The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer

by Thom Hatch

  Although the expedition moved along at its normal pace, it was inevitable that the headstrong Custer and Colonel Stanley, who has been described as “a squat, humorless, peevish alcoholic … the antithesis of Custer,” would come to loggerheads. Neither man had much respect for the other.

  Shortly after the expedition was under way, a drunken Stanley, who had invited another sutler along for his infantry, ordered that Augustus Baliran, a sutler attached to the cavalry, return to Fort Rice by that evening or face death by hanging. The incident was reported to Custer, who reminded Stanley that permission had been given to Baliran to accompany the Seventh Cavalry. Stanley relented but ordered Colonel Frederick Grant to destroy Baliran’s stock of whisky. Instead of carrying out the order, the kindhearted Grant advised the sutler to temporarily distribute his stores to various Seventh Cavalry officers for safekeeping. Stanley rescinded the order when he sobered up.

  Another matter of contention concerned the presence of Custer’s black cook, Mary Adams, and the cast-iron stove that he had brought along. Mary’s preparation of wild game made Custer’s mess extremely popular, and this apparently did not sit well with Stanley. The colonel ordered that Custer rid himself of the stove, which was nonmilitary equipment, but it survived several attempts to have it abandoned.

  The column halted on July 1 at Muddy Creek, which was overflowing and would require the infantrymen to construct a makeshift bridge in order to cross. Custer, whose troops Stanley had expected to assist with the crossing, had, under his own initiative, marched a detachment of his cavalry some distance ahead of the main body. He then dispatched a messenger requesting that Stanley send him forage and rations. An angry Stanley ordered that Custer return at once and consider himself under arrest.

  The Seventh Cavalry with its insolent commander was exiled to march at the rear of the column. Tom Rosser reasoned with Stanley, advising that common sense dictated that the cavalry lead the way. A sober Stanley agreed and not only lifted the arrest but also apologized to Custer, asked his forgiveness, and vowed to quit drinking. Regardless of promises, Stanley remained in an intoxicated state, which for all intents and purposes permitted Custer to assume leadership of the expedition.

  In mid-July, Custer led two companies on a treacherous march through the Badlands to reach the Yellowstone River where the steamer Far West waited with provisions and mail. They constructed a supply depot on the south bank of the Yellowstone about eight miles above the mouth of Glendive Creek and left Captain Frederick W. Benteen and two companies behind to guard “Stanley’s Stockade.”

  The party atmosphere ended when the expedition moved into the Yellowstone River Valley, an area known to be populated by the Lakota Sioux tribe. The order of march was Custer’s cavalry, followed by the surveyors with their transits and maps, and the infantry brought up the rear.

  Custer, his favorite scout, Bloody Knife, and a small detachment would normally ride in advance of the column. Bloody Knife became concerned by the frequency of fresh Indian sign and warned Custer to be prepared for an attack.

  Custer generally heeded the advice or information provided by Bloody Knife without question. There was no doubt that a bond of trust had developed between the two men, although their time together had been brief.

  Bloody Knife (Arikara name: Nee si Ra Pat; Sioux name: Tamina WeWe) was born sometime between 1837 and 1840 in Dakota Territory to a Hunkpapa Sioux father and Arikara (Ree) mother. He lived with the Sioux, who were traditional enemies of the Arikara, and was discriminated against due to his mixed blood and treated as an outcast. This resulted in a deep hatred for that tribe and in particular one of his peers, Gall, with whom Bloody Knife developed a feud that endured for years. Sitting Bull, who had adopted Gall as a younger brother, also subjected the mixed-blood boy to abuse.

  When Bloody Knife was about fifteen years of age, his mother left her husband and returned to her people at Fort Clark, an American Fur Company trading post on the upper Missouri near present-day Stanton, North Dakota. He was able to make good use of his multicultural background in the early 1860s when he carried mail between Fort Totten and other Missouri forts. Many mail carriers were killed by Sioux on this route, which made it difficult to employ riders, but Bloody Knife almost always got the mail through on time. He also occasionally worked as an army scout and a runner and hunter for the American Fur Company.

