most certainly Bouyer, being familiar with the land and believing he could help provide valuable information on the whereabouts of the Indian village, influenced Reno's decision to deviate from his orders.51 After all, the primary need was to locate the village. As it turned out, Terry did not approve of Reno's initiative. It was feared that his actions may have prematurely “flushed the covey” in the Rosebud and Big Horn valleys, that by “deviating from the route prescribed in his orders he incurred the risk of alarming the Sioux and enabling them to escape.”⁵²

The New York Herald carried a scathing dispatch about the incident, allegedly written by Custer:

Reno, after an absence of ten days, returned, when it was found, to the disgust and disappointment of every member of the entire expedition, from the commanding general down to the lowest private, that Reno, instead of simply failing to accomplish any good results, had so misconducted his force as to embarrass, if not seriously and permanently mar, all hopes of future success of the expedition. He had not only deliberately, and without a shadow of excuse, failed to obey his written orders issued by General Terry's personal directions, but he had acted in positive disobedience to the strict injunctions of the department commander.⁵³

After detailing the route Reno followed, the dispatch went on to say:

An abandoned camp ground of the Indians was found [on the Rosebud], on which 380 lodges had been pitched. The trail led up the valley of the Rosebud. Reno took up the trail and followed it about twenty miles, but faint heart never won fair lady, neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village. Had Reno, after first violating his orders, pursued and overtaken the Indians, his original disobedience of orders would have been overlooked, but his determination forsook him at this point, and instead of continuing the pursuit and at least bringing the Indians to bay, he gave the order to countermarch and face his command to the rear, from which point he made his way back to the mouth of Tongue River and reported the details of his gross and inexcusable blunder to General Terry.

His commanding officer informed Reno in unmistakable language that the latter's conduct amounted to positive disobedience of orders, the sad consequences of which could not yet be fully determined. The details of this affair will not bear investigation. A court martial is strongly hinted at, and if one is not ordered it will not be because it is not richly deserved….Few officers have ever had so fine an opportunity to make a successful and telling strike and few ever so completely failed to improve their opportunity.54

It was a strange twist in logic. Since Reno had already disobeyed orders, he should have taken things one step further, pursued the Indians and defeated them in battle. Had he done so, his original disobedience would have been forgiven. The ironic part is that the writer (Custer?) was probably right.

Despite the fact that Terry apparently steamrolled Reno for moving on to the Rosebud, the latter's disobedience turned out to be useful. As one officer expressed it in his dispatch of June 28: “It was now known no Indians were on Tongue River or Powder River, and the net had narrowed down to the Rosebud, Little Horn and Big Horn rivers.”⁵⁵

Accordingly, Terry updated his plan, thus saving time and energy that would otherwise have been wasted. There was no need to send Custer up the Tongue River and then have him cross over to the Rosebud. Instead, the column would continue on to the mouth of the Rosebud, from which point Custer could repeat the now well established pattern: march up one river, cross over to the next river west, then down that river toward the Yellowstone. Except in this case, Gibbon's column, accompanied by Terry, was going to take a more active role: they would continue up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Big Horn, then up that river to the Little Big Horn looking for Custer coming down. If all went well, they would crush Sitting Bull's army between them. Unless, of course, Custer found them first. As a matter of fact, it was pretty much expected that he would. Major James S. Brisbin, of the Second Cavalry, stated:

It was announced by General Terry that General Custer's column would strike the blow, and Colonel Gibbon and his men received the decision without a murmur. There was great rivalry between the two columns, and each wanted to be in at the death. Colonel Gibbon's cavalry had been in the field since the 22nd of last February,⁵⁶ herding and watching these Indians, and the infantry had been in the field and on the march since early last March. They had come to regard the Yellowstone Indians as their peculiar property, and have worked and waited five months until the Indians could be concentrated and Generals Crook and Terry could get into position to prevent their escape. The Montana column felt disappointed when they learned that they were not to be present at the final capture of the great village, but General Terry's reasons for according the honor of the attack to General Custer were good ones. First, Custer had all cavalry and could pursue if they attempted to escape, while Gibbon's column was half infantry, and in rapid marching in approaching the village, as well as in pursuing the Indians after the fight, Colonel Gibbon's cavalry and infantry must become separated and the strength of the column be weakened. Second, General Custer's column was numerically stronger than Gibbon's, and General Terry desired the strongest column to strike the Indians; so it was decided that Custer's men were, as usual, to have the post of honor, and the officer's and men of the Montana column cheered them and bid them God speed.⁵⁷

Additionally, Lieutenant Edward J. McClernand, Second Cavalry, noted in his journal on June 24: “The plan of the campaign seems to be for us [Gibbon's command] to move to the Little Big Horn, and thus get below the village supposed to be on that stream, while General Custer strikes them from above.”58

On June 22, 1876, a buckskin-clad Custer, at the head of all twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry, which now numbered some 600 men,⁵⁹ plus 35 Indian scouts, a handful of guides and packers, and 185 pack mules carrying 15 days' rations,⁶⁰ departed up the Rosebud. If there was ever going to be a chance for Custer to “cut loose” from Terry, this was it, gift wrapped, and he was going to make the most of it:

Custer advised his subordinate officers…in regard to rations, that it would be well to carry an extra supply of salt, because, if at the end of the fifteen days the command should be pursuing a trail, he did not propose to turn back for lack of rations, but would subsist his men on fresh meat…if the country provided it; pack mules if nothing better offered. The Herald correspondent will accompany Custer's column, and in the event of a “fight or a foot race,” will be on the ground to make due record thereof for the benefit of the Herald readers.⁶¹

On June 21, Mark Kellogg, the correspondent for the Bismarck Tribune (with an occasional article in the New York Herald) and the only official journalist to accompany the expedition, wrote, “I have the liberty of the entire column, headquarters and all, and will get down to bottom facts in all matters connected with the expedition.”⁶² In another dispatch he jotted down the now famous, and hugely ambiguous, line: “I go with Custer and will be at the death.”⁶³

Riding Off Into History

New York Herald, July 8, 1876

Custer's Battle Field, Little Horn, June 28, 1876.

The men were in the best of spirits, [on the afternoon of June 22] and mounted on the finest horses that could be bought in the East. General Custer, dressed in a suit of buckskin and mounted on a magnificent blooded mare, rode proudly at the head of his regiment, and looked every inch a soldier. The last good-by[e] was said, the officers clustered around General Terry, their idolized department commander, for a final shake of the hand, and, in the best of spirits, filled with high hopes, they galloped away to their death.

General Custer lingered behind a little for General Terry's instructions, and, with a grip like iron and a “God bless you,” Terry turned back to the boat.

Custer was proud of his regiment, but his face wore a sad expression. I have known him for sixteen years, and I never saw Custer so nervous and sad as he was when we last met. I fear the displeasure of the President weighed heavily on his mind and had much to do with his untimely death.

—Major James S. Brisbin

Writing of Terry, Kellogg noted: “Brigadier General A. H. Terry, in command of this expedition, I find to be my ideal of a commanding general—large brained, sagacious, far-reaching, cool under all circumstances and with rare executive abilities. He is besides genial, courteous, frank and manly.”64

But he saved his best for last. His description of Custer is grandiloquent, and reads more like a paid advertisement. On the other hand, Kellogg may have hit it on the head:

And now a word for the most peculiar genius in the army, a man of strong impulses, of great hearted friendships and bitter enmities, of quick, nervous temperament, undaunted courage, will and determination; a man possessing electric mental capacity and of iron frame and constitution; a brave, faithful, gallant soldier, who has warm friends and bitter enemies; the hardest rider, the greatest pusher, with the most untiring vigilance, overcoming seeming impossibilities and with an ambition to succeed in all things he undertakes; a man to do right, as he construes the right, in every case; one respected and beloved by his followers, who would freely follow him into the “jaws of hell.” Of Lieutenant Colonel G. A. Custer I am now writing. Do not think I am overdrawing the picture. The pen picture is true to the life, and is drawn not only from actual observation, but from an experience that cannot mislead me.⁶⁵

Terry's written orders to Custer were printed in the New York Tribune on July 7, 1876:

Camp at the Mouth of Rosebud River, June 22, 1876.

Lieut. Col. Custer, 7th Cavalry.

Colonel: The Brigadier General commanding directs that as soon as your regiment can be made ready for the march you proceed up the Rosebud in pursuit of the Indians whose trail was discovered by Major Reno a few days since. It is, of course, impossible to give any definite instructions in regard to this movement, and, were it not impossible to do so, the Department Commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability to wish to impose upon you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy. He will, however, indicate to you his own views of what your action should be, and he desires that you should conform to them unless you shall see sufficient reason for departing from them. He thinks that you should proceed up the Rosebud until you ascertain definitely the direction in which the trail above spoken of leads. Should it be found, as it appears to be almost certain that it will be found, to turn toward the Little Big Horn, he thinks that you should still proceed southward perhaps as far as the head waters of the Tongue, and then turn toward the Little Big Horn, feeling constantly, however, to your left so as to preclude the possibility of the escape of the Indians to the south or southeast by passing around your left flank. The column of Col. Gibbon is now in motion for the mouth of the Big Horn. As soon as it reaches that point it will cross the Yellowstone and move up at least as far as the forks of the Big and Little Big Horn. Of course its future movements must be controlled by circumstances as they arise; but it is hoped that the Indians, if upon the Little Big Horn, may be so nearly inclosed by the two columns that their escape will be impossible. The Department Commander desires that on your way up the Rosebud you should thoroughly examine the upper part of Tulloch's Creek [a tributary of the Big Horn River], and that you should endeavor to send a scout through to Col. Gibbon's column with information of the result of your examination. The lower part of this creek will be examined by a detachment from Col. Gibbon's command. The supply steamer [Far West] will be pushed up the Big Horn as far as the forks of the river are found to be navigable for that space,66 and the Department Commander, who will accompany the column of Col. Gibbon, desires you to report to him there not later than the expiration of the time for which your troops are rationed [15 days], unless in the mean time you receive further orders.

Respectfully, &c., E. W. Smith, Captain 18th Infantry, Acting Assistant Adjutant General.

Although unstated in Terry's wordy instructions, much of which can be construed as suggestions, he verbally informed Custer that Gibbon's column would be at the mouth of the Little Big Horn on June 26 (barring any unforeseen circumstances). However, it should be understood that this date had nothing to do with a predetermined time of attack. After all, when Custer departed the Rosebud on June 22, no one knew exactly where the Indian village was located, other than that it may have been somewhere along the Little Big Horn. The June 26 date and Gibbon's expected position thereon were stated so that Custer, or one or more couriers from Custer, would know when and where to find him.⁶⁷ The number of Indians that Custer expected to meet, should he find them, was about fifteen hundred.⁶⁸

The courier/scout that Custer was supposed to “endeavor to send” through to Terry with information about the upper part of Tullock's Creek was George Herendeen, a twenty-nine-year-old civilian trader and former occupant of abandoned Fort Pease (a short-lived trading post), who was transferred from Gibbon to Custer specifically to carry out this task. As Gibbon explained:

General Terry expressed a desire that Custer should communicate with him by sending a scout down the valley of Tullock's Fork, and send him any news of importance he might have, especially as to whether or not any hostiles were on that stream….Herendeen stipulated that in case he was called upon to incur the additional risk of carrying dispatches his compensation should be increased. This was agreed to, and he accompanied General Custer's troops.⁶⁹

Herendeen went on to write two detailed accounts of the part the Reno battalion played in the battle of the Little Big Horn, both of which were printed in the New York Herald. The first appeared on July 8, 1876, and the second on January 22, 1878.⁷⁰ We will quote from both of these accounts, labeling them “H1” and “H2,” respectively. We pick up his narrative at noon on June 22, at the start of Custer's historic ride to the Little Big Horn:

(H2) We started out on the 22nd about noon and traveled up the Rosebud. [Mitch] Boyer and Bloody Knife, a Ree [Arikara] Scout, had the lead and Custer traveled with them. Lieutenant [Charles] Varnum with his scouts followed Custer in advance of the column. We marched about twelve miles and went into camp at five p.m.

General Custer ordered reveille to be sounded at four and the command to be ready to march at five o'clock next morning. This was the morning of the 23rd, and we marched promptly at five a.m. Our course led up the stream four or five miles, when we struck an Indian trail which Reno had followed a few days before. We followed the trail until five p.m., when we encamped for the night and in the evening Custer sent the Crow scouts who were with us on in advance to see what they could find out.

On the morning of the 24th we broke camp at five o'clock and continued following the trail up the stream. Soon after starting Custer, who was in advance with Boyer, called me to him and told me to get ready, saying he thought he would send me and Charlie Reynolds to the head of Tullock's Fork to take a look. I told the General it was not time yet, as we were then traveling in the direction of the head of the Tullock, and I could only follow his trail. I called Boyer, who was a little ahead, back, and asked him if I was not correct in my statement to the General, and he said, “Yes, further up on the Rosebud we would come opposite a gap, and then we could cut across and strike the Tullock in about fifteen miles' ride.” Custer said, “All right, I could wait.”

We had not proceeded far when the Crows came in on the run and reported the trail was getting fresh ahead, and that they had seen some fresh pony tracks….Custer, on receiving the above intelligence halted his command, dismounted the men and had the officers' call sounded. He held a council with his officers, but I was not near enough to hear what passed….

