Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

by Stiles, T. J.

  When he returned, she left. In Washington Armstrong had seen Adelaide Ristori, a world-renowned Italian actress on her first tour of the United States. Crowds filled theaters to see her even though she spoke no English. (According to her obituary, she would not perform a full play in English until 1882.) When Ristori appeared in St. Louis, Libbie went, leaving him for almost a week, despite their long separation.26

  Winter ended. Spring began. Something was wrong between the Custers.

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  AT 8:30 IN THE MORNING on March 27, 1867, the “Hancock Expedition” marched out of Fort Riley. The long, slow-moving column consisted of 1,400 men, including seven companies of the 37th Infantry; Battery B of the 4th Artillery; eight companies of the 7th Cavalry; dozens of six-mule wagons; a canvas pontoon bridge; nine engineers; two federal agents for native nations of the Great Plains; a half-Cheyenne, half-French Canadian interpreter named Edmund Guerrier; and fifteen Delaware Indian scouts.

  White civilian scouts rode as well. One was Deputy U.S. Marshal James Butler Hickok, better known as “Wild Bill.” A blue-eyed man with a long, narrow nose, mustache, long hair, and wide-brimmed hat, he had signed on to work for the 7th Cavalry in January. He spent the next few months gambling in Junction City and enjoying the attention from a feature story in the February 1867 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It celebrated his 1865 gunfight with Dave Tutt in the town square of Springfield, Missouri. In the archetype of the mythical main-street walkdown, both men drew their revolvers and fired. Tutt missed. Hickok didn’t.27

  Custer commanded the cavalry. Colonel Smith, as head of the District of the Upper Arkansas, technically commanded the expedition, and Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock commanded Smith. Custer had first met Hancock as a temporary aide at Williamsburg, the battle that established Hancock’s reputation as a combat commander. That reputation had grown over the Civil War. Named to command of the Department of the Missouri, including Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, Hancock was ordered to pacify the central Great Plains.28

  This force was less than half the size of a full-strength brigade in the Civil War, but it “made a formidable appearance in the Indian Country,” wrote Dr. Isaac Coates, a civilian from Pennsylvania who signed on for an adventure. He was an agreeable man with dark hair parted in the middle and brushed back, and a full beard. He first met Custer at Fort Riley and immediately liked him. “The first thing I noted about the General was his laugh,” he wrote, “which, soon after I had entered the room, burst forth volcano-like until the very windows shook. There was an intellectual vigor, a whole-souled manliness, and an indomitable energy represented in that laugh.” Libbie impressed him as well. “I was surprised to find with what fluency the ladies discussed the Indian Question.”29

  Custer rode his wife’s horse, Custis Lee, past foot soldiers trudging in bitter cold, “a strong prairie wind blowing right in our faces, strong enough to blow a man over,” an infantry officer wrote. In camp each night, Custer erected his conical Sibley tent apart from the others. He brought a barrel of his beloved apples and an efficient stove, which drew visitors, including Colonel Smith. But Custer visited no one in camp. He mostly kept to his own canvas quarters. He even had to apologize to Hancock for avoiding him.30

  It was in the saddle, he told Libbie, that his blood moved again. “Contemplating these vast and apparently boundless prairies seems to give me new life.” In Custer, though, introspection was not a natural and happy state. When confident, he boasted and mailed off his press clippings. His moody reflections on the expedition spoke to unease, even guilt. “Where I was once eager to acquire worldly honors and distinctions,” he wrote, “my desire now is to make myself a man worthy of the blessings heaped upon me.” By implication, he was not worthy yet.31

  Major Gibbs teased him for shutting himself in each night to write to Libbie. One evening they crowded against each other at Custer’s camp table. “It’s a pretty thing that a man cannot write to his wife without being disturbed,” Custer snapped. Gibbs replied, “Any man who writes to his wife once a day deserves to be disturbed.”32

  They marched south from the Smoky Hill River over the treeless, waterless plain to Fort Larned, “a green oasis in the Sahara of bleached grass,” according to the reporter Henry M. Stanley (who would later presume that he had found Dr. Livingstone). A blizzard struck, piling up snow as thick as two feet deep. Dr. Coates wrote, “The thermometer of my romantic ideas of travel on the Plains was, indeed, now at zero.”33

  “You have been dreading an unsettled future, and perhaps separation,” Custer wrote to Libbie on April 8; “but General Hancock said to me today, ‘After you reach your [new] post…I will give you a chance to become settled.’ ” Hancock promised him command of Fort Garland in southern Colorado, he claimed. They would be together soon, he promised in letter after letter. War was unlikely, he thought. “Particularly do I desire peace, when I know that war means separation.”