  The animosity between Bloody Knife and Gall nearly resulted in Gall’s death during the winter of 1865–66. Bloody Knife was serving as a scout with a detachment of soldiers who went to arrest Gall, who was visiting a Sioux camp south of Fort Berthold. Gall attempted to escape, and was bayoneted. Bloody Knife stepped forward with intentions of shooting his enemy in the head but was stopped by an officer who believed that Gall was already dead. Gall miraculously survived and became a war chief with whom to be reckoned.

  In 1866, Bloody Knife married an Arikara woman named either She Owl or Young Owl Woman, who would give birth to at least one daughter and one son. The daughter, however, evidently died young, according to a grave marker at Fort Buford that bears the inscription: “Daughter of Bloody Knife, December 28, 1870, Disease.”

  Bloody Knife enlisted as a corporal in the army’s Indian scouts at Fort Stevenson in May 1868 and soon acquired a serious problem with alcohol, which may have contributed to his desertion that September. He was, however, promoted to lance corporal in 1872.

  When Fort Abraham Lincoln was established in June 1872, Bloody Knife was a leader of the Arikara scouts attached to it. Bloody Knife was hired for the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873, which was where he met George Armstrong Custer for the first time. He quickly became Custer’s favorite scout by proving himself a faithful companion and invaluable at reading sign.

  By early August, the expedition was deep into hostile territory, camped on the Yellowstone several miles downstream from the Tongue River. At noon on August 4—with the temperature hovering around 110 degrees—Custer, Captain Myles Moylan, First Lieutenants Tom Custer and James Calhoun, and Second Lieutenant Charles A. Varnum, with about ninety cavalrymen from companies A and B, had taken a break from a scout to halt in a grove of cottonwood trees near the mouth of the Tongue River (the site of present-day Miles City, Montana). The horses had been turned out to graze, the men were lazing around, and Custer was taking a nap when pickets shouted, “Indians!” The cavalrymen began firing at the small group of warriors who were attempting to scatter the horses.

  Custer, with his brother and Jimmy Calhoun, mounted twenty men and gave chase. Moylan was ordered to advance more slowly with the main body. After riding about two miles up the valley, Custer became suspicious and halted his squadron. Custer, accompanied by two orderlies, cautiously continued after the Sioux, in his words, “to develop their intentions.” Those intentions quickly became known when three hundred mounted warriors burst from a stand of timber and charged. It had been a trap.

  Custer wheeled his thoroughbred, Dandy, and easily outdistanced the Indians to arrive back where he had left his small detachment. Moylan brought up the remainder of the squadron, and the troopers were formed into a skirmish line in the cottonwoods behind the bank of a dry streambed. The men would rise up to fire point-blank into the onrushing warriors with effective volleys that discouraged each advance. The Sioux pulled back, dismounted, and began to creep through the tall grass toward the position of the cavalrymen.

  Custer and his troopers spent the long, hot afternoon defending their position against repeated assaults. The Sioux eventually set fire to the grass and advanced behind the smoke but were repulsed each time.

  By late in the afternoon, ammunition was running low when—just like the script of a Western movie—the rest of the cavalry could be observed riding to the rescue. A confident Custer mounted his men and surprised the Sioux by executing a counterattack. The Indians broke and ran, and the cavalrymen chased them several miles down the valley. Custer lost only one man and two horses in the skirmish.

  While Custer had been
pinned down, about thirty Sioux had happened upon veterinarian Dr. John Honsinger and sutler Augustus Baliran as the two men, unaware of danger, rode ahead of the main body to join Custer. Honsinger and Baliran were brutally murdered. Most accounts relate that Private John H. Ball was also killed, although evidence does exist to suggest that he had deserted.

  The command pushed up the Yellowstone until—on August 8—scout Bloody Knife, riding with Custer in the advance, discovered the site of a recently abandoned Indian village. The scout estimated that it consisted of five hundred lodges, which would indicate the presence of perhaps as many as one thousand warriors.

  Custer received permission from Stanley to follow this hot trail found by Bloody Knife and immediately dashed off with eight companies and the Arikara scouts.