At this point, with the village seemingly close at hand, Herendeen's mission to Terry fell by the wayside, although it is still unclear to this day precisely why. According to Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey, Seventh Cavalry, the Crow scouts who were riding in advance of the main column “seemed to be doing their work thoroughly, giving special attention to the right, toward Tulloch's Creek.”71 Perhaps Custer considered this sufficient, and since nothing of special note was discovered, decided not to send Herendeen to scout the area for himself and never bothered to send him to Terry. However, there are two problems with this scenario. First, Godfrey's statement lacks any positive knowledge that the headwaters of Tullock's Creek were indeed scouted at all. Secondly, if Herendeen made the ride, it was extra money in his pocket. Would Custer have purposely denied the scout a chance to earn this extra money? Perhaps Custer left the decision up to Herendeen, who, sensing the coming conflict and not wanting to miss out on the action, chose to stay with the command. Another possibility is that he considered it too dangerous to attempt such a ride at this time. Unfortunately, Herendeen's two accounts are silent on the matter.⁷²

It was at this juncture that Custer made a fateful choice that would forever cement his place in history. The fresh trail that the Crows reported was headed west toward the Little Big Horn. But what about Terry's orders: If the trail is found to turn toward the Little Big Horn, Custer “should still proceed southward perhaps as far as the head waters of the Tongue.”

For Custer there was only one thing to do. He would succeed where Reno failed. Still feeling the sting of the president's anger, this was his chance to show that he was the right man for the job, to show that he was the key to victory, that without his services, the army would not fare as well, to “redeem himself in public opinion,” “to retrieve his standing by some splendid act of successful daring.”73 In fact, his motivation aside, Custer did what just about any other cavalry leader would have done at that time and under those circumstances. He followed the trail. Herendeen again:

Captain Francis M. Gibson remembers Custer, Reno, and Benteen

Francis M. Gibson (1847–1919) was a lieutenant in Company H, Seventh Cavalry, at the time of the battle of the Little Big Horn. He was appointed captain in February 1880, and retired from the army in December 1891, after which he became the deputy commissioner of the Street Cleaning Department in New York City. His entire army career, more than twenty-four years, was spent with the Seventh Cavalry. In an article Gibson wrote more than twenty years after the memorable events of 1876, the former cavalryman recalled the three senior officers of the regiment:

New York Evening Post, February 20, 1897

[Custer, Reno and Benteen] possessed very different characteristics. Custer's gallantry and dash have gone down to history. He was also a man of extreme nervous energy: his untiring activity was boundless, and so also was his intensity of purpose.

He was utterly fearless, always sanguine of success, had an abiding faith in the ability of his regiment to succeed when others would fail, and reposed absolute confidence in his chosen friends. His daring exploits attest his bravery, and his fighting qualities should stamp him an able officer. He was a thorough cavalryman from top to toe.

Major Reno was regarded an able officer, but he lacked the dash, the energy, the determination, and the ambition of Custer. Benteen is a man of many noble characteristics. He is as brave as was Julius Caesar, and as cool under fire as the proverbial cucumber. In a tight place his coolness is reassuring, and his judgment can always be depended upon, and all the survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn are very glad he was there to exercise his superior judgment. Captain Benteen is a man of stolid determination, and when he takes up a position, either on the field of battle or in the midst of peaceful pursuits, it is next to impossible to move him. He is generous to a fault, and most charitable, and places his principles of honor on the very highest plane.

(H2) Toward evening the trail became so fresh that Custer ordered flankers to be kept well out and a sharp lookout had for lodges leaving to the right or the left. He said he wanted to get the whole village, and nothing must leave the main trail without his knowing it. About dusk we halted and went into camp on the trail. It was then very fresh and the General sent Varnum, Boyer and some scouts on ahead to examine the trail and adjacent country. The men were given orders to graze their animals, get supper and be ready to start at eleven p.m. Everybody rested until ten p.m., when we packed up again and moved out. The night was very dark and our progress slow. After marching some ten miles about two a.m. we halted; the horses were unsaddled and the men lay down to rest. The packs were taken off the mules and everything done to rest and recuperate the animals.

Some time during the night the scouts came in and reported to Custer that the Indian camp was found. We packed up and moved forward at early light. Mitch Boyer and Reynolds, who had been out, said the camp was very large. Boyer said it was the biggest village he had ever seen.74 Reynolds said there was a heap of them, and Custer replied “he could whip them.” Reynolds said it would take six hours hard fighting to whip them.

About nine o'clock on the morning of the 25th of June, and the last day of our march, Custer halted his troops and concealed them as well as he could. He then took an orderly and rode up on the Divide about four miles to where Lieutenant Varnum and Boyer were. The General was trying to get a look at the village, which was over on the other side of the divide on the Little Big Horn.

(H1) In about an hour Custer returned [from the lookout] and said he could not see the Indian village, but the scouts and a half-breed guide, “Mitch Boyer,” said they could distinctly see it some fifteen miles off. While General Custer was looking for the Indian village the scouts came in and reported that he had been discovered, and that news was then on its way to the village that he was coming.⁷⁵ Another scout said two Sioux war parties had stolen up and seen the command; and on looking in a ravine near by, sure enough fresh pony tracks were found. Custer had “officers' call” blown, gave his orders and the command was put in fighting order.

By “fighting order,” Herendeen was referring to Custer's division of the command into three fighting battalions. Captain Frederick Benteen was given companies H, D, and K, about 115 men. Major Reno was placed in charge of companies M, A, and G, roughly 140 men. Custer took control of the largest battalion, companies C, E, F, I, and L, totaling some 212 men. Company B, under Captain Thomas McDougall, was detailed to guard the pack train, the cavalry escort totaling 132 men. Shortly after making these designations, Custer ordered Benteen on a scout to the left in search of Indians,⁷⁶ while he and Reno continued along the creek they were following (since named Reno Creek). Once again, Herendeen continues the narrative:

(H2) As soon as the orders were issued we started up the Divide at a fast walk and traveled about three or four miles, when we came to the top. The scouts, under Lieutenants Varnum and Hare, then pushed on ahead at a lope and the command followed at a trot. I was with the scouts, and we kept down a creek which led toward the Little Horn. When we got near the mouth of the creek we saw a lodge standing on the bank. We rode up on a hill, so as to flank and overlook the lodge, and soon saw it was deserted. From the top of the hill we looked ahead down the Little Big Horn and saw a heavy cloud of dust and some stock apparently running. We could see beyond the stream a few Indians on the hills riding very fast, and seemingly running away. I said the Indians were running and we would have to hurry up, or we would not catch them. Lieutenant Hare wrote a note to Custer, but I do not know what he reported. I presume he thought as the rest of us did, that the Indians were getting away. Custer was near at hand, and was riding at a fast trot.

The scouts charged down on the abandoned lodge, cut it open, and found in it a dead Indian. Custer came up while we were at the lodge, Major Reno having the advance. I heard Custer say to Reno, “Reno, take the scouts, lead out, and I will be with you.”77 Reno started at a gallop, and as he rode called out, “Keep your horses well in hand.” My horse fell and for a few moments I was delayed, but I caught up with Reno at the ford.

As we were crossing I heard the Crow scouts call out to one another, “The Sioux are coming up to meet us,” and, understanding their language, I called to Reno, “The Sioux are coming.” Reno waited a few moments until the command closed up, then crossed the Little Big Horn and formed in line of battle on the prairie, just outside some timber. The formation was made without halting, and the line kept on moving, first at a trot and then at a gallop.

We could see a large body of Indians just ahead of us and apparently waiting for us. We advanced probably half a mile, the Indians setting fire to some timber on our right and in our front. A few Indians were in the timber and we fired on them, but no shots were returned. Very soon we dismounted, and the soldiers formed a skirmish line, facing the hills.

On events up to this time, Lieutenant Charles DeRudio, Seventh Cavalry, afterward remarked:

Having reached the river we forded, and on reaching the plain beyond the opposite bank we were ordered into line of battle. Everything being as was ordered, we started on a gallop, and for two miles pursued close on the verge of an immense and blinding cloud of dust raised by the madly flying savages ahead of us. The dust cloud was so dense that we could distinguish nothing, so Reno halted the battalion, and, after dismounting, formed a skirmish line, the right flank resting on the edge of a dry, thickly wooded creek. While the horses were being led to shelter in the wood the Indians opened a galling fire on us, which was immediately responded to, the skirmish continuing for about half an hour.⁷⁸

A report in the New York Herald, based on the testimony of battle participants, declared:

The fire was terrific, and reminded those present at that engagement of the Wilderness [May 1864]. Reno says he never heard firing more terrific. In a moment his command was completely surrounded with the howling devils on every side, firing at short range. Charley Reynolds, the well-known scout, afterward killed, exclaimed: “We are gone up. There is no hope for us.”79

Next, Herendeen takes us from the skirmish line to a command decision that was to have deadly consequences for more than thirty men:

(H2) The [skirmish] line extended to the left and front, and firing almost immediately began, the Indians being near the foot hills of the little valley. In a short time the firing became quite heavy, the Indians moving to the left and working to our rear. The horses were now led into the timber on our right and rear, and the soldiers fell back to cover among the bushes and small trees. There was a little park or meadow just within the timber, and on this the command formed and mounted. I was one of the last men to get into the timber and halted at the edge of the bushes to fire at some Indians who were coming into the timber on our left and rear. I got my horse and joined the command, which I found mounted and sitting in line of battle in the park or open space among the bushes. There was little firing for some minutes, and then we received a volley from the bushes. Bloody Knife was just in my front at the time, and Reno on my left. The volley killed Bloody Knife and one soldier. I heard the soldier call out as he fell, “Oh! my God, I have got it.”

Reno gave the order to dismount, and almost immediately gave the order to mount again. The soldiers were not all on horseback when Reno started out of the timber toward the prairie, the men following him. The men scattered, getting out of the woods as best they could. They ran quartering toward the Little Big Horn. I had started out of the timber when the command did, about half of it being ahead of me and the other half in my rear. There was such a cloud of dust no one could see where he was going; just as I got out on the edge of the prairie my horse fell, throwing me off and running away. I ran back to the timber about 150 yards and took cover among the bushes. Just as I turned back I heard some officer call out: “Halt men! halt! let us fight them!”

As soon as the troops led by Reno emerged from the timber the Indians closed down upon them, some ahead, some alongside and some in the rear of them.

(H1) The command headed for the ford, pressed closely by Indians in large numbers, and at every moment the rate of speed was increased, until it became a dead run for the ford. The Sioux, mounted on their swift ponies, dashed up by the side of the soldiers and fired at them, killing both men and horses. Little resistance was offered and it was a complete rout to the ford.⁸⁰

As described by Herendeen, Reno's retreat from the timber was nothing more than a headlong, every-man-for-himself race for life to the Little Big Horn. By all accounts, it was disorganized and lacked military discipline, and at least thirty-two men were killed.⁸¹ To the enraged Indians, it was a good old-fashioned buffalo hunt. Certainly, there were soldiers who knew it didn't have to be that way. Recollect Lieutenant Foster's pride-filled description (at the end of chapter four) of how a battalion of the Third Cavalry retreated from a larger force of Indians at the battle of the Rosebud:

Soldiers who, when in full retreat before an enemy superior in force, with advantage of position and in arms, will face the foe and fire as steadily and deliberately as though on the drill ground when an officer rides out and commands, ‘Skirmishers, halt!’ must be imbued with the very highest grade of soldierly discipline. Men who will turn again and charge the advancing enemy when to all appearances all is lost and everything in confusion at a simple appeal to their regimental pride cannot be lacking in esprit de corps. Both these things this noble little battalion did.82

Based on conversations with men from Reno's battalion, Major James S. Brisbin, Second Cavalry, with Gibbon's command, assembled the following description of their madcap charge from the timber to the river:

A wild scramble for life now began. It was every one for himself. Indians on every side rose up and fired at the flying horsemen, and hundreds mounted on swift ponies pursued the soldiers, easily enough coming up with the heavy American horses. It was a hand to hand fight, one trooper often having as many as five Indians after him. The troops used their revolvers at short range, emptying an Indian saddle at every shot. At the ford, about a mile distant, a strong force of Indians was found holding it. But the troopers dashed over them, crossed the river, and began to ascend the high bank opposite.⁸³ It was a mere Indian trail leading up the face of a bald hill. The Indians rallied and, taking shelter in the bushes about the ford, opened a deadly fire on the soldiers as they forded and ascended the opposite bank.

Major Reno's Race For Life

New York Tribune, July 13, 1876

Camp at Mouth of the Big Horn, M. T., July 3, 1876.

Reno advanced along the plain, meeting with no opposition until he reached a little grove. Here his line was attacked. He immediately deployed his skirmishers and dismounted. The horses were led into the wood[s] and the cavalrymen engaged the enemy. The Indians appeared in immense numbers. They attacked him fiercely in front, and at the same time turned his left flank and compelled his force to retreat into the woods. The Indians followed in hordes and drove the force before them to the river. The bluffs on the opposite side were steep and high, but the water in the river was low. The Indians, flushed with success, rushed upon our men and a hand-to-hand conflict ensued. Here McIntosh was shot. Hodgson was shot midway in the stream and fell before he could reach the opposite bank. Dr. DeWolf crossed in safety, but was killed on the bluffs. The rest of the command fought their way up the heights, with the Indians in hot pursuit. Death seemed to stare every man in the face, when suddenly Benteen came to the rescue.

