Custer’s Surprise Attack Along the Washita
As unkind fate would have it, the desperate attempts of the Northern Great Plains tribes—the Lakota (or Sioux) and their allies (the Cheyenne)—to preserve their distinctive nomadic culture and way of life by the mid-1870s could not have been more ill timed. Quite simply, the Indians of the Northern Great Plains had never faced an opposition more powerful, or as deadly efficient in securing victory at any cost, as the American army. America’s military leadership consisted of experienced former northern leaders of the Civil War.
With relentless single-mindedness, these highly placed commanders had led the Union to decisive victory during four years of brutal blood shedding. The American military machine’s experience in the art of invading an enemy homeland dated back to the Mexican–American War in 1846–1848. They were also the architects of vanquishing the South by the merciless art of total war, sending the Confederacy into the trash bin of history. President Ulysses S. Grant and his top lieutenants, Ireland-born Philip Henry Sheridan and William T. Sherman, were now the primary orchestrators of another war against a free people far west of the Mississippi. During the Civil War, they crushed the Southern people’s will to resist by waging war on civilian centers and their logistical support systems. Tough and ruthless, these hard men in high places had learned lessons that were now directed at the so-called hostile tribes of the Northern Great Plains, who resisted white encroachment and white civilization’s relentless march.
America’s leaders were now focused on the task of subjugating the latest threat to their nation’s inevitable push west in the name of Manifest Destiny and national progress: the Sioux people. The Sioux were the most defiant of the indigenous people of the Northern Great Plains, but had never before faced a more relentless or successful opponent. During the 1864 Campaign in Virginia, then–Lieutenant General Grant had ordered his top lieutenant, Sheridan, to transform Virginia’s fertile Shenandoah Valley into “a desert.” This task had been accomplished with a destructive zeal by Sheridan and his boys in blue, including his cavalry. Among Sheridan’s men was Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, who skillfully commanded his hard-hitting “Wolverine” (Michigan) cavalry brigade of his division. The nation’s top military leaders now brought the core concepts of total war to the Northern Great Plains.
Since the surrender of the battered Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on Palm Sunday 1865, the chances of open conflict increased between the Indians and the white migrants who pushed ever further west toward the setting sun. As during the Civil War, America’s military leaders knew that the key to decisive victory lay in targeting the civilian populace (the foundation of the Indian support system) to eliminate war-waging capabilities and the will to resist among Native Americans. Therefore, as early as 1868, the United States Army’s top leadership adopted the highly effective tactical formula of reaping success: attacking Indian villages in winter during the harsh weather conditions of the Great Plains, when the tribes were stationary and vulnerable.1
For an expansionist nation with an insatiable appetite for gaining additional territory, stretching even beyond significant differences in race and culture, the real source of conflict between the two people boiled down to one basic issue: the Indians possessed what the American people wanted for their own, a seemingly endless expanse of rich and fertile land. After the Civil War, the United States government had established one treaty after another with the Indians, but these flimsy Machiavellian agreements—every one of them—had been systematically broken by the whites. Representing the young nation’s pulse, the relentless push west of the American people never ended, ensuring the inevitable armed clashes with the Indians and shattering of treaties in their wake.
A Different Type of War
While America possessed a good many Civil War heroes, few of them successfully adjusted to a new type of warfare they were to now face. As a strange as it seems, the destiny of no United States officer was more eerily intertwined with the proud Cheyenne tribe (far more than the Sioux) than one of the North’s greatest Civil War heroes, George Armstrong Custer. Ever since being assigned to service on the Great Plains not long after the Civil War’s end, Custer had met the elusive art of Indian fighting with considerable frustration. Quite simply, much like other officers, he had trouble even finding Indians to fight. Therefore, Custer still had to prove himself in the Campaign of 1876. Since his Civil War glory days, Custer found the task of achieving success against the Northern Great Plains warriors to be far greater than he had imagined.
A West Pointer schooled in conventional warfare who graduated last in his class, Custer experienced frustration for the first time in his life when attempting to make the extremely difficult adjustment from conventional warfare to asymmetrical warfare on the seemingly endless prairies. The series of sparkling victories that had seemingly come so easily for Custer during the Civil War were only a distant memory. None of Custer’s successes had been more important than on the third day at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There, in July 1863, he and his hard-charging Michigan cavalrymen had thwarted General Robert E. Lee’s finest cavalryman, James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart, from striking into the Army of the Potomac’s rear in conjunction with “Pickett’s Charge.” By relying on his time-proven favorite tactic of leading the headlong attack, Custer played a key role in saving the day for the Union several miles east of Cemetery Ridge.