  After a thirty-six hour march, the trail led to the banks of the Yellowstone near the mouth of the Bighorn River. Bloody Knife swam across to determine that the tracks continued on the south side, but the river at this point was too deep and swift for the cavalry to cross. Custer decided to camp for the night and would resume attempts to cross the following morning, August 11.

  At daybreak, however, the Sioux made their presence known. Hundreds of warriors hidden in the cottonwoods on the opposite bank opened up with withering rifle fire and a torrent of arrows. While the women and children gathered on the bluffs to watch, hundreds more warriors began swimming the river above and below Custer’s position.

  Custer reacted quickly and deployed sharpshooters to engage and, he hoped, pin down the entrenched warriors. To counter the threat from the flanks, he dispatched two companies commanded by Captain Thomas H. French down the valley and two companies under Captain Verlin Hart up the valley. Hart posted twenty men under Second Lieutenant Charles Braden in a forward position on a benchland rising from the valley.

  Braden’s detachment bore the brunt of the initial assault. His small unit bravely repelled four concerted efforts by the superior force to breach their line. During the battle, Braden’s left thigh was shattered by a bullet and he fell critically wounded.

  Custer was seemingly everywhere, handling his command with the calm deliberation and battlefield instincts that he had developed in the Civil War. He rode along his line shifting companies to meet each attack or to flush out groups of warriors from nearby ravines, all the while exposing himself to a vicious onslaught of bullets and arrows.

  Finally, Stanley arrived on the field and began lobbing artillery shells into the timber across the river. Custer decided to seize the initiative. He mounted his entire 450-man command, signaled for the band to strike up “Garry Owen,” and ordered a charge. He once again had surprised his enemy with this bold tactic. The Sioux responded by scattering and racing away as fast as their ponies could run. The cavalrymen chased the fleeing Indians for nine miles before losing the trail.

  The Seventh Cavalry had suffered three men killed, four wounded, and eight horses lost during the engagement. Custer estimated that about forty Indians had been killed in both August battles. The identity of the Indians who attacked the Seventh Cavalry has been a matter of speculation—although Frank Grouard, a future army scout who was known to have been adopted by Sitting Bull, claimed to have participated.

  Following this skirmish, the survey moved up the Yellowstone another thirty miles before halting on August 15 at Pompey’s Pillar, a solitary sandstone landmark some 380 miles west of Fort Rice that had been named by Lewis and Clark. The column had settled in to rest for the day when a group of Sioux warriors opened fire on some swimming soldiers, who were scared and scattered but were otherwise unharmed. Custer chose not to pursue the hostiles.

  Had the Sioux known that the cheap transportation provided by new railroads would eventually lead to the extermination of the buffalo, they might have offered more resistance to the Yellowstone Expedition. By this time the southern herds were steadily being decimated, and the northern herds were soon to follow. By 1883, all but a few small herds had vanished, and with them the fortunes of the Plains Indian tribes, who were dependent on this beast for life itself.

  The Plains Indians not only regarded the buffalo as sacred, but these nomadic hunters also viewed a herd of these shaggy animals with the same prospects that modern consumers might contemplate a spacious shopping mall or grocery supercenter. There in one centralized location was nearly every item required not solely for basic survival but also as a dependable source for those luxuries that provided a comfortable standard of living.

  Best of all, this shaggy beast had covered the plains in abundance. During the early nineteenth century, buffalo herds were estimated to total upwards of 75 to 100 million, an impressive figure considering that each animal weighed around a ton, with most bulls tipping the scale at a ton and a half. Nowhere else in the annals of food resources can such an infinite provider of sustenance be documented.

  There has been a continuing debate about whether or not the by-products derived from the buffalo were indeed vital to the health and welfare of the average Plains Indian. Granted, there was an abundance of other wild game and those animals were assuredly a part of the menu and wardrobe. But these nomadic people sustained a thriving self-sufficiency by ingeniously utilizing every portion of the buffalo but the bellow.

  The most obvious, and important, benefit was food. Buffalo were truly a four-legged commissary. The muscle was high in protein, and other parts supplied more than the daily requirements of vitamins and minerals. What was not readily consumed could be preserved for the long winter months. One manner was by drying the meat under the sun, another by pounding berries and fruit into that dried meat to create pemmican—a treat that provided every element necessary for a balanced diet.