—As told to a special correspondent

On account of the narrowness of the ford a great crowd soon collected about the crossing and became jammed there; and into this mass of men and horses the Indians fired at short range. The loss of life here was fearful. Lieutenant Hodgson fell while gallantly endeavoring to get his men across the stream. Hodgson had already crossed the ford himself and was ascending the opposite bank when his horse was shot and rolled down the bank with him. Detaching himself from the fallen animal he grasped the stirrups of a passing soldier to help himself up the bank, and had nearly reached the top when a shot struck him and he fell back, rolling down the bank into the water. As soon as the soldiers reached the hill overlooking this ford they dismounted and opened fire on the Indians to cover the crossing of their comrades.84

As Reno's men were treacherously making their way across the river and up the opposite precipitous bluff, they were met by Benteen's three companies approaching the same bluff from the south. It was a lucky turn for Reno that Benteen had abandoned his fruitless scouting mission and arrived on the scene just when he did. Captain Gibson later recounted his part in Benteen's unproductive search for Indians:

[Captain] Benteen ordered me to select half a dozen men on the best horses, get ahead of the battalion, and proceed as rapidly as possible to the valley, and report to him without delay what I found there; at the same time he handed me his field-glasses. His object in sending me was to save unnecessary fatigue to both horses and men in case nothing was there. I got to the valley and found it as quiet as the grave itself. Up the valley I could see a long distance, but in the direction of the village only a short one, owing to the turn in the valley and the broken character of the country. I hurried back to Benteen, and told him there was no use going any further in that direction. Therefore, in compliance with Gen. Custer's orders, in case no Indians were seen in the valley, we were to return by the shortest route to the trail of the main command, and follow it up.⁸⁵

While following in the wake of the Seventh Cavalry's tracks, he was met by two couriers from Custer's command; first by Sergeant Daniel A. Kanipe, Company C, sent back to hurry up the pack train (a few miles in the rear of Benteen's battalion),⁸⁶ then, shortly after, by trumpeter John Martin, Company H (Benteen's own company). Martin, who turned out to be the last white man to see Custer alive, was serving as Custer's orderly trumpeter that day. He carried an urgent message from his commander, quickly scrawled by the regimental adjutant, Lieutenant William W. Cooke: “Benteen. Come on. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs. W. W. Cooke. P. bring pacs.”⁸⁷

Whether Benteen moved with as much haste as possible after receiving Custer's message has been a matter of debate since the day of the battle. Nevertheless, once he reached Reno's position on the bluff, his search for Custer ceased (a point of contention among many battle students who feel he should have continued on without Reno, or that the combined battalions should have moved out briskly in the apparent direction Custer most likely traveled), and the reunited battalions looked to prepare themselves for a siege. At the moment, Reno was in no mood for advancing; besides, Custer was supposed to be supporting him, not the other way around. According to Gibson, Reno told Benteen that “the last he saw of Custer was on the crest of the hill we were then on, but that his [Custer's] troops must have been behind the slope, as he did not see them.”88

Continuing now with Herendeen's narrative, the scout found himself in a perilous situation, left behind in the timber, along with about twelve other men:

(H1) I did not see the men at the ford, and do not know what took place further than a good many were killed when the command left the timber. Just as I got out my horse stumbled and fell and I was dismounted, the horse running away after Reno's command.

(H2) When I went back to the timber, after my horse threw me, just as I reached the cover I met Lieutenant DeRudio and stopped to talk to him.⁸⁹ As we spoke together about a dozen soldiers, some on foot and some on horseback, came along and I called to them to come into the timber and we could stand the Indians off. The soldiers joined us at once and we concealed ourselves, tying the horses to the trees. Just as we got settled down firing below us opened up and we knew Custer was engaged. The Indians had been leaving Reno and going down the valley in considerable numbers at full speed.

Of this part of the fight, Red Horse, a Sioux Indian, recalled:

After driving this party [Reno] back the Indians corralled them on the top of a high hill [on the other side of the river] and held them there until they saw that the women and children were in danger of being taken prisoners by another party of troops [under Custer] which just then made its appearance below. The word passed among the Indians like a whirlwind and they all started to attack this new party, leaving the troops on the hill.⁹⁰

An anonymous trooper who clawed his way up to that hill, known today as Reno Hill, afterward reflected:

“We did not understand the movement [of the Indians] then, but we understand it now, and while we stood on the hill wiping the sweat from our brows and waiting to catch our breath, we could hear faintly the sound of volleys in the direction in which Custer had gone. In an hour they ceased and all was still.”91

Herendeen again, from his position in the timber:

(H2) The firing down the valley [in Custer's direction] was very heavy. There were about nine volleys at intervals and the intermediate firing was quite rapid. The heavy firing lasted from three-quarters of an hour to an hour and then it died away.

I said to the men who were with me, “Boys, we had better get out of this.” I told them that the fight below had stopped, and it was a guess how it had gone, but I thought likely in favor of the Indians, and we had better get away before they came back up the valley. I started out and the men followed me.⁹²

(H1) I deployed the men as skirmishers and we moved forward on foot toward the river. When we had got nearly to the river we met five Indians on ponies, and they fired on us. I returned the fire and the Indians broke and we forded the river, the water being breast deep. We finally got over, wounded men and all, and headed for Reno's command, which I could see drawn up on the bluffs along the river about a mile off. We reached Reno in safety. We had not been with Reno more than fifteen minutes when I saw the Indians coming up the valley from Custer's fight. Reno was then moving his whole command down the ridge toward Custer.⁹³ The Indians crossed the river below Reno and swarmed up the bluff on all sides. After skirmishing with them Reno went back to his old position which was on one of the highest points along the bluffs. It was now about five o'clock, and the fight lasted until it was too dark to see to shoot.

As soon as it was dark Reno took the packs and saddles off the mules and horses and made breastworks of them. He also dragged the dead horses and mules on the line and sheltered the men behind them. Some of the men dug rifle pits with their butcher knives and all slept on their arms.

“The situation where the command made its final stand was peculiar,” Private Jacob Adams of Company H later stated. “We were in a large basin, at the center of which we had our horses. Along the outer edges of the basin, at the top of the ridges, we lay, for the Indians had us surrounded and fought us from every quarter.”⁹⁴ Captain Gibson later recalled:

Troop H…was posted along the crest of a hill that overlooked the rest of the command, which was located about three hundred yards away, across a broad slope [basin], which was somewhat protected, but very little, from the constant and heavy cross-fire of our wily foe. In this slope our horses, pack mules, supplies, and extra ammunition found such poor shelter as it afforded. Many of our animals were killed, and as the weather was hot they decomposed rapidly, which by no means added to our comfort.⁹⁵

That night the men on Reno Hill wondered what had happened to Custer. Despite what many had earlier seen from Weir Peak (Indians shooting into objects on the ground), the thought that he was killed, along with all five companies of their comrades, seemed an unlikely development. More likely the five companies had been bested in battle and were holed up somewhere like they were,96 or perhaps Custer had (temporarily) deserted them in favor of reuniting with Terry and Gibbon. Best-case scenario, Custer would come to their rescue the next day. Worst-case scenario, with sunrise the fight for life would start again.

(H1) At the peep of day the Indians opened a heavy fire, and a desperate fight ensued, lasting until ten o'clock [a.m.]. The Indians charged our position three or four times, coming up close enough to hit our men with stones, which they threw by hand. Captain Benteen saw a large mass of Indians gathering on his front to charge, and ordered his men to charge on foot and scatter them. Benteen led the charge and was upon the Indians before they knew what they were about, and killed a great many. They were evidently much surprised at this offensive movement, and I think in desperate fighting Benteen is one of the bravest men I ever saw in a fight. All the time he was going about through the bullets, encouraging the soldiers to stand up to their work and not let the Indians whip them. He went among the horses and pack mules and drove out the men who were skulking there, compelling them to go into the line and do their duty. He never sheltered his own person once during the battle, and I do not see how he escaped being killed.

About ten o'clock in the forenoon, and soon after Benteen made his charge, the men began to clamor for water. Many of them had not tasted water for thirty-six hours, and the fighting and hot sun parched their throats. Some had their tongues swollen and others could hardly speak. The men tried to eat crackers and hardtack, but could not raise enough saliva to moisten them. Several tried grass, but it stuck to their lips, and not one could spit or speak plainly. The wounded were reported dying for want of water, and a good many soldiers volunteered to go to the river to get some or perish in the attempt. We were fighting on the bluffs, about 700 yards from the river, and a ravine led down from the battlefield close to the river's edge. The men had to run over an open space of about 100 yards to get into the head of the ravine, and this open space was commanded by the Indians on the bluffs. The soldiers, about fifty strong, dashed over the open plateau, and entered the ravine. They rushed down it to the mouth and found it closely guarded by a party of Indians posted in the timber across the river. The water could be approached to within about thirty feet under cover; but then one had to step out on the river bank and take the Indians' fire. The boys ran the gauntlet bravely. Some would dash down to the river with camp kettles, fill them, and then take shelter in the bend of the ravine, behind the rocks, and there canteens were filled and carried up the hill. Before all the men and wounded were supplied one man was killed and six or seven wounded in this desperate attempt. One man had the bone of his leg shattered by a ball, and it has since been amputated.⁹⁷ About two o'clock the Indians began drawing off but kept skirmishing until late in the afternoon, and near dark all drew off. We now got water for the animals, many of them being almost dead, and they were put out to graze on the hillside.

On June 24, Gibbon's command—five companies of infantry,⁹⁸ four companies of cavalry, a battery of Gatling guns, and a mule train carrying about one week's rations 99—were ferried to the south side of the Yellowstone, at the mouth of the Big Horn. Their destination was the mouth of the Little Big Horn, about thirty miles south as the crow flies, which point they hoped to reach two days later. On the morning of June 26, Lieutenant Bradley, riding in advance with a handful of Crow scouts, came across the trail of four Indians that the scouts assumed to be Sioux. Following their tracks for several miles they discovered an abandoned horse and several personal items, which were quickly recognized as belonging to some of the Crow scouts that had been sent with Custer several days before. Shortly after this they spotted three Indians a couple of miles away, and after signaling with blankets for “a long time to no purpose,”¹⁰⁰ they were finally able to convey that they were friends. As expected, the three men they were trailing turned out to be Crow scouts who had been transferred to Custer's command back at the Rosebud: White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead, and Hairy Moccasin. What they reported to their fellow tribesmen was the first news of Custer's massive defeat at the Little Big Horn. Bradley wrote:

It was a terrible, terrible story, so different from the outcome we had hoped for this campaign….My men listened to…[the news] with eager interest, betraying none of the emotion of the Crows, but looking at each other with white faces in pained silence, too full of the dreadful recital to utter a word. Did we doubt the tale? I could not; there was an undefined vague something about it, unlooked for though it was, that commanded assent, and the most I could do was to hope that in the terror of the three fugitives from the fatal field their account of the disaster was somewhat overdrawn. But that there had been a disaster—a terrible disaster—I felt assured.¹⁰¹

Major Brisbin added:

[The Crows] said they had been with Custer until the day before—the 25th—when, while near a village, he had been surprised and his regiment cut to pieces. They said this had happened at about twenty miles from where they then were. They were at the junction of the Little Horn with the Big Horn. They reported the Sioux as “covering all the plain”—a force too numerous to count….Upon full consideration of the story of the Crow scouts it was not believed to be altogether true. It was, however, conceded on all hands that some event of grave import had happened, but the worst that any one conceived as the possible fate of the gallant Seventh Cavalry and its dashing leader was that it had been repulsed and compelled to retire for support.¹⁰²

General Terry and Colonel Gibbon were especially incredulous of the news: “Their story was not credited [by the commanding officers]. It was supposed that some fighting, perhaps severe fighting, had taken place, but it was not believed that disaster could have overtaken so large a force as twelve companies of cavalry.”¹⁰³

As the column advanced “every eye [was] bent upon a cloud of smoke resting over the southern horizon, which was hailed as a sign that Custer was successful and had fired the village,” or, as another expressed it, “[we] felt sure that Custer was ravaging the valley.”104

Brisbin picks up the narrative once more:

It was now 11:00 a.m. of the 26th, and Gibbon's command was closed up and a forced march was made toward a heavy smoke seen on the Little Horn about fifteen miles away. By 1:00 p.m. the command had reached the Little Horn, six miles distant. The command was put over in deep water, but on a good ford, and by 5:00 p.m. was again in motion. Two scouts with messages for Custer were sent out, one to the right and the other to the left, but both returned in an hour and reported the hills full of Indians, who had pursued them. One scout, named [Muggins] Taylor, had over a hundred shots fired at him while thus pursued.

Indians now began to appear on the bluffs to our right, and the column was closed up and prepared for battle. Lieutenant [Charles F.] Roe, with Company F of the Second Cavalry, was sent out to feel the enemy, and exchanged shots with the Indian scouts, who fled before his advance.¹⁰⁵

Our line of march was in a level bottom land of considerable width, with the Little Horn on our left and steep bluff-like hills at a distance on our right. In these hills we had seen Indians for some time; the scouts reported them very numerous and at nightfall a large body of them was visible. Colonel Gibbon therefore halted [after a march of twenty-nine miles], formed a square, and encamped in the center of the bottom or prairie, well out of rifle range from both the river and the bluff. All night the men lay on their arms, and were prepared to move forward with daylight.¹⁰⁶

An anonymous officer achieved the dramatic when he wrote: “We lie down full of anxiety for Custer; many think he has been defeated, but will not acknowledge it even to themselves. I hope that tomorrow will answer all our queries.”¹⁰⁷

He was right; the next day would bring answers, and as history will bear witness, a whole lot more questions. From the field diary of an unknown officer (as printed in the New York Herald):

Tuesday, June 27—Broke camp at twenty minutes past seven a.m. and started for the smoke seen yesterday. Quite a number of ponies were picked up. Upon reaching the top of a bluff about two miles from last night's camp we could plainly see two skin lodges and a number of horses in the bottom timber….I have had some little experience in Indian matters, but I could not understand the state of things that appeared to exist here. Nearing the two lodges we found the ground strewn with Indian camp equipage, piles of lodge poles tied together ready for trailing, buffalo robes, cavalry saddles, cooking utensils, coffee mills, China dishes, new spades, axes, guns, pistols, horn spoons, wooden soup bowls, all lying scattered about in the utmost confusion, and a great many Indian dogs that fled like wolves at our approach.