Then, near the war’s end, the seemingly charmed “boy general” and his hard-riding cavalrymen had aggressively pursued what little remained of Lee’s exhausted army after it had been forced to evacuate the fortifications of Petersburg, Virginia, and fled west in early April 1865. Custer had personally led the vigorous pursuit, including one of the war’s last cavalry attacks. With his hard-hitting style, he had helped to force Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on Palm Sunday 1865, after cutting off his opponents’ avenue of retreat farther west. It had been most appropriate that Custer had received the white surrender flag of the fabled Army of Northern Virginia.
Custer basked in the glow of a widely celebrated national hero of a victorious nation. After having earned a major general’s rank, Custer never forgot his shining moment in the sun on May 23, 1865. At that time, he led his famed cavalry division during the victory parade of the Army of the Potomac down the broad Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. With long blonde hair flowing, he had impressed the new president and the nation’s highest-ranking military leaders before a cheering populace. While serving on the western frontier, these resounding cheers still rang in Custer’s memory, something that he still cherished while chasing Indians on the dreary Great Plains, now devoid of glory and far from national recognition. Any chance of reliving that golden time—the zenith of a distinguished military career that had reached unprecedented heights for the young American hero—had seemingly passed him by.
Instead of winning glory, the thankless job of hard service and fast-moving warriors slipping through his fingers deflated Custer’s self-esteem. Victory proved elusive for Custer for the first time in his life. Most of all, by winter 1868 (more than half a decade removed from Gettysburg), a frustrated Custer needed a victory in this strange, primeval land so different from his native Midwest as never before.2
Surprise Attack on a Cold November Dawn
Since Lee’s surrender more than three years before, as a professional military man, Custer had naturally dreamed of reaping still another smashing victory to once again electrify the American nation. The mundane service on the Great Plains seldom provided true opportunities for an ambitious officer long accustomed to victory, however. Therefore, Custer had been not only frustrated but also humiliated in attempting to achieve victory over the most elusive opponent he had ever faced.
Suddenly, like a gift presented by Mars, the Roman God of War, orders from headquarters and bitter winter weather suddenly became Custer’s best allies to greatly enhance his chances for achieving a rare victory against a most confounding adversary. The harsh winter weather of 1868 ensured that the Southern Cheyenne, including Chief Black Kettle’s village, remained stationary in winter’s depths and vulnerable to a surprise cavalry attack. However, Black Kettle was friendly, presenting a moral dilemma. Unlike so many young warlike chiefs, the mature Black Kettle possessed the wisdom to have early realized that the Cheyenne’s best chance for survival was peaceful accommodation with white people. He knew that attempting to defeat these powerful interlopers and their seemingly endless numbers was an unwise policy that would forever doom the Cheyenne.3
Doing the dirty work of General Sherman (who emphasized to “use all the powers [to vanquish] the enemies of our race”) and General Sheridan, Custer had the odds in his favor by targeting Black Kettle’s vulnerable village on the Washita in winter. Under orders from his superiors, Custer now possessed his best opportunity to reap a success. Not only were these peaceful Indians now encamped in Black Kettle’s village, but also many warriors—particularly the ever-defiant Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, who wanted to fight white encroachment to the bitter end instead of trying accommodation like other Indians—were absent.