  Within the village proper, the first thing to catch the eye would be the structures, the lodges or tepees, which were constructed mainly from buffalo hides. Inside those lodges were warm coats and sleeping robes also fashioned from those same hairy hides and summer blankets made soft by scraping off the hair and tanning both sides. These dressed hides were also sewn into shirts, leggings, moccasins, and women’s dresses.

  Green skins made serviceable kettles for drinking and cooking. Buffalo hair was braided into ropes, lariats, and reins for ponies. Horns were used for ladles, cups, and other containers. Bull boats to traverse the rivers were made watertight with stretched hides. Hooves were boiled down to make glue for many applications. Bones could be carved into arrowheads, spear tips, or needles. Sinew for bowstrings. Skin for battle shields. Axes and hoes from shoulder blades. Sledge runners from ribs. Paint from blood. Hair to stuff pillows. Fly swatters and whisk brooms from the tail. The black beard an ornament to adorn clothing. Fuel for campfires from buffalo chips, the dried droppings. Primitive toys, including baby rattles, were constructed from various parts. And the list goes on and on.

  Another advantage was that the buffalo was relatively easy to kill in whatever numbers desired. As white hunters quickly discovered when one fell, the others simply continued grazing and if the herd should happen to stampede it could be directed toward a cliff and chased over to die at the bottom.

  Other game may have collectively provided the bulk of the aforementioned products, but the buffalo offered everything. It was the difference between a shopping trip to the mall compared to one to the corner convenience store.

  Thus, the destruction of the great buffalo herds led to the demise of this major aspect of traditional Plains Indian lifestyle. And the railroads, which brought the hunters and made it easy to ship millions of hides to Eastern tanners, were largely responsible for those huge piles of weathered bones that were scattered about the plains as a tragic reminder of man’s greed and disregard for other cultures—or for the buffalo. Railroads advertised that passengers could actually shoot buffalo while the train moved along the tracks, and the thousands of carcasses that littered the nearby landscape attested to that fact. The expanding trail of railroad tracks also chased the great herds of buffalo away from traditional ranges, which c
aused the various nomadic Indian tribes to follow where they came into conflict with white settlements and wagons moving west.

  On August 16, Custer’s column headed east on a difficult yet uneventful return march overland to the Musselshell River and down the Missouri, finally reaching Fort Abraham Lincoln on September 21—several days before Stanley’s plodding foot soldiers and wagon train made their appearance. Stanley estimated that the expedition had covered 935 miles in ninety-five days.

  Ironically, on the day that Custer reached Fort Lincoln, Jay Cooke & Company, the sponsor of bonds for the Northern Pacific Railroad, collapsed, bankrupting the railroad. The demise of that firm was followed by those of numerous banks and even caused the temporary closure of the New York Stock Exchange in what became known as the Panic of 1873. The end of track would be stalled at Bismarck for six years until the Northern Pacific could raise the resources to resume operations westward.

  But the expedition into the Yellowstone had afforded George Armstrong Custer his first taste of battling the Sioux. It would not be his last.

  Six

  Black Hills, Red Spirits

  George Armstrong Custer was showered with further accolades as the country’s foremost Indian fighter for his actions during the Yellowstone Expedition—not to mention strengthening his relationship with the Northern Pacific Railroad. His official report of the campaign, which was published by The New York Times and the Army and Navy Journal, was well received by an adoring public.

  Upon his return, he was issued orders from the War Department assigning him the command of the newly established Fort Abraham Lincoln—five miles south of Bismarck, Dakota Territory, on the Missouri River—which was still under construction when the Seventh Cavalry arrived. Six companies of the Seventh and three infantry companies would be posted at the fort, while the four additional cavalry companies, under the command of Major Joseph G. Tilford, would be stationed at Fort Rice, twenty-five miles downstream. Major Marcus A. Reno and companies I and D were wintering at Fort Totten, where they would resume escort duty for the Northern Boundary Survey in the spring.