Arriving at the lodges we found a number of fine ponies lying in a circle around them shot dead, and in one of the lodges were three dead warriors and five in the other one, all laid out in state, wrapped in beautifully dressed robes, headdresses, leggings and embroidered moccasins.

Moving on I picked up a pair of pants that had evidently belonged to a cavalry officer; another picked up a buckskin coat, with “Porter, Seventh Cavalry,” marked in the lining, a bullet hole through the right breast, passing out under the right shoulder. It was very much blood-stained. Now we began to find cavalry saddles and to realize that there must be truth to the report of the Crow scouts, and that Custer's force had been severely punished. Just then, like a thunderbolt, came a report from Lieutenant Bradley, who was on the hills on the opposite side of the river, that he had discovered the dead bodies of 196 white men.108

Bradley's news hit hard, and Terry called a halt. Brisbin wrote that the report “might well have been called incredible, but that the statement was of so clear a matter of fact, reported so directly, that doubt was not possible.”¹⁰⁹ Soon the entire column was passing through the “ruins or remains of an immense Indian village.” Continuing, Brisbin recalled:

Evidences that it had been hastily abandoned were seen on every hand. Buffalo robes, elk skins, kettles, camp utensils generally, such as are used by Indians, were scattered on the ground in every direction¹¹⁰—wounded Indian ponies struggled here and dead ones lay quietly there. Dead horses, branded “Seventh Cavalry,” were seen. Then we saw the head of a white man, but could nowhere find his body; and, a moment later, we came upon a dead cavalryman with an arrow sticking in his back and the top of his skull crushed in.

An officer picked up a shirt, deeply stained with blood, and a pair of drawers. On the waistband of the drawers was written “Lieutenant Sturgis, Seventh Cavalry.” This news spread through the column, and it was readily comprehended that this well known and favorite young officer was no more. He was the son of the Colonel of the Seventh Cavalry.

That a battle had been fought near by was plain, but what the result had been we could as yet only conjecture. That it had been severe was amply attested by the bodies Bradley had found. Some believed that Custer, in a desperate fight, had captured the village and was in pursuit of the foe; others furtively surmised that Custer and his whole command were destroyed. If he had been defeated only why had he not retreated to the mouth of the Little Horn, where he was sure to meet Gibbon's column? But if he was alive and victorious why had he not sent his messengers, as directed, to the same point?¹¹¹

As the troops were trying to make sense of the chaotic and ghastly scene, Lieutenant Joshua W. Jacobs, Seventh Infantry, galloped in with the news that Major Reno and about three hundred men were on the hills to the left. They “knew nothing of Custer; did not know that he had had a fight.”¹¹²

Brisbin again:

On we went, therefore, till we came upon Reno's battlefield [at the southern end of the village]¹¹³ and marched among the bodies of fallen soldiers and their horses. All the bodies were horribly mutilated, offensive from the heat and covered with swarms of flies. An officer recognized the body of Lieutenant [Donald] McIntosh, of the Seventh Cavalry, and of a soldier of McIntosh's company. McIntosh was himself part Indian, a highly educated gentleman and a fine officer. He has fallen in battle with his face toward the enemy, and it is hoped the government will remember his widow and his little children at Fort Lincoln.

Reno's battlefield was a dreadful place—horses and ponies, white men and Indians, all dead together, and their bodies mingled as if they had died where they fought in all the wild confusion of the melee.114

Another eyewitness noted:

At every step we found tokens of the dreadful carnage. Here was brave McIntosh; here lay Isaiah [Dorman], our Negro scout; close by, Charley Reynolds, the chief scout had bravely met his fate; and here, close together, were the bodies of our cavalrymen and their horses.¹¹⁵

Soon two mounted officers crossed the river and approached Gibbon's column. They turned out to be Lieutenants George Wallace and Luther Hare of the Seventh Cavalry. To the question, “Where is Custer?” they replied: “He left us Sunday morning with five companies, and we have heard nothing from him since.”

[Shortly afterward,] Our commander with a small escort forded the stream, and scaling the almost perpendicular bluffs joined Reno's force. He was greeted with cheer upon cheer. Stout-hearted soldiers who had not flinched in the hour of peril now wept like children, and smiles returned to the wan faces of the wounded men. The Indians had retreated when they saw our line of infantry approaching. We had rescued these despairing soldiers.¹¹⁶

An anonymous observer on Reno Hill recalled: “General Terry was with Colonel Gibbon, and when he rode into our works many a gallant fellow did not feel ashamed to let his general see tears of heartfelt gratitude rolling down his cheeks for deliverance from a horrible death. The General was also deeply affected, and did all that was possible for our speedy relief and comfort.”¹¹⁷

Brisbin also recorded the historic scene:

Reno was found on a high hill, and when the officers of our column made their way up the officers of the Seventh grasped them by the hand and shed tears. Reno came forward, and, for the circumstances, was wonderfully calm and at ease.¹¹⁸ He said he wanted doctors and medicines and canvas to shelter the wounded from the sun, and wished to have his wounded men helped down into the valley. He would have moved them several hours before, as he felt sure that the Indians were gone and help was near, but thought it better to avoid even the possibility of having to move them twice. They were all got down before night, but it was then too late to move his camp, and he passed another night there. But in the cool air of night the odors were less unendurable.¹¹⁹

Surviving with Reno were the remnants of seven companies of cavalry: 328 men, including 51 on the wounded list. Over the next couple of days, many of the survivors traversed the battlefield, identifying the remains if possible and burying the dead, where Custer and some 210 soldiers fought their last fight.¹²⁰ “All the officers' graves,” wrote Brisbin, “were marked by hollow sticks, sunk deep in the ground, containing the names of the dead.”¹²¹

If the following descriptions are any indication, Custer's battlefield was a sight they would never forget:

The battlefield looked like a slaughter pen…the dead were much mutilated.¹²²

Many of the men found dead on Custer's field were horribly mutilated and most had their skulls smashed by stone mallets. This was the work of the squaws, who swarmed to the battlefield robbing and mutilating the bodies of the dead and killing the dying and wounded.123

Many were gashed with knives and some had their noses and other members cut off. The heads of four white soldiers were found in the Sioux camp that had been severed from the trunks, but the bodies could not be found on the battlefield or in the village.¹²⁴

The remains bear many evidences of torture. The heads of nearly all had been crushed with stone clubs, while in other cases their heads were severed from the bodies. The entrails in many cases had been taken out, and from many the limbs were chopped off. Other bodies were partially burned, a few were not found, but clothing belonging to them was found and recognized.¹²⁵

Across Custer's breast laid, face downward, the semi-nude corpse of a sergeant of the Seventh Cavalry….This poor fellow was robbed of everything but his undershirt; the crown of his skull was knocked away, his ears cut off, his left leg chopped asunder, and the rest of his frame perforated with rifle balls….Tom Custer's heart was literally dug out. The red devils appeared to have vented their savagery upon his remains. We could barely lift them up intact, they were so hacked up with knives….Very few of the slain had hair long enough to scalp. We noticed that those who had hair enough were scalped, while those whose hair was too short were either beheaded or else brained. The savages must have been exasperated where scalping was an impossibility. They varied the monotony by cutting off noses, ears, limbs and perpetrating other indignities, and conducted the butchery with method at times, for we would come across a pile of heads here, or stack of arms and legs there, and so on. As a rule, however, noses, ears, heads and limbs were scattered all over the battleground. Some of the heads were impaled on poles stuck into the ground for that purpose. In three or four cases the amputations were performed with surgical neatness; in all others mere chopping was the manner….The beheaded privates we had considerable difficulty in identifying, their heads being mixed up and scattered around; only privates were beheaded.126

It is sickening to look at the bodies stripped. Here a hand gone, here a foot or a head, ghastly gashes cut in all parts of the body, eyes gouged out, noses and ears cut off and skulls crushed in. One sees at a distance a dead horse lying on the plain or near the river, and upon a near approach the gleaming white skin of a naked cavalry soldier, the body cut and mangled beyond description, is brought into view.¹²⁷

The men, horses and mules were piled up, over and across and under each other, presenting one of the most horrible sights I ever saw.¹²⁸

It makes one heart sick to look over the battleground and see the poor fellows, some of them with their entrails cut out, others with their eyes dug out and hearts laid across their face. They even stopped to cut their pockets to get their money and watches. The most fearful sight was Lieutenant Cook[e]. He was a splendid looking man, with long dark whiskers. They dug his face all out so as to get his fine beard, it is supposed.¹²⁹

We found a man's head with a lariat attached. The Indians had dragged the body around until the head had become detached.¹³⁰

Sitting Bull's Description of Custer's Last Stand

New York Herald, November 16, 1877

Fort Walsh, Northwest Territory, October 17, 1877.

“The trouble with the soldiers,” [Sitting Bull stated] “was they were so exhausted and their horses bothered them so much that they could not take good aim. Some of their horses broke away from them and left them to stand and drop and die. When the Long Hair, the General, found that he was so outnumbered and threatened on his flanks, he took the best course he could have taken. The bugle blew. It was an order to fall back. All the men fell back fighting and dropping. They could not fire fast enough, though. But from our side it was so,” said Sitting Bull, and here he clapped his hands rapidly twice a second to express with what quickness and continuance the balls flew from the Henry and Winchester rifles wielded by the Indians. “They could not stand up under such a fire,” he added.

—As told to reporter Jerome B. Stillson

The Indians had taken all the soldiers' clothing, guns and ammunition, and the bridles and saddles from the dead horses. Many of the men were so mutilated and so changed by the two days of hot sun that they could not be recognized. Those who were only wounded at first were cut in the face and on the body with the tomahawk. Some had their bodies shot full of arrows, others were scalped.¹³¹

However, when it came to describing Custer's remains, “the beau sabreur of the Army of the Potomac,”132 the grisly descriptions, as if by the mutual consent of all involved, were transformed into the comforting image of a man sleeping peacefully or portrayed rather innocuously, undoubtedly for the benefit of his widow, Elizabeth Custer:

Near the top of a little knoll…lay Custer himself, and it touched my heart to see that the savages, in a kind of human recognition of heroic clay, had respected the corpse of the man they knew so well….He lay as if asleep, his face calm and a smile on his lips.¹³³

Poor Custer's troubles in this world are over. He fell like a gallant soldier as he was, and the savages recognizing him as a “great brave” refused to scalp or otherwise mutilate his person.¹³⁴

Custer seemed to be sleeping: his attitude was natural, his expression sweet and serene.¹³⁵

All but Custer himself are brutally mutilated. He is stripped only.¹³⁶

Custer's [body] was not mutilated. He was shot through the body and through the head.¹³⁷

They did not disfigure General Custer in any way.¹³⁸

Custer's expression was serene.¹³⁹

Even some fifteen years later, an eyewitness declared:

All the bodies were entirely naked and nearly all were horribly mutilated. Custer's, however, was not disturbed.¹⁴⁰

The truth of the matter is that, in addition to suffering two bullet wounds, one to the left side of his forehead and one near his heart, Custer's thigh was slashed, a finger severed and an arrow shoved into his penis.¹⁴¹

One anonymous writer likely summed up everyone's feelings after looking at the bloody battlefield when he declared: “The ghastly detail[s] would seem to court oblivion, if it were in the nature of things possible to forget or cloak them up.”¹⁴²

As far as the author can tell, the first mention of there being a “last stand” was in the following paragraph from an anonymous writer in a dispatch dated “Mouth of the Big Horn, July 1,” and printed in the New York Herald on July 8:

At the highest point of the ridge lay Custer, surrounded by a chosen band. Here were his two brothers and his nephew (Mr. Reed), Colonels Yates and Cooke, and Lieutenant [Algernon E.] Smith, all lying in a circle of a few yards, their horses beside them. Here, behind Yates' company, the last stand had been made, and here, one after another, these last survivors of Custer's five companies had met their death. The companies had successively thrown themselves across the path of the advancing enemy and had been annihilated. Not a man has escaped to tell the tale, but it was inscribed on the surface of the barren hills in a language more eloquent than words.¹⁴³

A few days later, a similar description appeared in the New York Tribune:

Lieutenant Smith fought his way to a peak, where a last stand was made. They must have known that their hour had come. Here were Custer and his brother, Adjutant Cook[e], Capt. Yates, Lieut. Riley, Lieut. Smith, and a few soldiers. Making ramparts of their fallen horses, they fought to the end.¹⁴⁴

Statement of Little Buck Elk about the Battle of the Little Big Horn

New York Times, October 19, 1876

Washington, Oct. 18—The Commissioner of Indian Affairs today received a letter from Indian Agent Mitchell, dated Fort Peck, Montana, September 25. Agent Mitchell writes as follows:

“Little Buck Elk, an Uncapapa, Chief of the Soldiers' Band, arrived here on the evening of the 23rd…. Little Buck Elk stated that he was in the fight in which Gen. Custer and all his men were slaughtered, and that eleven different tribes were engaged in the fight. He said the Indians were as thick as bees at the fight, and that there were so many of them that they could not all take part in it; that the soldiers were all brave men and fought well; that some of them, when they found themselves surrounded and overpowered, broke through the lines and tried to make their escape, but were pursued and killed, miles from the battleground. One soldier, who had a faster horse than the rest, made his escape into the bad lands, and after he had ridden seven or eight miles accidentally ran into a war party of Indians and was killed by them. This soldier rode a big horse with flaxen mane, and had a Government saddle and gray saddle blanket, but it was not known whether he was an officer or not. He also stated that they captured six battle flags, and that no soldiers were taken alive; but after the fight the women went among the dead bodies and robbed and mutilated them. There were plenty of watches and money taken from them, which the young warriors are now wearing on their shirts and belts. Little Buck Elk promised me that if the watch belonging to Lieutenant [John J.] Crittenden [20th Infantry] could be found he would bring it to the agency.”