With Sheridan’s personal blessings and under his orders, Custer and his 7th Cavalry departed their encampment amid a raging snowstorm that greatly increased the odds for a successful surprise attack on an immobile and unwary adversary, whose elusiveness in spring and summer was legendary. When the 7th Cavalry arrived in Washita’s snow-covered valley, a personal reconnaissance by Custer and his trusty Osage scouts revealed that Black Kettle’s sleeping village lay completely vulnerable in the tree-lined bottoms along the frozen river. After dividing his command to hit the village from multiple points, Custer prepared to unleash a sudden dawn surprise attack of four detachments. Typically confident, Custer believed at this time that there “[were] not Indians enough in the country to whip the Seventh Cavalry.”4
When Custer struck the Cheyenne village at the cold dawn of November 27, 1868, he hit hard. Black Kettle was killed during the 7th Cavalry’s relatively easy victory. Custer’s losses were light in catching his opponent by surprise. His younger brother, Captain Thomas “Tom” Ward Custer, was slightly wounded while charging by his brother’s side. Winning national recognition for his Washita “victory,” Custer had succeeded in overwhelming a peaceful village, thanks to heavy snow and a totally unprepared opponent. In fact, this success was so thorough and easy that Custer thereafter viewed the overwhelming of Indian villages as a relatively easy undertaking: a dangerous delusion that was destined to have fatal consequences for him and nearly half of the 7th Cavalry in less than eight years.5
Indeed, in part because of Custer’s one-sided Washita success, the stage had been early and partly set for the upcoming disaster at the Little Bighorn, especially after top military leadership lavishly praised Custer’s tactics, including dividing the regiment, at the Washita. For such reasons, Custer’s one–sided success renewed his old sense of confidence from the Civil War years. In Sherman’s ruthless words from a letter that emphasized no mercy to any Indians who stood in the way of America’s relentless march to the Pacific: “I am well satisfied with Custer’s attack” on the Washita “and would not have wept if he had served [the other Indian bands] in the same style. I want you all to go ahead; kill and punish the … Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Kiowas.”6
Despite the glowing words for Custer’s performance on that cold November morning, the truth was actually far different. Indeed, what was “most remarkable about the Battle of the Washita, as it came to be known, is how largely unremarkable it is” on every level.7 Like military leadership saddled with the nasty business of trying to halt the brutal warfare that was impossible (offering no quarter by both sides) between the two entirely incompatible people, most Americans of the day conveniently overlooked the Washita’s ugly realities. Nevertheless, this one snowy morning in late November along the Washita made Custer “one of the best-known Indian fighters of his age.”8
Although he was only following orders, Custer’s unprovoked attack on the peaceful Southern Cheyenne village followed the same relentless pattern initiated by his predecessors in the West. Under orders to “kill Cheyennes whenever and wherever found,” Colorado soldiers had won another “victory” in attacking the friendly Southern Cheyenne village of the same ill-fated Black Kettle (who too willingly trusted the guarantees of whites) at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, in late November 1864.
Personal ambitions and politics also explained the killing of mostly Cheyenne women and children at Sand Creek, whose male family members were away in pursuit of buffalo. Due to politics, the Colorado Territory’s governor desired no peace with the Cheyenne, who actually wanted peace for self-preservation. Most of all, this consummate politician knew that his political success was based upon the slaughter of the Cheyenne to garner popular appeal and votes that guaranteed higher office. Equally ambitious military leaders also fell in step with political leaders in order to advance their careers. General Samuel R. Curtis, a former Civil War general, emphasized to Colorado’s top military man that “I want no peace till the Indians suffer more.”9 Therefore, the Colorado soldiers had been ordered to “[k]ill all the Indians you come across,” setting the stage for the massacre at Sand Creek.10 However, to be entirely fair, whites and Indians equally demonstrated the evil capacity to display extreme levels of depravity in this bloody clash of divergent cultures on the Great Plains.11
Setting the Stage for Another Indian War
The settlers’ relentless push west, and the resulting conflict with indigenous people, caused the United States government to attempt a more drastic solution. Since most native people were generally peaceful if left alone, only a relatively few warriors, usually young men, conducted raids against isolated settlers (to win individual recognition to elevate warrior status). The government took action to permanently separate the two people to halt the bloody clashes. Therefore, to confine the Great Plains Indians (a tragic fate for a wide-ranging nomadic peoples who followed the buffalo herds) to a stationary and unfamiliar way of life, the government established the reservation system. As the army’s commander before he became president in March 1869 and before his personal positions hardened, Grant realized that “a good part of our difficulties arise from treating all Indians as hostile when any portion of them commit acts that makes a campaign against them necessary.”12
Therefore, as a solution for dealing with the largest and most warlike tribe, the Lakota (Sioux of seven tribes), of the Northern Great Plains, the Great Sioux Reservation was established by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The overall strategic plan formulated at the White House seemed to be a workable solution at first, but only to a limited degree. By 1870, and according to the treaty’s provisions, more than half of the Sioux were living on the reservations and drawing government rations—instead of leading a traditional nomadic life searching for buffalo over their traditional hunting grounds of the Powder River basin, including rivers like the Little Bighorn, south of the Yellowstone River.13
The Sacred Black Hills
The Black Hills was one of the last bountiful natural preserves, filled with game and distinguished by a pristine beauty, not yet overrun by white settlers. It was a very special place to the freedom-loving nomadic people who roamed it. Indeed, situated in the middle of the vast expanse of the Northern Great Plains and part of the Great Sioux Reservation, the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory were the most sacred ground of Northern Great Plains tribes. The Sioux believed that the Great Spirit dwelled among these rocky, forested mountains that rose up from the sprawling grassy plains like a giant beacon. The Lakota people called these magnificent hills—the home of the tribe’s most revered ancient traditions and core religious beliefs—by the revered name of Paha Sapa. This Lakota name translated into the “Hills that are Black,” and they were covered in dark carpets of luxurious Ponderosa pines and virgin Black Hills spruce of immense size. Consisting of the most sacred of grounds that lay at the very center of the moral, spiritual, and cultural world of the Lakota and Cheyenne, the Black Hills were strictly off limits to white interlopers as guaranteed by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Placing the struggle of people, regardless of race, in its proper historical context—that of a larger struggle for possession of the best lands—the aggressive Lakota had forced the Kiowa out of the Black Hills to take possession and claim the lands as their own.