  “I saw many strange and interesting sights today,” he wrote, just before the snowstorm hit. The skeleton of a buffalo. An owl emerging from a prairie-dog village. “Today I also saw that peculiar natural phenomenon called ‘mirage.’ ”34

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  AT 8 P.M. ON APRIL 12, Custer stood in front of a bright fire in full dress uniform, along with Smith, Hancock, Gibbs, and the other officers of the expedition. Fifteen tall men of the Cheyenne nation filed past them, solemnly shaking hands. “The Indians were dressed in various styles, many of them with the orthodox army overcoat, some with gorgeous red blankets, while their faces were painted and their bodies bedizened in all the glory of the Indian toilet,” Stanley wrote. “Their ears were hanging large rings of brass; they wore armlets of silver, wrist rings of copper, necklaces of beads…breast ornaments of silver shields…and their scalp locks were adorned with a long string of thin silver disks.”

  Edward W. Wynkoop, the federal agent for the tribe, introduced Tall Bull and White Horse, their spokesmen, and they all sat on logs around the fire. Hancock stood, removed his coat, and spoke. The half-Cheyenne Edmund Guerrier translated as he went, a sentence at a time. Hancock soon reached his point.

  “Now, I have a great many soldiers, more than all the tribes put together,” he said. “I have heard that a great many Indians want to fight. Very well, we are here, and we come prepared for war. If you are for peace, you know the conditions; if you are for war, look out for its consequences.” He demanded the return of captives, “white or black,” and promised to punish both Indian and white violators of the peace. “We are building railroads, and building roads through the country. You must not let your young men stop them.…These roads will benefit the Indian as well as the white man, in bringing their goods to them cheaply and promptly. The steam car and the wagon train must run.”

  Hancock sat. Tall Bull silently lit a pipe, took a few puffs, then passed it to his colleagues. “With much dignity in his bearing,” Stanley wrote, he stood in his red-and-black robe and shook Hancock’s hand. “You sent for us. We came here.…You can go on any road. When we come on the road your young men must not shoot us.” As Guerrier translated, he tapped his foot impatiently, “in a very defiant manner,” according to Barnitz. Tall Bull briefly discussed a captured Indian boy whom Hancock had brought to return to his family, then returned to the main thrust of his remarks. “The buffalo are diminishing fast. The antelope that were plenty a few years ago are now few. When they will all die away we shall be hungry. We shall want something to eat, and we shall be compelled to come into the fort. Your young men must not fire on us. Whenever they see us they fire, and we fire on them.”

  Hancock interrupted him at one point to say that he was coming to their village with all his men. When Tall Bull finished, Hancock stood again. “We know the buffalo are going away. We cannot help it,” he said. “The white men are becoming a great nation. You must keep your young men off the roads. Don’t stop the trains and travelers on the roads, and you will not be harmed.” He finished by saying
, “I have spoken,” and went back to his tent. The meeting ended.35

  Hancock believed that he had been disrespected. The next morning, he marched his men west, along the river called Pawnee Fork, toward a large winter encampment of Southern Cheyennes and Oglala Lakotas. He wanted to intimidate them. The weather grew sunny and warm. Pawnee Killer, an Oglala leader, rode up with some warriors, followed by White Horse of the Cheyennes. All the leaders in the village would come in to talk the next morning, they said, indicating how high the sun would be in the sky. They agreed to spend the night in the camp.