“At the highest point of the ridge lay Custer, surrounded by a chosen band….these last survivors of Custer's jive companies…Not a man escaped to tell the tale.” “They must have known that their hour had come….Making ramparts of their fallen horses, they fought to the end” “[T he last stand had been made” The imagery was fantastic. There were no survivors to tell the tale. Our fascination with death, and on such a grand scale, is piqued. Custer was a charismatic frontier personality. The Indian warriors were colorful, capable of horrific savagery on the battlefield, and represented the last holdouts of a dying era. Mix up the ingredients and you have the recipe for a legendary battle that has remained in the public consciousness since the day it occurred.

According to Lieutenant John Carland, Sixth Infantry, when Terry arrived on the battlefield, he looked down at the lifeless Custer and, with teary eyes, said, “The flower of the army is gone at last.” And if Carland is to be believed, there were “seventeen cartridge shells by Custer's side, where he had kept them off until the last moment.”145

“The flower of the army is gone at last.” But how did it happen? What went wrong? How could this modern army, led by one of its top commanders, fall to a technologically inferior, some would say Stone Age, foe? Was it simply a matter of overwhelming numbers? One contemporary writer thought the odds were satisfactory, or would have been under “ordinary circumstances:

Information derived from many sources, including…the observations of officers engaged in the battle, leads to the conclusion that 2,500 or 3,000 Indians composed the fighting force arrayed against Custer and his 600. Still, these were odds which any officer of the Seventh Cavalry would have unhesitatingly accepted for his regiment under any ordinary circumstances of Indian warfare.¹⁴⁶

But this view was too simplistic. Yes, technically, the twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry numbered about six hundred soldiers at the time of battle, but they were divided into four battalions (including McDougall's company with the pack train) that made each segment unable to properly defend itself, even if confronted by no more than half the estimated total of Indians. And when the horse holders are subtracted from the number of men available to fight, generally one man for every four horses, the odds are even more staggering.¹⁴⁷ But what if Custer had kept all twelve companies together?¹⁴⁸ Dr. Henry R. Porter, the only one of three surgeons to survive the battle, believed that “the result would have been the same…, only the massacre would have been more terrible.”¹⁴⁹ Lieutenant Carland echoed this sentiment when he wrote:

There can be no blame attached to any one for this fearful slaughter. If Custer had had the whole regiment [together] it would only have been worse as the Sioux were too many. Of course there will be some blamed by Eastern papers, but as an eyewitness of the whole battle[field] I cannot censure any one.¹⁵⁰

Sherman, based on the earliest of reports, conjectured that “Gen. Custer attempted a battle without reconnoitering the position, and that he was too bold.”¹⁵¹ Following the same line of thought, Lieutenant Alfred Johnson, Seventh Infantry, wrote, “I am clearly of the opinion that General Custer did not know the extent of this camp.”¹⁵²

One writer blamed Custer's defeat on the fatigue of the troops, and then followed it up with a healthy dose of speculation:

While Reno was attacking the village from the south Custer's force would assault the Indians on the flank and in the rear. It was a shrewd plan, but he overrated the endurance of his soldiers; they were faint and weary; they had been in the saddle 24 hours….[Custer] had gone around the bluffs and had attempted to ford the river at the northern end of the village.¹⁵³ The Indians were massed in his front and on his flanks. The whole command dismounted and made a determined resistance, which checked momentarily the onset of the Indians. Then Custer ordered a retreat, his force dividing in order to take advantage of two ravines on the left flank. The enemy had already appeared in large force on the right and closed the door of escape in that direction. At the head of the upper ravine Calhoun's company was apparently thrown out as skirmishers to defend the entrance. Here their bodies were found after the battle; the skirmish lines were clearly marked by the rows of the slain with heaps of empty cartridge shells; Calhoun and Crittenden were in their places—in advance of the files.¹⁵⁴

The Battle of the Little Big Horn in a Nutshell

New York Herald, July 8, 1876

Sioux Expedition, Mouth of the Big Horn, July 1, 1876.

The history of Reno's operations comprises all that is now known of this sanguinary affair. It seems that Custer, with eight companies, reached the [Little Big Horn] river in the forenoon of the 25th, having marched continuously all the previous day and night. Seeing the upper or southern extremity of the village, and probably underestimating its extent, he ordered Reno to ford the river and charge the village with three companies, while he, with five companies moved down the right bank and behind the bluff to make a similar attack at the other end. Reno made his charge, but finding that he was dealing with a force many times his own numbers dismounted his men and sought shelter in the timber which fringed the river bank. The position appearing to him untenable, he remounted and cut his way to the river, forded under a murderous fire, and gained the bluff, where he was subsequently found. Here he was afterward joined by Captain Benteen with the three companies, which had just reached the field, and by Captain McDougall, with his company [B] and the pack mules. The position was immediately after completely invested by the Indians, who, for more than twenty-four hours, allowed the garrison no rest and inflicted severe loss. But for the timely arrival of relief the command would have been cut off to a man. The number saved with Reno was 329, including fifty-one wounded.

—Anonymous

Perhaps the one theory that hit closest to the truth, and that embraced the lack of advance surveillance guessed at by Sherman, was that expressed in the New York Tribune on July 7, 1876: “Custer underestimated the enemy, separated his force, and was defeated in detail.” He also misjudged the time necessary to find a suitable fording place downstream to make a simultaneous attack, thus “losing the moral effect.”155

An article appeared in the New York Herald on July 26 based upon statements of the Crow scout Curley.¹⁵⁶ Possibly written by Major Brisbin, the scenario was, for the most part, reasonable, and still holds up today:

Custer had to go further down the river and further away from Reno than he wished on account of the steep bank along the north side; but at last he found a ford and dashed for it. The Indians met him and poured in a heavy fire from across the narrow river. Custer dismounted to fight on foot, but could not get his skirmishers over the stream. Meantime hundreds of Indians, on foot and on ponies, poured over the river, which was only about three feet deep, and filled the ravines on each side of Custer's men. Custer then fell back to some high ground behind him and seized the ravines in his immediate vicinity. The Indians completely surrounded Custer and poured in a terrible fire on all sides. They charged Custer on foot in vast numbers, but were again and again driven back.157

Based on the available evidence, an anonymous report printed in the New York Herald on July 8 also laid out a logical outline of events:

At a point about three miles down the right bank of the stream [from Reno Hill] Custer had evidently attempted to ford and attack the village from the ford. The trail was found to lead back up to the bluffs and to the northward, as if the troops had been repulsed and compelled to retreat and at the same time had been cut off from regaining the forces under Reno. The bluffs along the right bank come sharply down to the water and are interspersed by numerous ravines all along the slopes and ridges, and in the ravines, lying as they had fought, line behind line, showing where defensive positions had been successfully taken up and held till none were left to fight, there, huddled in a narrow compass, horses and men were piled promiscuously.¹⁵⁸

After Crazy Horse surrendered in May 1877, he and Horned Horse suggested to a reporter that Custer's downfall was in misreading the situation as it unfolded:

The attack was a surprise and totally unlooked for. When Custer [Reno] made the charge the women, papooses, children, and in fact, all that were not fighters, made a stampede in a northerly direction. Custer, seeing so numerous a body, mistook them for the main body of Indians retreating and abandoning their villages [in the face of Reno's charge], and immediately gave pursuit. The warriors in the village, seeing this, divided their forces into two parts, one intercepting Custer between their non-combatants and him, and the other getting in his rear. Outnumbering him as they did, they had him at their mercy, and the dreadful massacre ensued.¹⁵⁹

It was an ironic twist of fate: despite launching a surprise attack, the attackers were the ones who were surprised. Instead of scattering to avoid a pitched battle, as everyone expected the Indians to do (if experience was any indication), they responded with an even stronger offensive than the one launched against them. The troops, having been separated into smaller fighting units, were soon battling for their lives. Custer's battalion was particularly in a bad way: not only was it separated from Reno and Benteen, but it was itself separated into two battalions (under Captains Myles Keogh and George Yates). And the hilly terrain was not conducive to cavalry tactics.

On June 28, while many of the men were engaged in burying the dead, Gibbon's cavalry was sent on a reconnaissance to determine where the Indians had gone:

Colonel Gibbon's cavalry followed the Indians for about ten miles, and ascertained that they had moved to the south and west by several trails. A good deal of property had been thrown away by them to lighten their march, and was found scattered for many miles over the prairies. Many of their dead were also discovered secreted in ravines a long distance from the battlefield. Among them were Arapahoes and Cheyennes as well as Sioux.160

While it is impossible to know just how many Indians were killed in the fights with Reno and Custer, some historians believe the number may be as low as forty-three.¹⁶¹ According to Red Horse, the Indians suffered 136 killed and 160 wounded. Of course, this suggests that the Indians laid out all of their dead and counted them, which is not likely. Another report from an Indian source claimed that only thirty-one Indians were killed.¹⁶² Whatever the number, it seems likely that others died in the following days and weeks from wounds received in the battle. According to John W. Smith, a frontier trader “who speaks Sioux fluently,” reliable Indians at Standing Rock Agency told him that forty Indians were killed in the Custer battle, and that twenty more had later died of their wounds.¹⁶³ Of the Indian casualties, an undetermined number were the result of friendly fire:

Horned Horse says the smoke and dust was so great that foe could not be distinguished from friend. The horses were wild with fright and uncontrollable. The Indians were knocking each other from their steeds, and it is an absolute fact that the young bucks in their excitement and fury killed each other, several dead Indians being found killed by arrows. Horned Horse represented this hell of fire and smoke and death by interturning his fingers and saying: “Just like this, Indians and white men.”¹⁶⁴

As is usual with such disasters, the need to assign blame quickly followed. An anonymous dispatch to the New York Herald gave voice to one or more officers who wished to remain anonymous:

Whether Custer did right or wrong in attacking as he did, your correspondent does not pretend to say. An officer informs me General Terry did not expect or desire General Custer to attack the Indians until he [Terry] should reach the Little Horn and gain a position from which he could support him. Custer attacked forty-eight hours [!] in advance of the time Terry was to reach that point. An officer informs your correspondent when Custer came in sight of the 1,800 lodges, a village of upward of 7,000 Indians, he swung his hat and said—“Hurrah! Custer's luck! The biggest Indian village on the American continent!”¹⁶⁵

A dispatch out of Chicago, printed in the New York Times on July 7, stated: “Gen. Custer was directed by Gen. Terry to find and feel of the Indians, but not to fight unless Terry arrived with infantry and with Gibbon's column.”¹⁶⁶

However, as previously noted, Custer's column was expected to “strike the blow.” Writing to Sheridan on July 2, Terry composed a letter to clear himself of any wrongdoing in the loss of almost half of the Seventh Cavalry:

Camp Big Horn, July 2.

I think I owe it to myself to put you more fully in possession of the facts of the late operations. While at the mouth of the Rosebud [June 21] I submitted my plan to Gen. Gibbon and Gen. Custer. It was that Custer, with his whole regiment, should move up the Rosebud till he should meet a trail Reno had discovered a few days before, but that he should not follow it directly to the Little Big Horn; that he should send scouts over it and keep his main force further toward the south, so as to prevent the Indians from slipping in between himself and the mountains. He was also to examine the head waters of the Tullock's Creek, as he passed it, and send me word of what he found there. A scout [Herendeen] was furnished him for the purpose of crossing the country to me. We calculated it would take Gibbon's column until the 26th to reach the mouth of the Little Big Horn, and that the wide sweep I had proposed Custer should make would require so much time that Gibbon would be able to cooperate with him in attacking any Indians that might be found on the stream.167 I asked Custer how long his marches would be. He said they would be at the rate of about thirty miles a day. Measurements were made and calculations based on that rate of progress. I talked with him about his strength and at one time suggested that perhaps it would be well for me to take Gibbon's cavalry and go with him. To the latter suggestion he replied: that, without reference to the command, he would prefer his own regiment alone. As a homogenous body, as much could be done with it as with the two combined. He expressed the utmost confidence that he had all the force that he could need, and I shared his confidence. The plan adopted was the only one which promised to bring the infantry into action, and I desired to make sure of things by getting up every available man. I offered Custer the battery of Gatling guns, but he declined it, saying that it might embarrass him, and that he was strong enough without it.

The movements proposed by Gen. Gibbon's column were carried out to the letter, and had the attack been deferred until it was up, I cannot doubt that we should have been successful. The Indians had evidently prepared themselves for a stand, but as I learned from Capt. Benton [Benteen] that on the 22nd the cavalry marched twelve miles; on the 23rd, twenty-five miles; from 5 a.m. till 8 p.m., of the 24th, forty-five miles, and then after night ten miles further, resting, but without unsaddling, twenty-three miles, to the battlefield. The proposed route was not taken, but as soon as the trail was struck it was followed. I cannot learn that any examination of Tullock's Creek was made. I do not tell you this to cast any reflections upon Custer, for whatever errors he may have committed Custer's action is unexplainable in the case.