Open warfare between the Sioux and the whites was now inevitable, thanks to long-existing rumors that gold lay along the rocky bottoms of its clear streams and just below the thin topsoil. White trespassers on this holy ground were guaranteed to engender a violent response. Nevertheless, under orders from Division of the Missouri commander General Sheridan, Custer led his controversial summer 1874 expedition southwest from Fort Abraham Lincoln, located on the Missouri River in today’s North Dakota, into the Black Hills situated in southwest South Dakota.
With President Grant’s permission, Sheridan—the grizzled warrior who had so thoroughly ravished the Shenandoah Valley to play his part in destroying the Confederate Army’s support system—planned to pry this central foundation of Lakota spiritual faith away from the Sioux people, weakening them internally. He planned for the building of forts in the area to all but guarantee complete subjugation. One of Custer’s men, New York–born Private William Othneil Taylor, who had enlisted at age seventeen in the 7th Cavalry in mid–January 1872, wrote how the expedition was launched, “against the protest of the Indians, and in plain, direct violation of the treaty [of 1868 and] Gold was discovered, white men flocked to the El Dorado notwithstanding the gross violation of the treaty.”14 This transgression was deeply felt by native people. Like so many others of his tribe (the Sioux’s closest ally) who also considered the Black Hills sacred, ancestral homeland, a Cheyenne warrior named Wooden Leg had been born in the Black Hills.15 We’ll hear more from Wooden Leg later, as his memoir brings the battle to vivid life.
Concern for another people’s spiritual ground no longer mattered by the early 1870s, because the Black Hills became a national obsession of a growing nation on the move. After all, this was “the Gilded Age, and fortune–making was the national sport” 16 across America. An aggressive people on the march desired what was most revered by a highly spiritual people whose concept of the world was based upon the Black Hills. This situation guaranteed an inevitable bloody showdown along the Little Bighorn River, as if ordained by destiny and the Gods.
In 1875, after the gold rush to the Black Hills, the United States government launched the Senator William B. Allen Commission in an attempt to purchase the Black Hills. However, the so-called hostile Sioux, best represented by leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, intimidated any chiefs who dared to sign away the land. The leaders of the free-roaming (non-reservation or non-treaty) Lakota in the Yellowstone and Powder River country where the last of the great buffalo herds were found to support the nomadic ways, Sitting Bull (spiritual and political leader of the Hunkpapa Sioux) and Crazy Horse (war leader of the Oglala Sioux) were determined not to lose the Black Hills or their traditional way of life at any cost. Therefore, no treaty to hand over the sacred Black Hills was signed.
Given this frustrating situation that kept the Black Hills out of white hands, drastic action was needed by Washington, DC, to secure them. This required more devious means. At the White House on November 3, 1875, a cynical President Grant, Richmond’s conqueror and head of a corrupt administration, along with other top officials and military leaders, agreed “that war was the best solution.”17 Here, along the Potomac’s banks and under the Washington Monument’s shadow, a new war against the Sioux was artificially “contrived” in the White House. However, no one in Washington, DC imagined the ultimate high cost of these calculated decisions: the destruction of the revered Civil War hero once known as the “boy general,”18 along with his elite cavalry regiment.
Clearly, because the Sioux refused to sell the Black Hills, a dark Machiavellianism dominated the White House proceedings to determine the area’s fate and, ultimately, that of the Sioux. Almost everyone, including the commission, had been convinced early on that a good deal of coercive leverage (i.e., military might) was now needed to forcefully convince the Sioux to sell the Black Hills. America’s leaders, therefore, had fully realized that no purchase of the Black Hills was possible, until “the army had taught the Lakota a lesson”19 that they would never forget.