  Custer took Harper’s artist Theodore Davis and went into the visiting Indians’ tent uninvited. “My entrance and presence did not seem to disturb their stoicism or equanimity in the least,” he wrote to Libbie. “All were seated upon the circumference of the tent upon buffalo robes. I made my way through the smoke to a vacant robe, and joined the circle, but did not ‘swing round’ it.” They ignored him as they cooked meat over an open fire. When Custer left, they remained as opaque to him as ever.36

  Early the next day, April 14, Pawnee Killer left, promising to get the other leaders. They never came. Furious, Hancock broke camp and advanced on the village. “We had gone but a few miles,” Dr. Coates wrote, “when reaching the summit of a little hill, we beheld in the valley, a mile distant, several hundred Indian warriors approaching us. They were in a line.…Everything now looked like war.”37

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  THE WAR THAT CUSTER would fight against “these dusky and certainly savage-looking chiefs,” as he called them, had roots dating back to 1492.38 Christopher Columbus called the natives of this hemisphere “Indians” to promote the idea that he had found a route to India. But any common name would have been foreign, imposed from the outside. In their multiplicity of languages and cultures, they had no shared identity except in relation to the newcomers from Europe.

  Their various societies specialized to meet regional environmental demands, adapting to changing climate, new opportunities, and conflicts with neighbors. Custer confronted the nomadic peoples of the high plains—the elevated western half of the Great Plains. To Custer, these nations were exotic, alien, and isolated from the United States. This impression was false. From the moment they refounded their societies upon the horse—first introduced to North America by Spanish colonizers—they locked themselves into relationships with their European-derived neighbors. They depended upon transactions with them as much as on hunting bison (commonly called buffalo). Indeed, there was no separating the two.39

  The Comanches of the Southern Plains pioneered their material culture. In the late 1600s, they first acquired horses and iron tools from the northern reaches of the Spanish empire. “The Spanish horses they pilfered in New Mexico and then rode onto the plains found a nearly perfect ecological niche on the southern grasslands,” writes the historian Pekka Hämäläinen. These tough little horses descended from North African ancestors, bred to subsist on grazing and infrequent access to water. The Comanches built vast herds, transforming themselves into nomads to hunt the bison. “But,” Hämäläinen adds, “there was another enticement: commerce.”

  Aggressively battling other nations, the Comanches seized a strategic position on the grasslands between the Spanish, French, and English empires. Comanches traded slaves seized in raids and bison meat and hides in return for iron tools, firearms, and corn. They controlled trade through their realm, warred against native neighbors to maintain their advantages, pillaged Mexico, and halted the expansion of American settlement in Texas. They amassed a “commercial empire” from the Arkansas River to the Rio Grande, writes Hämäläinen, reaching their peak of power in the 1840s.40

  Other indigenous nations adopted their nomadic ways in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Kiowas emerged as their closest allies. Arapahoes and Plains Apaches embraced the horse as well. In the north, the Lakotas, or Teton Sioux, moved onto the Great Plains grasslands from the wooded Great Lakes region.

  So did the Cheyennes. Their tradition holds that a prophet, Sweet Medicine, held a four-year conclave with Maheo, the All Being, inside Naohavose, a Black Hills peak later called Bear Butte. “You may have horses,” Maheo told Sweet Medicine. “You may even go with the Comanches to take them. But remember this: If you have horses everything will be changed for you forever.…You will have to have fights with other tribes, who will want your pasture land or the places where you hunt. You will have to have real soldiers, who can protect the people. Think, before you decide.”41

  Converting to a mounted culture dominated by the hunter and warrior, the Cheyennes migrated to the Central Plains between the Platte River to the north and the Arkansas to the south. They allied with the Arapahoes and fought the other high-plains tribes, the Comanches, Kiowas, and Lakotas. In 1840, these nations made peace at a grand meeting on the Arkansas River. As allies they warred against the low-plains tribes to the east, who practiced horticulture in permanent settlements and forayed onto the high plains seasonally to hunt—the Pawnees, Potawatomis, Omahas, Osages, and various nations removed from their eastern homes by the U.S. government and forced west, including Delawares, Creeks, Cherokees, and others. They fought to control trade and critical natural resources.42

  White merchants came. Access to trading posts became so important that the Cheyennes split into Northern and Southern branches in the 1830s, largely according to whether they dealt with merchants on the Platte or the Arkansas. Traders provided ironware, gunpowder, and firearms, and demanded hides. After the beaver population collapsed around 1840, they wanted bison skins—hundreds of thousands each year.