A. H. Terry, Brigadier General.¹⁶⁸

As noted earlier in this chapter, on July 6, Sheridan was unwilling to make any public statements to a New York Herald reporter about the military disaster that befell Custer until more of the facts were learned. And he was right; it would have been “unfair to the memory of Custer.” The most the reporter could get out of him was that “Custer was a gallant, daring man, who knew the Indian country well, who had served against various tribes, and who, in addition to his natural ability and courage, had special experience.”¹⁶⁹ As right as Sheridan was in holding his tongue, especially if his comments would have reflected negatively on Custer, it makes for boring history. Luckily, when Sheridan left the room, one of his subalterns opened up to the Herald correspondent:

The truth about Custer is that he was a pet soldier who had risen not above his merit but higher than men of equal merit. He fought with Phil Sheridan and through the patronage of Sheridan he rose, but while Sheridan liked his valor and his dash he never trusted his judgment….While Sheridan is always cool, Custer was always aflame. He was like a thermometer. He had a touch of romance about him, and when the war broke out he used to go about dressed like one of Byron's pirates in the Archipelago, with waving, shining locks and a broad, flapping sombrero. Rising to high command early in life he lost the repose necessary to success in high command. Why, I remember when we were chasing Lee and had him up against Appomattox, Custer rushed into the rebel lines and wanted Longstreet to surrender the whole army to him. You see Custer imagined that if he could frighten Longstreet into a surrender all he would have to do would be to turn over the whole rebel gang to Grant, but Longstreet, who had wonderful sense, quietly told the furious young man that he did not command the army to surrender it, and that Lee was off to see Grant on that same business.

Then Custer must rush into politics, and went swinging around the circle with [President] Johnson. He wanted to be a statesman, and but for Sheridan's influence with Grant the republicans would have thrown him; but you see we all liked Custer and did not mind his little freaks in that way any more than we would have minded temper in a woman. Sheridan, to keep Custer in his place, kept him out on the Plains at work. He gave him a fine command, one of the best cavalry regiments in the service. The colonel, Sturges [Sturgis], was allowed to bask in the sunshine in a large city while Custer was the real commander. In this service Custer did well, and indicated the partiality of Sheridan as well as the kind feelings of his friends. But Grant's administration began to go down, and it looked like a new deal. The old spirit which sent Custer swinging around the circle revived in him. He came East and took a prominent part in reforming the army. Well, that is all right in theory; but, you see, when a soldier goes out of soldiering he is sure to blunder.

Then he must write his war memoirs. Sherman did it, and Frederick and Napoleon, and why should not Custer? So people began to cry ‘Dime novel!’ at him. Well, in these memoirs he began to write recklessly about the army. He took to praising McClellan as the great man of the war. Probably he was; but it was no business of Custer, and, coming as it did when the democrats began to look lively, it annoyed the administration. Grant grew so much annoyed that even Sheridan could do no good, and Custer was disgraced. Instead of commanding the Yellowstone expedition…he was made a subordinate….Custer felt…[disgraced] and went out to the field to do some tremendous thing, astonish the country and overwhelm the administration. So, when he saw some Sioux camps, instead of waiting for Gibbon or for Terry, who would have shared or usurped his honors, he rushed in without knowing or caring. It reminds me very much of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava….Custer's glorious death and the valor of his men will become a legend in our history….We all think, much as we lament Custer and much as we respect his generous, brave nature, that he sacrificed the Seventh Cavalry to his ambition and wounded vanity. He played an appalling stake and lost. As the great commander said of Cardigan's charge of the light brigade—‘It is superb, but it is not war.’

I liked Custer so well that I wish I could throw only laurels on his grave. But one must think of those who died with him, of the dishonor to our flag, of the exultant frenzy this will inspire in the Indians, of the more combats to come. The defeat of Custer—God knows only what it means. It may unite the Indians as they were under Tecumseh, and while in the end we shall conquer that league, it will require blood and treasure that might have been saved but for these mad doings on the Yellowstone.170

On July 7, the same day it ran the interview with Sheridan, the New York Herald melodramatically asserted:

Had Custer been in command of the campaign a sense of responsibility would have restrained and tempered his impetuosity. But this brave soldier had been rendered desperate by ill usage, and when “death was set in one eye and honor in the other” he courted a heroic death rather than endure the disgrace which the cold malignity of the President had attempted to put upon him. It would be hardly too severe to say to President Grant, “Behold your hands! They are red with the blood of Custer and his brave three hundred.”¹⁷¹

On July 8, Sheridan sent a communication to Sherman calling for calm, control, and cash:

I think it premature to think of asking for volunteer cavalry, with the attendant expense….We are all right; give us a little time. I deeply deplore the loss of Custer and his officers and men. I fear it was an unnecessary sacrifice due to misapprehension and a superabundance of courage—the latter extraordinarily developed in Custer….[I]f Congress will give the $200,000 which I have asked for the past two years, for the establishment of the posts at Tongue River and the mouth of the Big Horn, it will be in the interest of economy and will settle the Sioux question.¹⁷²

Back in Montana and Wyoming, the Indian campaign had come to a crushing halt. Crook was waiting for reinforcements in northern Wyoming, and Terry, after sending about three dozen wounded men back to Fort Lincoln on the steamer Far West, had to regroup on the Yellowstone. And he, too, would request reinforcements. Both columns would remain virtually inactive until the first days of August.

In a dispatch to the New York Herald dated July 1, an anonymous writer with the expedition left his readers with this thought:

In closing my hasty narrative of this affair, in certain respects the most remarkable in modern history, I purposely refrain from comment. The naked facts, so far as they are known, must guide your readers to a conclusion as to the causes of the calamity.¹⁷³

In a letter to his father on July 2, Lieutenant George D. Wallace, Seventh Cavalry, wrote:

Our noble regiment is almost obliterated, but a merciful God has spared a few. Of the five companies that were with General Custer not one man is left to tell the story of the massacre.¹⁷⁴

Lieutenant Johnson of the Seventh Infantry, also writing to his father, expressed the hope that the Sioux would soon get their comeuppance: “Generals Terry, Gibbon and Crook are old campaigners and will strike a telling blow with an iron hand should an opportunity present itself.”175

In closing this chapter, let us give the final word to one of the warriors who fought on that hot June day in 1876. Describing his pictographic depiction of the battle of the Little Big Horn twenty-five years after the event, Black Bear, a Brule Sioux warrior, recalled:

I was in that fight. I was a young man then, and I remember it was the biggest thing in my life. I think I make a picture of it, so that all my people know about it.

That man in the middle on the horse, see him? That is ‘Long Hair.’ See how his hair wave[s] out behind.¹⁷⁶ He ride[s] alone. There is one of his men dead (pointing to a figure of a man in a slouch hat lying down). There is another. Indians are killing them.

There are Indians on horses. They ride round and round Long Hair. They ride fast, and every time they pass they kill some of his men. Indians can ride fast and they can shoot. Long Hair know that and he fight well, but Indians were like the dust the wind blows. No man can count them. Long Hair must die and he knows it.¹⁷⁷ That horse he rides, it is killed, but he fights on. I know that because I see it.

(Around the edge of the picture are rows of Indians holding rifles to their shoulders and all aiming at the center, where Custer stands alone.) “These men all Sioux but they are different tribes. The Ogalalas stand here. The Brules here. They sometimes fight each other, but now they all fighting against Long Hair.¹⁷⁸

Superhuman Indian Warriors

In the weeks following the battle of the Little Big Horn, the Sioux were sometimes transformed into a race of superhuman fighting men, as illustrated in this clipping from the Cheyenne Daily Leader on August 17, 1876:

The Savage Sioux—The Sioux are among the very best fighters in the world. They possess union and self-reliance, cunning without equal, a personnel in which every man is an athlete capable of super-eminent feats of endurance, horsemanship and agility. Further, they possess the vast advantage of fighting on ground of their own selection, in their own country, and with whose resources, either for supplies or defense, they have a perfect familiarity. It affords them too, at every step, natural fortifications equal—for purposes of concealment or defense—to the most elaborate work possible to engineering skill. Well mounted, armed with the very best of modern small arms, ever alert and tireless, regarding death in battle as an honor to be sought rather than as a calamity to be avoided, they are practically as effective as a civilized army of 20,000 men operating in an open country and according to the rules of modern warfare.

Black Bear's interviewer added:

Crude as the picture is, it conveys an admirable idea of a multitude against a handful. Nothing could better illustrate the force of superior numbers than the circle of feather-bedecked savages closing in relentlessly on the one brave man who is given the place of importance in the center. The artist is a good-natured Brule, who is more than six feet tall. The cordial way in which he shakes hands with strangers, and his habitual smile did not bear out his story, which he tells proudly, of how he participated in the Custer massacre and “kill heap white men.”179

INTERLUDE

Thoughts on Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn

“To make General Custer a scapegoat would be to place upon his head iniquities for which he is no more responsible than were the brave men who charged at Balaklava for the policy which brought on the Crimean War.”

—Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 7, 1876

“The magnetism of the man discovered for him a warm sympathy among the people so that in his cruel end thousands recognized a personal loss as well as a national disaster.”

—New York Herald, July 7, 1876

“The country will give him its admiration, its tears, its regrets; it will pardon his error, if he committed one, and inscribe his name in bright letters on the roll of fame. For the planning of this mismanaged, ill-starred campaign he was not responsible.”

—New York Herald, July 7, 1876

Major Robert E. A. Crofton: “I have seen a little Indian fighting, and I tell you that it is the worst business a man can engage in. Here is General Custer, one of the bravest of men and one of the best Indian fighters that ever lived, after years of successful experience, beaten and cut down and all of his command with him. He who had so often baffled the wiles of the Indian and overmatched them in cunning, at length falls a victim to Indian strategy. I can look at it in no other manner, and I am pretty sure that when we get official reports we shall learn that the unfortunate General fell into a trap.”

—New York Times, July 7, 1876

“The precise particulars of that horrible catastrophe will never be known. There are no survivors. The course of the detachment, after it began the attack, is traced only by the bodies of the slain.”

—New York Times, July 7, 1876

“If such a catastrophe should provoke the people into demanding a speedy and complete revision of our Indian policy, the blood of our soldiers will not have been shed entirely in vain.”

—New York Tribune, July 7, 1876

“Death came to him as he would have wished, at the head of his column, on the field of honor.”

—Colorado Springs Gazette, July 8, 1876

“All we know of this harrowing massacre is learned by an inspection of the dead. General Custer and his brave five companies advanced to the attack, were veiled in the smoke of murderous muskets, and none escaped to tell the tale.”

—New York Herald, July 8, 1876

“The mysterious silence which reigned over those mutilated dead must have been more eloquent than any words, because amid such surroundings conjecture, aided by imagination, must have drawn a more dreadful picture of the battle than the tongues of the dead could have given had they been able to speak. All that we are ever likely to know of the immediate circumstances of the battle is mere inference from the position and appearance of the corpses. A dark pall of mystery hangs over the scene and will hang forever.”

—New York Herald, July 8, 1876

Major General Thomas L. Rosser: “As a soldier I would sooner today lie in the grave of General Custer and his gallant comrades alone in that distant wilderness, that when the ‘last trumpet’ sounds I could rise to judgment from my post of duty, than to live in the place of the survivors of the siege on the hills. I knew General Custer well…and, being on opposite sides during the late war, we often met and measured strength on the fields of Virginia; and I can truly say now that I never met a more enterprising, gallant or dangerous an enemy during those four years of terrible war, or a more genial, whole-souled, chivalrous gentleman and friend in peace than Major General George A. Custer.”

—New York Herald, July 11, 1876

“Had Custer let Sitting Bull escape after so much pains to find him, he would have incurred the indignant censure of every army officer and of the whole country. Inconsiderate and ungenerous minds have blamed him for not awaiting the arrival of Terry and Gibbon before making the attack. But if he had waited and given the Indians an opportunity to run away, what would have been said of him?”

—New York Herald, July 11, 1876

“This slaughter of General Custer and his troops is one of the most remarkable events of modern times….It is very unusual for the attacking party to be annihilated by the party of the defense. It looks very much as if Custer had greatly underrated the fighting capacity of his foe. The victory of the Sioux…is not very likely to inspire the troops with an extraordinarily ardent desire to get into close quarters with the Red Men, who are becoming ‘exceedingly angry.’”

—Deseret News, July 12, 1876

“If Custer was too weak without the support of Terry and Gibbon why was he sent away from them on an errand where they could not support him, and when he might have met the Indians at any time?”

—New York Herald, July 13, 1876

“A deed like this on the Yellowstone will shine out in our history with the splendor of Thermopylae in the history of Greece. The courage of Custer was as high as that of Leonidas….Custer's death has all the romance, all the beauty of high achievement. It has no parallel in our history, and few, indeed, in the history of other nations.”

—New York Herald, July 14, 1876

Gen. Andrew T. McReynolds: “General Custer may have been too impulsive, but, after all, the great forte of cavalry is reckless dash. Custer's only fault, if fault it may be termed, consists in failure. If it had been a success, as doubtless he had every reason to anticipate, imperishable laurels would have crowned his brow.”

—New York Tribune, July 15, 1876

“Enclosed please find $1 toward the Custer monument in commemoration of the greatest cavalry officer ever born—a man who always rode at the head of his men. I hereby suggest that the United States government should keep in its possession the plot of ground where Custer and his comrades were found riddled with the bullets of the cursed Sioux, and that it would be no more than right for them to erect a monument on the spot, so as to show future generations how she remembered her sons.”

—New York Herald, July 17, 1876

“Those who knew Custer do not wonder that he tried to make the most of it and hazarded all in an attempt to conquer the Sioux without assistance….[F]aith in his own fortune and the chafing he had received at the hands of the President…was the immediate cause of the disaster.”

—New York Herald, July 18, 1876

“Brave Custer's memory will ever be enshrined in the hearts of the pioneers of the west, and the Great West will now see to it that Custer's last battle shall be made the ‘beginning of the end’ of the Indian troubles on the frontier.”