After the sacred Black Hills had been violated, and knowing that these relentless whites now sought to gain the land by unethical means, the Lakota and Cheyenne chiefs (especially Crazy Horse, whose father and grandfather had been holy men) discussed the possibility of having to go to war only because they no longer had a choice. They knew that they would have to fight to the bitter end to save their ancestral ways and people.20
Victims of the insatiable greed for the yellow metal that made sane white men absolutely crazy, the Cheyenne’s sad plight can be seen in the words of a Southern Cheyenne woman, Howling Woman (Kate Bighead was her reservation, or “white,” name). She explained the setting of the stage for the eventual showdown at Little Bighorn:
“I came to the Northern Cheyennes when their reservation was in the Black Hills country (1868–1874). White people found gold there, so the Indians had to move out. The Cheyennes were told that they must go to another reservation, but not many of them made the change. They said it was no use, as the white people might want their reservation too [so therefore] Many Cheyenne and many Sioux also, went to live in the hunting ground between the Powder and Bighorn rivers.”21
The Bighorn, Little Bighorn, and Powder rivers (from west to east with the Tongue River and Rosebud running in the same direction between the Little Bighorn, the eastern tributary of the Bighorn, and the Powder River) flowed north into the Yellowstone River. Running northeast, the Yellowstone eventually entered the Missouri River. Free of white people and all traces of their corrupt, strange civilization, this magnificent land of unspoiled beauty and natural plenty was an unspoiled buffalo country. Here, some of the last remaining vast herds of buffalo still roamed free over an untamed landscape. Most of all, these pristine lands and best remaining hunting grounds provided an ideal haven for the most uncompromising Sioux bands under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Sitting Bull was a “deep thinker,” who bestowed insights and wisdom on his people, helping them to prosper.
As reported to the War Department in November 1875, increasing numbers of Sioux, including the bands of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, were now off the reservation in the unceded territory, which was overflowing with game, and breathtaking beauty.22 Throughout the past, the Southern Cheyenne had often ridden north to join their Northern Cheyenne cousins to hunt the seemingly endless buffalo herds in the Powder River country.23 Buffalo country also included the pristine region around the picturesque river that the Sioux called the “Greasy Grass”: a name bestowed from morning dew simmering off the tall grass that lined the Little Bighorn River (the river’s “white” name) that flowed west of the Powder.24
The Lakota people and their Cheyenne allies were not about to allow the desecration of the Black Hills and the loss of their best hunting grounds without a fight. As early as summer 1874, Lakota chiefs had warned the United States Army that war would erupt if the Black Hills were desecrated by whites. Nevertheless, the United States Government had dispatched a second (Custer led the first) expedition to the Black Hills during spring 1875, which had led to the congressional purchase attempt. Now the revered spirits of ancestors and the Great Spirit of this virgin land had been violated as never before. By the end of 1875, at least 15,000 miners had invaded the Black Hills, scaring off the game, polluting the land, and ensuring that the outbreak of war was only a matter of time.25
Feeling violated, angry Sioux looked upon the route of Custer’s initial 1874 expedition into the Black Hills as the opening of “the Thieves’ Road,” which led to the holy ground’s desecration. Clearly, by spring 1876, the Sioux and Cheyenne had plenty of old scores to settle with Custer, who was simply following orders from headquarters, thus becoming a symbolic representative of all that was immoral to the native peoples.26 A final showdown had been brewing for many years. Deep-seated grievances of the Cheyenne went all back to 1864 with the attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful village of Southern Cheyenne. A victim of a corrupt system of an aggressive alien people, a foreign nation, and their army, Black Kettle lamented how he once had been “the friend of the white man, but since they have come and cleaned out our lodges, horses, and everything else, it is hard for me to believe white men any more.”27
Understanding why Custer and his men were about to pay the ultimate price for their society’s and government’s longtime—and seemingly endless—transgressions, Sergeant John Ryan, Company M, 7th Cavalry, correctly emphasized how the “Black Hills expedition did more to start the Indians than anything else and it soon became known that a general war with the northern Sioux was about to break forth.”28
Ordered to Return to the Reservation
Literally pushed into a corner, the increasingly desperate Great Plains warriors would finally get their long-awaited opportunity to unleash their pent-up desperation and wrath along the pristine waters of the Greasy Grass River, because of serious bungling in high places of the army and government from the 1876 Campaign’s beginning. Secret plans for waging an aggressive war against the Lakota had been in place early on, including a manufactured excuse for the launching offensive operations. During spring 1876, reservation agents reported increasing numbers of Sioux warriors departing because the buffalo herds were once again on the move in search of fresh grass, crossing the Yellowstone and heading south toward the Tongue River during their annual migration. Corruption led to famine on the Great Reservation, forcing an exodus to the rich hunting grounds of the unceded lands. Ignoring the fact that most warriors were only riding off to pursue the buffalo for their survival, like generations of warriors before them as part of a traditional way of life, Generals Sherman and Sheridan saw the building up of strength among the bands of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull for only ill intent, as if they still waging war against the Confederacy.