  The Indians’ commercial slaughter of bison exacerbated the inherent environmental instability of nomadism. Drought and predators, particularly wolves, frequently caused dramatic declines in the bison population. The famously gigantic herds of buffalo that astonished newcomers, and made convenient targets for hunters, only gathered during the rutting period in the summer, when the short grass of the high plains was dense enough to sustain vast numbers of grazing animals. At other times they dispersed into smaller, more elusive herds. And the huge numbers of Indian ponies competed directly against the nomads’ main prey for resources, Hämäläinen notes, since horse and bison ate the same grasses and had similar water needs.

  The demands of bison hunting and horse herding forced each nation to disperse into small bands. The Cheyennes created a governing institution, the Council of Forty-Four, to maintain unity. They also created six warrior societies: Kit Foxes, Crazy Dogs, Elk Scrapers, Red Shields, Wolf Soldiers, and, most famous of all, the Dog Soldiers. Their members came from across the various bands. When a cholera epidemic killed half of the Flexed Leg band, the survivors joined the Dog Soldiers, giving it a mixed character as both a voluntary military society and the community of a band. These societies—the Dog Soldiers in particular—emerged as centers of militancy, pressing for an armed response to encroachments on the plains.43

  Just as the indigenous nations were misleadingly grouped together as “Indians,” so too have the people of the United States in this period been oversimplified as “whites.” Of course whites predominated, but black faces appeared almost everywhere in the West, particularly after the deployment of the new regiments of black regulars, who came to be known as the “buffalo soldiers.” All groups in the nineteenth century commonly used “Americans” as a national term for U.S. citizens and soldiers. None of these labels is entirely satisfactory, yet they cannot be entirely avoided.

  These Americans, white and black, began to settle the eastern fringe of the Great Plains with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. As of 1867, they had seized large sections of the lands of the low-plains nations, but their zone of occupation had not yet reached the high plains.44 The immediate threats they posed to the Cheyennes and their allies were more invasive. One was disease, including smallpox, whooping cough, and cholera. The other was migration—not into but through their country. Starting in 1843 with the “Great Migrati
on” on the Oregon Trail, surging with the California gold rush in 1849, and picking up again in 1859 with the discovery of gold in the Colorado mountains, tens of thousands of people burst across the plains.

  The migrants followed the rivers that ran west to east—the Platte, Republican, Smoky Hill, and Arkansas, in particular. These and other narrow river valleys comprised only 7 percent of the high plains, but they were crucial for the survival of both bison and Indian horses. These ribbons of precious resources striped the dry grasslands, providing water, stands of trees, grazing (including cottonwood bark), and shelter from the weather in the depths of winter. But they were vulnerable. The nomads’ winter encampments shunted bison herds to marginal places, putting pressure on their population. The American travelers tipped the precarious balance, if it can be called a balance. They cut down trees for fuel, polluted the water, killed or drove off game, and brought their own livestock that ate up grass and other forage.

  Even worse, the army established permanent posts at the most desirable points on the rivers—“protective islands,” as the historian Elliott West calls them. Fifteen forts went up in the half-dozen years after the start of the Colorado gold rush in 1859. The garrisons consumed resources all year round, turning the richest locations into dead zones. They attracted passing migrants and freighters, further devastating their surroundings. The Butterfield Overland Despatch stagecoach and freight-wagon line began service along the Smoky Hill in 1865, with regularly spaced stations that duplicated the process.45

  Then there were railroads. Fixed pieces of infrastructure, the symbiosis of the federal government and business corporations, they crept west from Omaha and Kansas City, bound for San Francisco and Denver, respectively. General Sherman, head of the Military Division of the Missouri, described their significance on October 1, 1867.