—Weekly Rocky Mountain News, July 19, 1876

“The criticism of Major Reno that he did not go to the relief of Custer fails when the fact is stated that he had a narrow escape from Custer's fate whose command was five miles away. It was more than the gallant Reno could do to take care of himself.”

—Daily Colorado Chieftain, July 20, 1876

“Indians who believe that God punishes men for their wickedness and regards them for their good work will very certainly look upon their success in killing General Custer and his troops while invading the Sioux country for no better a purpose than the protection of whites who were violating law and justice as being significant of the will of the Great Spirit.”

—New York Herald, August 3, 1876

“The fate of the brave and gallant Custer has deeply touched the public heart, which sees only a fearless soldier leading a charge against an ambushed foe, and falling at the head of his men and in the thick of the fray.”

—Harper's Weekly, August 5, 1876

“We can hardly doubt that the disaster to our arms on the sad occasion of Custer's last attack was in some measure caused by a total absence of experience in horsemanship or the use of arms on the part of our troops, who were largely made up of recent recruits. It is well to understand that such recruits, who represent as good material for rank and file as is possessed by any country in the world, are not given the opportunities of serviceable drill, that any other country would furnish….Let us, then, take the recruit in the field. If his horsemanship be on a par with his rifle practice imagine him in action, with one hand grasping the pommel of his saddle, striving to retain his stirrupless and uncertain seat, while Sioux warriors in front dash toward him, yelling and waving their blankets, scaring horse and man, until the latter has his brains knocked out while looking round helplessly for succor.”

—New York Herald, August 5, 1876

Major General Thomas L. Rosser: “Custer did that which in ninety-nine cases out of 100 will succeed, but this by chance was the fatal exception, yet the result does not impair the value of the rule.”

—New York Herald, August 22, 1876

President Grant: “I regard Custer's massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary-wholly unnecessary.”

—New York Herald, September 2, 1876

“There is only one sure way to kill Indians, and that is to go where they are and kill them before they can kill you. Custer had the correct idea, but an insufficient force and an excess of bravery.”

—Weekly Rocky Mountain News, September 13, 1876

INTERLUDE

“He was the personification of bravery and dash”

As a one-time correspondent for the New York Tribune, Samuel J. Barrows (1845–1909) accompanied Colonel David S. Stanley's Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 (in which Custer participated) and Custer's Black Hills Expedition of 1874. Upon Custer's death, Barrows wrote the following tribute to his old friend, which was printed in the Tribune on July 10, 1876:

New York Tribune, Monday, July 10, 1876

REMINISCENCES OF GENERAL CUSTER.

A BORN CAVALRYMAN—COURAGE AND ENDURANCE—LOVE OF DISPLAY—HIS WRITINGS.

Cambridge, Mass., July 8, 1876.

To the Editor of the Tribune—

Sir: I accompanied Gen. Custer on the Yellowstone and Black Hills expeditions. He was a born cavalryman. He was never more in his element than when mounted on Dandy, his favorite horse, and riding at the head of his regiment. He once said to me, “I would rather be a private in the cavalry than a line officer in the infantry.” He was the personification of bravery and dash. His most bitter enemies never accused him of cowardice. If he had only added discretion to his valor he would have been a perfect soldier. His impetuosity very often ran away with his judgment. He was impatient of control. He liked to act independently of others and take all the risk and all the glory to himself. He frequently got himself into trouble by assuming more authority than really belonged to his rank. It was so on the Yellowstone expedition, where he came into collision with Gen. [David S.] Stanley, his superior officer, and was placed under arrest and compelled to ride at the rear of his column for two or three days, until Gen. [Thomas L.] Rosser, who fought against Custer in the Shenandoah Valley during the war,180 but was then acting as engineer of the Northern Pacific Railroad, succeeded in effecting a reconciliation. Custer and Stanley afterward got on very well, and perhaps the quarrel would never have occurred if the two generals had been left alone to themselves without the intervention of camp gossips, who sought to foster the traditional jealousy between infantry and cavalry. For Stanley was the soul of generosity, and Custer did not really mean to be arrogant; but from the time when he entered West Point to the day when he fell on the Big Horn, he was accustomed to take just as much liberty as he was entitled to.

For this reason, Custer worked most easily and effectively when under general orders, when not hampered by special restrictions, or his success [not] made dependent on anybody else. Gen. Terry understood his man when, in the order directing him to march up the Rosebud, he very liberally said: “The Department Commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability to wish to impose upon you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy.” But Gen. Terry did not understand Custer if he thought he would wait for Gibbon's support before attacking an Indian camp. Undoubtedly he ought to have done this; but with his native impetuosity, his reckless daring, his confidence in his own regiment, which had never failed him, and his love of public approval, Custer could no more help charging this Indian camp than he could help charging just so many buffaloes. He had never learned to spell the word “defeat”; he knew nothing but success, and if he had met the Indians on the open plain, success would undoubtedly have been his; for no body of Indians could stand the charge of the 7th Cavalry when it swept over the plains like a whirlwind. But in the Mauvaises Terres [Bad Lands] and the narrow valley of the Little Big Horn he did it at a fearful risk.

With all his bravery and self-reliance, his love of independent action, Custer was more dependent than most men on the kind approval of his fellows. He was even vain; he loved display in dress and in action. He would pay $40 for a pair of troop boots to wear on parade, and have everything else in keeping. On the Yellowstone expedition he wore a bright red shirt, which made him the best mark for a rifle of any man in the regiment. I remonstrated with him for this reckless exposure, but found an appeal to his wife more effectual, and on the next campaign he wore a buckskin suit. He formerly wore his hair very long, letting it fall in a heavy mass upon his shoulders, but cut if off before going out on the Black Hills [expedition], producing quite a change in his appearance.

But if vain and ambitious, Custer had none of those great vices which are so common and so distressing in the army. He never touched liquor in any form; he did not smoke or chew or gamble. In early life he had been addicted to some of these habits, but was entirely won from them by the loving, purifying influence of his devoted wife. He was a man of great energy and remarkable endurance. He could outride almost any man in his regiment, I believe, if it were put to a test. His men had many nicknames for him, which celebrated this hardihood. When he set out to reach a certain point at a certain time, you could be sure that he would be there if he killed every horse in the command. He was sometimes too severe in forcing marches, but he never seemed to get tired himself, and he never expected his men to be so. In cutting our way through the forests of the Black Hills, I have often seen him take an ax and work as hard as any of the pioneers. He was never idle when he had a pretext for doing anything. Whatever he did he did thoroughly. He would overshoot the mark, but never fall short. He fretted in garrison sometimes, because it was too inactive; but he found an outlet here for his energies in writing articles for the press. He made some enemies in the army by the freedom with which he wrote and criticized. I think it was not Custer's habit to add to his fame by disparaging the reputation of others. As he loved praise himself, so he liked to award it to others whenever it was due.

He had a remarkable memory. He could recall in its proper order every detail of any action, no matter how remote of which he was a participant. He was rather verbose in writing, and had no gifts as a speaker; but his writing interested the masses from their close attention to details, and from his facility with the pen as with the sword in bringing a thing to a climax. As he was apt to overdo in action, so he was apt to exaggerate in statement, not from any willful disregard of the truth, but because he saw things bigger than they really were. He did not distort the truth; he magnified it. He was a natural optimist. He took rose-colored views of everything, even of the miserable lands of the Northern Pacific Railroad. He had a historical memory, but not a historical mind. He was no philosopher; he could reel off facts from his mind better than he could analyze or mass them. He was not a student, nor a deep thinker. He loved to take part in events rather than to brood over them. He was fond of fun, genial and pleasant in his manner; a loving and devoted husband. It was my privilege to spend two weeks in his family at one time, and I know how happy he was in his social relations. His loss will be felt by those who had learned to know him through the productions of his pen; by the remnant of the famous Seventh he had so often led to victory; but by none more than by those who had won a place in his affection.

Lieutenant Calhoun, his brother-in-law, was a young man [thirty years old] equally temperate and exemplary. He served on the Black Hills expedition as adjutant.

Captain Thomas Custer was distinguished for the same daring and the same recklessness as his brother. He was a hard rider, a great hunter, and had often distinguished himself in action.

Lieutenant Hodgson was a brave young man from Philadelphia, an excellent officer who knew how to keep his company in fine order whether in garrison or on the march. He was generous to a fault and more than once has your correspondent shared his tent and his mess when prevented from reaching his own quarters. He was unmarried.

Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith was in command of Company E, one of the finest companies in the regiment. He was formerly on Gen. Custer's staff and was an excellent commissary. He leaves a wife, but no children.

Captain George W. Yates was one of the best-hearted men in the regiment. He had had long experience as a cavalry officer and knew every detail of the service. He was a good companion at the campfire and a brave man in the field. He leaves a wife and two children.

Lieutenant McIntosh, also married, was a half-breed who had received a fine education. His father was a member of the Hudson Bay Company. He knew nothing of Indian life in its wilder forms except as he met it while serving with his regiment.

S. J. B.

INTERLUDE

“The calamity is one of those things that could not be prevented”

This interesting interview with John Hobart Walker was printed in the New York Daily Graphic on July 11, 1876. Walker, a Civil War veteran and “prominent Brooklyn Grand Army Man,” had retired from the Twenty-third Infantry in March 1869 “after having been injured.” On June 6, 1891, he was confronted by Alfred Hull, who accused the retired captain and brevet major of “paying too close attention to Mrs. Hull.” A fight ensued and Walker, badly injured with kicks to the head and body and two fractured ribs, died five nights later. His death was reported in the New York Times on June 12, 1891.

New York Daily Graphic, Tuesday, July 11, 1876

AN INDIAN FIGHTER'S VIEWS.

“FIGHTING CAPTAIN JACK WALKER” ON THE RECENT MASSACRE AND THE METHODS OF THE RED MAN.

There is now engaged in business on Wall Street, a quiet, unassuming gentleman about thirty-five years old, physically light and lithe, with an open, intelligent countenance and agreeable manners. As far as appearance goes he would be one of the last men who would be selected as having endured the hardships incident to active military duties on the frontier. This gentleman is ex-Captain and Brevet Major John H. Walker, of the Fourteenth United States Infantry—known in the west, on account of his many successful encounters with the redskins as “Fighting Captain Jack Walker.” This officer was prominent in the campaigns during 1865–69 against the Pi Ute and Snake Indians, under command of General Crook and others, when the Pi Utes and Snake Indians far west of the Black Hills, in Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon, were whipped into their places after many sanguinary conflicts. Lieutenant Calhoun,181 the correspondent of The Graphic who was slain with Custer, was formerly a member of Major Walker's command, and was subsequently promoted to the Seventh Cavalry.¹⁸²

A reporter of The Graphic called upon Major Walker to ascertain his views regarding recent disasters and the general conduct of the Indian conflict. Among many other interesting details, Major Walker stated that the criticisms of the course of General Custer in forcing the fighting were out of place. His own plan, and that of all successful Indian fighters, was always to attack the Indians whenever they were found, and to do the best, regardless of their numbers. If such tactics were not pursued the Indians dispersed rapidly and were hard to hunt up again in sufficient bodies to allow of any severe punishment being inflicted upon them. General Custer had always held this view and practice in Indian warfare, and, until his last fatal battle, had been remarkably successful.

Major Walker's opinion of this final event is that Custer discovered the trail of the Indians and followed it energetically in the belief that he would not have time to communicate with Terry or receive reinforcements before the Indians got away; that he found them in his front rather suddenly, and thinking he would not have such an opportunity again, pitched in to do his best to whip them. Major Walker does not believe that General Custer had any correct knowledge of the force he was attacking, and thinks he must have been badly informed by his scouts. In all such campaigns much depends upon the scouts, and if they are poor or do not do their work thoroughly the commander is very apt to be misled. It is also his opinion that General Custer had a perfect right to make an attack without waiting for General Terry, as, by the latter's own report, he had instructed Custer to make such changes as his discretion suggested under extraordinary circumstances.

Major Walker also believes that in the battle recently fought by General Crook the Indians were found in larger numbers than was expected. “The fact is,” he said, “the Indians have left the reservations in very large numbers, going out with no other purpose than to join the hostile bands, and our army officers did not expect to find such large bodies of them. General Crook is a good and a stubborn fighter and will keep after them until he finds and whips them.” The Major was of the opinion that the effect of the Indian successes thus far will be to draw all the fighting Indians from the reservations, together with those known as renegades. The renegades are chiefly remnants of broken-up tribes, and leave the reservations for the sole purpose of plunder. “I have fought them,” said Major Walker, “when they would shake in the faces of my men the red blankets that had been issued to them on the reservations hundreds of miles distant. There are always plenty of white men who are ready to furnish arms and supplies to the Indians, and there is no law against their doing so. The Indians trade the stock they steal 400 or 500 miles away to these bad white men, and in this manner they get all the arms and ammunition they need.”

Major Walker is also of the opinion that the result will very soon demonstrate the wisdom of General Sheridan's application for money to establish posts on the Yellowstone. He says that at least two posts are needed there as points from which to carry on operations against the Indians whenever it becomes necessary, and he thinks the great mistake made by Congress for the last two years in refusing to appropriate $200,000 for this purpose will cost the country, besides the valuable lives already lost, many more and a vast amount of money. He states that the Indian war will last for many months, but does not believe that the Indians will keep together in large bands. They know the white men so well and their capability of putting a large force in the field, that they will scatter and divide. The Indians have remarkable facilities for concentrating at short notice. “They have,” says Major Walker, “as perfect a system of signals as any in existence. Fires on the tops of hills, lighted and extinguished in a certain way, and, when marching, leaving along their route piles of stones indicating their direction and numbers, are some of the means of communicating with each other.”