As mentioned, an ideal excuse for initiating a new war against the Sioux had been established by the government with an artful skill calculated to achieve strategic and national goals, especially securing the Black Hills. Knowing that not enough sufficient time had been allowed for any compliance with the impracticable deadline, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward Smith had arbitrarily ordered that all wayward Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were to report to their respective agencies by January 31, 1876. As could be expected for such a late summons, only mere handful of warriors reported, but not the bands of Sitting Bull’s and Crazy Horse’s warriors who roamed deep in buffalo country and refused to recognize the white man’s reservation system.
Nothing was more important to these fast-moving nomads of the plains than the buffalo, the most sacred animal of the Great Plains people. Indeed, the buffalo served as the very foundation of tribal life, both physical and spiritual. Noncompliance to this laughable government dictate to return to the reservations proved the flimsy excuse for the United States Army to launch a powerful punitive campaign against a free-roaming people who were now focusing on hunting the buffalo for subsistence at the traditional time and place.29 Roaming at will in the Powder River country south of the Yellowstone, these surviving buffalo now fed on what was commonly called the “Buffalo curly grass.”30
Of course, this calculated scenario that guaranteed widespread noncompliance to an arbitrary mandate manufactured by Washington, DC, was expertly contrived by hardened cynics. In Private Taylor’s words, “many Indians from the different Agencies went out with the consent of their agents to hunt Buffalo in the unceded country [because] they had the right to do this under the treaty [and] []there was more reason for them to go at this time because there was an insufficient supply of provisions at the Agencies.”31
Boding ill for future developments, especially with regard to the 7th Cavalry’s eventual fate, an overconfident General Sheridan, the Division of Missouri commander, delegated the conducting of the 1876 Campaign to his two department commanders of relatively little ability, Generals George Crook and Alfred Terry. Crook was ordered to lead a column north from the Wyoming Territory, while Terry led a column from the north with the plan of catching the Indians in between them in a broad pincer movement. Confidence was high at headquarters for success against nothing more than “savages.” Crook had already garnered a bold headline in the New York Times in May 1873 for his efforts in “Civilizing the Arizona Savages.” He was now expected to do the same with the Sioux along with Custer.
Symbolically, Crook had been a player at the November 3, 1875, White House conference that orchestrated still another new war against the Sioux because they had refused to sell the Black Hills. Of course, entirely unknown to the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies at this time, a new war had been artificially created in Washington, DC, to bring the most serious threat to the Lakota’s native homeland and way of life on a scale not previously seen. It did not matter that General Terry, a politician type rather than a man of action, possessed no Indian fighting experience, while Crook had relatively little experience, except in fighting the Apache in Arizona.
Quite simply, neither general was truly qualified for the stiff challenges that lay ahead in taking the war to the Sioux and Cheyenne deep in buffalo country, the unceded territory to whites and as designated in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Compounding these inherent weaknesses in the command structure for offensive operations in unfamiliar territory, an overconfident Sheridan initially dismissed reports of the growing strength of Indians in the Powder River area out of contempt for his opponent.