Regarding the composition of the armies for Indian warfare, Major Walker was emphatic in stating that both cavalry and infantry are needed, even if the cavalry does sometimes get ahead. He advocates the filling up of the cavalry companies to the maximum number of 100 men and then backing them with infantry, but does not think any more regiments are needed, especially if the trouble is not settled prior to the setting in of winter. It has always been General Crook's idea that the winter months, after all, are the best in which to deal with the redskins. They remain more in their camps in winter, and in consequence are more easily found. They cannot hunt as in summer, and have their supplies more concentrated.

“The Indians have 40,000 square miles to scatter about in,” said the Major, “but for all practical purposes the Government force will be large enough if the cavalry companies are filled up to 100 men each.”

Major Walker said: “After all, when we look squarely at the question, the Indians have some cause of complaint, and it is a fact that they believe they fight in defense of an inalienable right—certain rights which they will never yield until they are so subdued and annihilated as to render them glad to stay in any one locality where the march of civilization shall crowd them. We have marched so far in that direction and the necessity for opening up the wild lands is so great that our people will not, even with a semblance of justice to back the Indians, be dictated to by them. Hence they are bound to go under at no distant day and a large proportion of them will be killed in their resistance.”

Major Walker instanced the Nez Perces tribe of Idaho in connection with the belief held by the Indians generally that they were the owners of the country. This tribe of Indians has many educated men among their number, and the chief, Lawyer, speaks fluently four different languages. Their children have been educated at the East. Yet, with all this civilization, one branch of the tribe, under War Eagle, refused to sign the treaty, the chief proudly pointing to the history of the tribe that records no instance of resistance to a white man, and as proudly asserting that he would sign no treaty as he was one of the original owners of the soil.

In conclusion Major Walker said: “It is foolish for any one to think that General Custer could have waited for reinforcements. The calamity is one of those things that could not be prevented.”

INTERLUDE

Was the Battle of the Little Big Horn a “Massacre”?

In the days and weeks following the battle of the Little Big Horn, it was not uncommon to find the fight referred to as a massacre in the daily papers. However, just as quickly, an alternate view took shape, which objected to the term massacre. Although the New York Times was not above using the word, that didn't stop it from printing the following editorial on July 12:

If it is unreasonable to lay at the door of the peace policy results due strictly to deviations from it, there is a like lack of reason in the anger which styles Sitting Bull's recent victory a “fiendish massacre.” Custer went out to beat the Sioux. Had he succeeded, would he have been guilty of a “fiendish massacre”? The soldier has blows to take as well as to give, and there is no justice in styling the defeat of an attacking force “a fiendish massacre,” when its success would have been called a glorious victory. We did not fancy that the Southern people deserved extermination because we were beaten at Bull Run, nor did the rebels call the defeat at Gettysburg a “fiendish massacre.”

Three days later, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle took up the cause:

There appears to have been no treachery in this encounter. The Indians were not the attacking party. They were acting on the offensive against their pursuers, and the fearful execution of their arms was wrought in actual combat on the field. Had they been found in smaller force, and had a few hundred of them been cut down by our gallant soldiers, no particular animosity would have been felt, and new laurels would have been given to the brave commander.

It wasn't long before Wendell Phillips, a well known humanitarian, joined the dispute.183 On July 19, the New York Herald reprinted one of his letters to the Boston Transcript:

Will you please explain why even your columns talk of the “Custer Massacre”? The Sioux war, all confess, is one that our misconduct provoked. During such a war General Custer has fallen in a fair fight, simply because the enemy had more soldierly skill and strategy than Custer had. What kind of war is it, where if we kill the enemy, it is death; if he kills us it is a massacre? When the farmers of Concord and Lexington, in 1775, shot the British invaders of their villages was it a massacre? When the Southerners mowed us down at Bull Run and Ball's Bluff, there was no talk of massacre. When the North paid them in their coin at Gettysburg and Antietam, there were no [newspaper] columns with staring capitals “Gettysburg Massacre.” The general use of this abusive term betrays the unfairness of the American press.”

On August 2, 1876, the Deseret News, a long-time champion of Indian rights, reprinted an editorial that first appeared in the Sacramento Record-Union:

A curious instance of the ease with which an improper use of any word or term is accepted has occurred recently in connection with the destruction of Custer's command. From one end of the country to the other the event has been spoken of as a “massacre.” Perhaps a definition in the dictionaries may appear to warrant the employment of such a term, but if we wish to perceive how unjustifiably it is used in this connection we have only to inquire: Supposing the case had been reversed, and Custer's command had killed all the Sioux—as they assuredly would have done had they been able—should we have called the event a “massacre” of the Indians? Most assuredly we should have done nothing of the kind, but, instead, it would have been designated a “crushing defeat,” a “terrible blow,” a “glorious victory,” and so forth. The simple truth is that General Custer went out to slaughter the Indians, and the Indians slaughtered him, in a square, standup fight. No doubt he was outnumbered, but he knew that the odds were against him when he charged down upon the village, and he took his chance with his eyes open. It is just as well to call things by their right names, for presently Custer may be avenged upon the Sioux, and then it will be awkward to have to talk of the “Sioux massacre,” and might seem like disparaging the bravery of our gallant boys in blue.

A Titled British Ass

Daily Colorado Chieftain, July 23, 1876

In the house of commons on July 21, one Sir Edward Watkin, who appears to be one of those far-away-from-home philanthropists whose sight is too distant to observe any trouble going on under his nose, but can distinctly see that which is five thousand miles away, has turned his attention to the Custer massacre, and sympathizes deeply with the unfortunate and downtrodden Sioux, whose last little playful prank was to murder a gallant officer of the United States army and some two hundred and fifty of his men. Had Custer and his men been killed in a fair fight with civilized people their death would not have created so much indignation, but when surrounded by four times their number and every man butchered, scalped and mutilated, the indignant people of the United States are not in a condition to listen calmly to the unmelodious braying of this titled British ass….Sir Edward should remember the homely proverb to the effect that advice unasked for has a disagreeable odor, and also that those who poke their noses into the affairs of others sometimes get those noses smashed.

—Editorial

Thomas Harrington, late a trooper with the Seventh Infantry, helped clarify the issue when he stated that Sitting Bull “might have taken high rank as a military genius” if not for “the butchery that ensued [after the battle],” then added, “if he whips us [again] there will be a second massacre.”184 In other words, it was not the battle itself that was considered a massacre, but the extensive and deliberate mutilations that came afterward. So yes, there was a battle and there was a massacre of sorts that followed, but they were two separate issues, even if the newspapers did not always take the time to make the distinction.

INTERLUDE

A Father's Accusations and a Veteran's Rebuttal

Among the slain on Custer's battlefield was twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant James G. Sturgis, son of Colonel Samuel D. Sturgis, the commanding officer of the Seventh Cavalry. Several days after learning of his only son's death, he was interviewed by a St. Louis reporter. Basing his statements on early reports of the battle, from which he tried to re-create the order of events, Colonel Sturgis made some wild accusations against Custer, accusing him of purposely sacrificing his son and another young lieutenant, twenty-nine-year-old James E. Porter, while he held back with the older, more experienced, officers as a personal guard. On July 17, 1876, his allegations were printed in the New York Times, in an article headlined “Gen. Custer's Death—An Interview with Colonel Sturgis,” part of which stated:

Why was not Gen. Custer at the head of his troops instead of a long distance in the rear of them? Why was not his body found where the hottest fight occurred, instead of back on that knoll? No officers were found dead at the front but those young lieutenants who had been sent there to die as a sacrifice….And it is proposed to erect a monument to the memory of Gen. Custer! What for! Monuments commemorate deeds worthy of emulation by after generations. Is such conduct as Custer's to be held up to our youth as a bright example to follow? He was guilty of disobedience and of sacrificing good men's lives to win notoriety for himself.

The elder Sturgis was understandably distressed and clearly grieving for his son, and Custer was the obvious and easy target for his anger. However, such public statements, especially those tainted with absurdity, were likely to stir a retort, and that is exactly what Sturgis drew forth in a lengthy and detailed response from Edwin A. Sherburne, a veteran of the Civil War. Sherburne's letter, originally published in the Chicago Tribune, was reprinted in the New York Herald on July 26:

New York Herald, Wednesday, July 26, 1876

GENERAL STURGIS.

AN IOWA VOLUNTEER PAYS HIS RESPECTS TO CUSTER'S TRADUCER.

Chicago, July 22, 1876.

To the Editor of the Chicago Tribune—

Your daily of July 19 contains a letter from your St. Louis correspondent relating what General Sturgis said to him on the 18th about General Custer. The substance of Sturgis' remarks is an insinuation that General Custer was a coward, because (as he avers) “the bodies of 300 or more soldiers were found piled up in a little ravine, while behind were found those of Custer and his ‘chosen officers.’ What a spectacle,” he says, “it would have been to find 300 soldiers collected on one side, and, in the rear, the commander of the little force surrounded by its officers! Mind, I don't want to impugn their bravery!” Oh, no! But he means for every one else to. He then flings in the assertion that “Custer was insanely ambitious of glory,” and that “Custer's luck affords a good clue to his ruling passion,” criticizes “Custer's want of judgment, which drew these men into a trap,” and then says that “the records” show him (Sturgis) to have been one of the “most successful Indian fighters,” that “in 1860 he followed the Kiowas and Comanches so that their camps were entirely broken up and they caused no further trouble.” He also says that he told somebody in St. Paul two years ago that he “didn't believe Custer knew sufficient of the Indian character to fight them to advantage, that he was liable to be led into a trap, in which case I (Sturgis) told the gentleman there would be no one left to tell the tale.” And then he congratulates himself that now, at the first important attack, “the prophecy is fulfilled,” and winds up by asserting that General Custer was unpopular with his troops, was a tyrant, and had no regard for the soldiers under him. Now, Mr. Editor, cowardice in the face of the enemy is, under the laws of war, punishable with death. It ought also to be the law that a cowardly attack on the reputation of a dead soldier should meet the same fate.

We regard with contempt the man who strikes a woman or a child, or any one much weaker then he, and not able to defend himself. We call the Indian a fiend and dastard because he mutilates the dead bodies of his helpless victims, and yet these acts are brave and honorable compared with rending by falsehood or cunning innuendo the soldiery character of one who, so far as we know, died fighting with his face to the enemy, with flashing blade and straining nerve to the very last. “But,” says General Sturgis, “mind, I don't want to impugn their bravery!” To add that remark to what he had already said was like styling a man a thief and in the next breath averring that he did not want to impugn his honesty! Now, sir, General Custer was bound by no ties to me other than those which knitted him to every soldier of our country. But, as soldiers, we do claim him as a comrade and a brother, of whose every record we are proud; and, sir, in the name of the comrades with whom he fought, and to whom his presence at the head of their column was an inspiration which told like a lightning flash on the enemy in many a charge and battle, I deny that he was a “tyrant” or regarded “unkindly by his men.” The attempt to stain him with cowardice needs no denial. The unanimous testimony of all who served with him and of all who ever heard of him refutes that, and “Custer's luck,” as General Sturgis sneeringly styles Custer's success, was what naturally resulted to a soldier whose heart was a stranger to fear, who went to battle with an eye gleaming like a blazing star, and whose arm was ever found in the thickest of the fight, dealing blows both well directed and resistless.

General Sturgis' object seems to be to get before the mind of his listener a comparison of his “record” with that of the dead General, which shall be injurious to the latter. To assist General Sturgis' memory in this laudable effort, I would suggest to your correspondent in his next interview to ask General Sturgis if, in the summer of 1864, he did not march out of Memphis, Tenn., at the head of a fine division of from 7,000 to 10,000 men to attack General Forrest (a rebel cavalry general known to be near and supposed to have about the same number of men), and if he did not march with the most indifferent ignorance right into “a trap” set for him by Forrest, get caught by surprise so completely that his entire command, without striking a blow, was broken and scattered in utter rout and confusion,185 and what were not captured sent flying back to Memphis in little detached parties, like a flock of scared sheep before a pack of wolves, minus guns, knapsacks, artillery, baggage and wagons? And ask him if he and a “few of his chosen officers” were not among the first to arrive in Memphis, and if he was not seen the next day after his return playing billiards in a saloon there, while his weary, hunted soldiers were straggling into town every now and then in little detached parties, while their wounded and dead comrades still lay on the field of rout (not battle). And if he did not remain “behind” in Memphis while General A. J. Smith went, with no greater number of men, and administered a sound drubbing to Forrest on the field of Tupelo [July 14–15, 1864]. And, when this “successful Indian fighter” has answered these questions, ask him if he remembers winning the regard of his soldiers by ordering a private of the Second Kansas Volunteers to be lashed to the wheel of a cannon and scourged with twenty lashes on his bare back, and, when he failed to find a man in that regiment who would execute the sentence, ordering two “regulars” from his own regiment to come and do the job, while he stood by to see that it was well “laid on”; and if, when all things were ready, an officer of the Second Kansas, at the head of his battalion, under arms, did not step forward and tell General Sturgis that the sound of the first blow on their comrade's back was the signal for his battalion to riddle the “generous, beloved General” with bullets, and if the said General's cheek didn't blanch with fear when he cast his eyes down the constantly lengthening line of stern frontiersmen who faced him, and if he didn't walk off, leaving them to free their unwhipped comrade. When he shall have answered all this to the satisfaction of your correspondent and the readers of his vituperative story, and then pointed to any authenticated instance where he has been entitled to the name of warrior, it may be a little less indecent for him to make comparisons between himself and General Custer. But until then he should “lay his mouth in the dust.”

E. A. Sherburne, formerly of the 27th Iowa Infantry Volunteers.