All of these diverse factors began to set the stage for a disaster along the Little Bighorn. Custer was about to pay a frightfully high price for the failures of top leadership, including his old Civil War commander, Sheridan. Nevertheless, with high hopes on May 17, 1876, the troops of the Terry–Custer column departed the newly established Fort Abraham Lincoln. Located in a remote region at the western edge of white settlement and the Union Pacific Railroad, this fort had been the 7th Cavalry’s home in the Dakota Territory on the Missouri River’s west bank since the early 1870s. It had been built as part of Sheridan’s ambitious plan for creating an advanced position to strike at the Indians in their secluded sanctuaries. Leaving carefree days and the grassy baseball field behind (where they had played enthusiastic games as members of teams called the Athletes and the Actives), the 7th Cavalry troopers rode out of the fort with lofty expectations of an easy victory in Sioux country. They headed west for the south central section of the Montana Territory, riding toward a rendezvous with a cruel destiny.32
A Compromised, Yet Confident, Fighting Force
Unfortunately, at this time, the 7th Cavalry was not in the best of shape, after the long Northern Great Plains winter of inactivity. Even the regiment’s elite reputation was somewhat of a deterrent to future success, engendering a dangerous sense of overconfidence, if not hubris. In an understatement, one modern historian diplomatically concluded with careful words how “the Seventh was perhaps not as good as its reputation.”33
In addition, the expedition’s launching from Fort Abraham Lincoln on misty May 17 was belated because of the late arrival of Custer and the lingering winter. A diehard Democrat, Custer had been caught amid the brewing sea of political intrigue and the scandals of Grant’s Republican Administration, testifying before Congress about improper dealings at high levels. The precious time wasted before riding forth on a new campaign allowed even larger numbers of Indians to depart the agencies and join with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.34
Sergeant John Ryan, who had fought (as a Massachusetts infantryman) in the Army of the Potomac like Custer, described the departure from Fort Abraham Lincoln:
The troops marched in columns of platoons with their guidons flying and their horses prancing [and] all the companies wore broad rimmed slouch hats, some black, others gray. The regiment never looked better, as all the men were in good spirits. Then came General Custer and his staff; next came the 7th Cavalry Band, all mounted on their magnificent gray horses, playing one of Custer’s favorite tunes, ‘Garryowen’.35
Reporter Marcus “Mark” Henry Kellogg described the extent of the overconfidence and even the commonplace delusion that distinguished the thinking of so many cavalrymen riding forth: General Terry “hopes the Indians will gain sufficient courage to make a stand at or before we reach the Yellowstone River.”36
But some enlisted men in Custer’s ranks of the dozen 7th Cavalry companies did not share the cocky optimism of their smug superiors, while riding away from the Missouri River country and toward where the sun set. One 7th Cavalry trooper, Ireland-born Private Thomas P. Eagan of Company E, was less sure of an easy success against the Sioux and their allies. As he had penned in a March 1876 letter to his sister: “We are to start for the Big Horn country [because] [t]he Indians are getting bad again [and] I think that we will have some hard times this summer. The old chief Sitting Bull says that he will not make peace with the whites as long as he has a man to fight….”37 Maintaining his distinct Irish sense of humor, Private Eagan then informed his sister in jest in the same letter, “As soon as I got back of the campaign I will rite you. That is if I do not get my hair lifted by some Indian.”38 Unfortunately for Eagan, who was in late twenties, this was precisely the future tragic fate that awaited him along the Little Bighorn.
Born in Bedford County, in the Piedmont of southwest Virginia in 1851, an apprehensive Private Thomas E. Meador of Company H, 7th Virginia, hoped for the best like so many other troopers, who rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln to clanging of accouterments and the blare of martial music. He penned in a March 1876 letter to his sister: “We are to start on an expedition [which] [w]ill by my last one [and] I will come home next fall if nothin hapins.”39 Of course something indeed would happen, ordaining that Private Meador met his Maker on June 25, 1876.
Almost prophetically before they were killed along the Little Bighorn, Privates Eagan and Meador had ample reason for concern about the prospects for a successful summer campaign. Unlike in winter, success seldom came in summertime for United States soldiers, including Custer. Indian bands had begun coming together during April and May, concentrating as if correctly anticipating that a campaign would be directed against them.
Indian Forces Were Missing
Searching for the great buffalo herds with the warm weather of spring, after crossing to the Yellowstone’s south side, the united bands moved west over the lush prairies, bright green from spring rains, and across the Powder River. They then continued west to cross the Tongue River, before settling down around the headwaters of the Rosebud River, west of the Tongue and just east of the Little Bighorn. They then steadily moved south up the lush valley of the Rosebud. Along the way in traversing the pristine, open plains region of southeastern Montana, they were joined by a steady, ever-increasing flow of agency Indians eager to hunt buffalo in the beautiful spring weather, when the green grass was high to provide ample nourishment to their ponies and the buffalo. Most of all, the Indian people were determined to defend “our beautiful country,” in one warrior’s words, against all interlopers.40
Remaining supremely confident for success, Custer shared little concern about what was happening with regard to his opponents’ steadily gathering strength, because it was not fully realized. Like other experienced officers, he was most worried about the possibility of the Sioux escaping before his 7th Cavalry had an opportunity to strike a blow at an estimated 800 warriors.41 However, by June 22, when he was destined to hold his officer’s call when deep in Indian country, Custer and his officers believed that they would have to face from 1,000 to 1,500 warriors. This was still a significant underestimation of Indian strength that increased to outpace intelligence reports.42 However, even this recent increase in warrior numbers from their earlier estimation still caused no great concern among these confident cavalrymen. Few men, especially officers, expected the Sioux to make a stand and fight, which was not their way of waging war, as Custer’s men realized based upon Great Plains experience.43
For such reasons, ironically, “never had a more eager command started for hostile Indians,” wrote New Hampshire-born Lieutenant Winfield Scott Edgerly, a West Pointer of Company D, 7th Cavalry. Clearly, a dark day of reckoning was in store for Custer and his men in a far-flung expedition that most troopers viewed much like an exciting adventure and little more than a lark.44 Despite Custer having ignored General Sherman’s May 8, 1876, warning to Terry: “Advise Custer to be prudent [and] not to take along any newspaper men, who always make mischief,” Mark Kellogg, the Bismarck Tribune reporter, rode forward with the same confidence that dominated the column. He wrote how “Custer, dressed in a dashing suit of buckskin, is prominent everywhere [and is] full of perfect readiness for a fray with the hostile red devils, and woe to the body of scalplifters that comes within reach of himself and [his] brave companions in arms.”45 To be fair, Kellogg’s words only reflected the day’s common views among expedition members. Crook’s recent success in hastening the surrender of Apache bands in Arizona was still seen as resulting from their “absolute fear of [Crook’s] troops,” which was now reflected in the common attitude among Custer’s troopers.46
In truth, nothing was going to be easy during this campaign; it was going to be as lengthy as it was arduous. An emboldened Sioux warrior named Two Moons understood a reality still not fully appreciated by Custer and his troopers at this time: “Word came to us that the pony soldiers were coming after the Sioux [but] they are never good when they come on marches for that purpose.”47
Symbolically, Custer and his men now rode on this expedition with newly cut hair, because this was an ambitious summer campaign that might well prove lengthy.48 In the words of Trumpeter John Martin (Italian immigrant Giovanni Martini), Custer’s “yellow hair was cut short—not very short; but it was not long and curly on his shoulders like it used to be.”49 Knowing that the newspaper’s readership enjoyed such personal information about one of America’s authentic war heroes, Kellogg wrote how Custer was called “the LONG HAIRED CHIEF” by his Indian scouts, “though he long since abandoned those golden ringlets, and now wears a FIGHTING CUT.”50
Perhaps superstitious, men in the 7th Cavalry’s column had heard, as expressed by a Sioux warrior, that the “Indians would not scalp soldiers with short hair [because there was] [n]o glory to scalp anyone with short hair ….”51 Back in his glory days when the future never seemed brighter, Custer had his wartime locks first cut short by his wife in July 1865, which prompted him to inform his father-in-law, who disapproved of long hair, of the loss.52
Ironically, Custer’s admiration for his superior, who was now sending him to his death deep in the Montana Territory, knew few bounds. As he had penned in a letter to wife, Libbie (Elizabeth Bacon-Custer), in the past, but the exact situation now applied to his ambitious expedition: “Some [7th Cavalry] officers think this may be a campaign on paper—but I know Genl. Sheridan better. We are going to the heart of the Indian country where white troops have never been before.”53
However, because this campaign had begun too late in the year, precious time had been lost. Equally ominous was the fact that a good many veterans (about 100) of the 7th Cavalry, now together on a campaign for the first time since its formation in 1866, remained behind at Fort Abraham Lincoln because of the lack of horses.54 Also staying behind at the fort along the Missouri were thirty-nine women who were about to learn of the high cost of choosing to become military wives. These unfortunate women at Fort Abraham Lincoln were all about to become widows.55
Ironically, Custer was riding forth on still another campaign because of fate and twists and turns in his own life. As early as March 1866, he had written to his wife, “I think it probable that I shall leave the army … I can obtain the position of Foreign Minister, with a salary in gold … I would like it for many reasons.”56 Meanwhile, Custer was now confidently leading the way in his most challenging and demanding campaign to date.