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

by Stiles, T. J.

  They aid us in our military operations by transporting troops and stores rapidly across a belt of land hitherto only passed in the summer by slow trains drawn by oxen, dependent on the grass for food; and all the States and Territories west have a direct dependence on these roads for their material supplies. When these two great thoroughfares reach the base of the Rocky mountains, and when the Indian title to roam at will over the country lying between them is extinguished, then the solution to the most complicated question of Indian hostilities will be comparatively easy, for this belt of country will naturally fill up with our own people.46

  It was an astute if brutal analysis. In private, though, Sherman worried. On June 11 he wrote to Grant about the difficulty of protecting the railroads and transit corridors. “The claims for guards at every stage station, every telegraphic hut…will leave us with little or nothing to carry war into the enemy’s country.” He wanted to go on the offensive. As Robert Utley writes, no army officer thought forts alone offered “a long-term solution of the Indian problem.…Most [were] so weakly manned as to accomplish little except to show the flag.”47

  The Cheyennes and their allies knew better. Those undermanned forts, wagon trains, stagecoach lines, and railways were making life on the high plains untenable. Nor were the Indians ignorant of the size and power of the United States. In 1863 a delegation of high-plains leaders traveled to New York and Washington, D.C., where they met President Lincoln. They saw the armed might of the fully mobilized republic.

  They found themselves in a terrible dilemma. If they did nothing, in the long run they were doomed. If they fought back, in the short run they might be doomed. Their leaders debated their options endlessly. Some signed the successive treaties that restricted residence and hunting to defined zones, in return for food and supplies. Others, especially the Dog Soldiers, committed themselves to nomadism and armed resistance. The militants were bolstered by a massacre at Sand Creek of the Southern Cheyenne band led by Black Kettle. In 1864, he and his people had reported as requested to Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. On November 29, two volunteer Colorado cavalry regiments, led by Col. John M. Chivington, attacked. The soldiers murdered 150 men, women, and children, mutilating many of the dead.48

  Young men from virtually every Cheyenne band took part in retaliatory raids. The fighting quieted before the Hancock expedition set out in March 1867, but the Indians’ existential dilemma remained. Satanta, a militant leader among the Kiowas, explained it to General Hancock later that spring. “All tribes are my brothers,” he said, speaking of the allied nations of the high plains. “This country here is old, and it all belongs to them. But you are cutting off the timber, and now the country is of no account at all.” He complained of migrants’ water consumption and the loss of wild game. But he admitted that he didn’t know how to respond. “Other tribes are very foolish. They make war and are unfortunate, and then call upon the Kiowas to aid them and I don’t know what to think about it.”49

  Sherman had ordered Hancock “to go among the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Kiowas…and notify them that if they want war they can have it now; but if they decline the offer, then impress on them that they must stop their insolence and threats.” In other words, the point of the expedition was to crush their pride.50

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  “THEY WERE FORMED IN A LINE, with intervals, extending about a mile,” Custer wrote to Libbie. It was the afternoon of April 14, 1867, near a winter encampment of Southern Cheyennes, including Dog Soldiers, and some Oglala Lakotas. The troops under Hancock confronted some 300 warriors. “The sun was shining brightly, and as we arrived the scene was the most picturesque and novel I have ever witnessed,” Custer added. “What rendered the scene so striking and so magnificent were the gaudy colors of the dress and trappings of the chiefs and warriors.”51

  A parley interrupted the seemingly inevitable fight. Hancock insisted on camping near the Indians. The Cheyennes who met with him returned to their line, which immediately turned about and withdrew. Custer and his men pursued. “Notwithstanding that the cavalry marched at its most rapid pace, there was not an Indian to be seen after marching five miles,” he wrote.52

  A dozen miles away they found the village—an impressive collection of nearly 300 tepees, or lodges, in a curve of the Pawnee Fork, sheltered amid cottonwoods. A group of Cheyenne men approached and told Hancock that the women and children had fled. Roman Nose, a prominent Dog Soldier, asked him if he had not heard of the Sand Creek Massacre. Hancock insisted that they return, so he could properly intimidate them. He sent Guerrier, the translator, to be sure that the men did not sneak away as well.53

  That night an orderly appeared at the flap of Custer’s Sibley tent and said Hancock wanted him. In the headquarters tent, Hancock told him that Guerrier had found that “the Indians…were saddling up to leave about sunset,” Custer wrote to Libbie. Hancock wanted the 7th Cavalry to detain them.54

  Barnitz heard Custer ride up to his tent and ask for him. “I knew very well, from the tone of his voice, that something was to be done, which required haste and secrecy, and so I got up at once, drew on my boots, and reported for orders.” Custer told him to wake his men quietly but quickly. “In fifteen minutes our four squadrons of cavalry were all in line,” William W. Cooke wrote to his mother. “Not a word was spoken over a whisper. We moved slowly and without noise towards the Indian camp.”

  By midnight Custer had deployed the troops in a cordon around the village. He led a small party, including Guerrier and Dr. Coates, in to investigate. He could see in the moonlight that the lodges still stood among the trees and fires still burned. He told Guerrier to announce that they had come in peace. Still the village was silent. One of the group dismounted and entered a lodge. He called out, “Gone, by Jupiter.” Going from lodge to lodge, they found the entire camp had been abandoned.55

  Barnitz and his men remained to hold the village as the rest of the regiment returned. “On entering the [Indian] camp I was astonished at its magnitude and magnificence!” he wrote to his wife. “Each tent would contain 20 or 30 persons.” An inventory ordered by Hancock found 272 lodges, 814 buffalo robes, 283 saddles, 243 whetstones, 165 frying pans, 49 coffee mills, as well as brass kettles, spades, bridles, ropes, hatchets, crowbars, horn spoons, tin cups and plates, and much more.56

  Jesse H. Leavenworth, federal agent for the Comanches and Kiowas, was astounded that Hancock “marched his column right up to the Indian village.” Even Custer grasped that they feared another Sand Creek. Leavenworth added, “I am fearful that the result of all this will be a general war.”

  Hancock had no legal or treaty grounds for detaining the Cheyennes or Lakotas. He admitted to Sherman that they committed “no hostilities.” But he saw their flight as a “provocation,” an act of “bad faith.” He ordered Custer to pursue at daylight.57

  At 5 a.m. on April 15, Custer led the eight companies of cavalry out of camp, followed by a train of supply wagons. Guerrier rode along, as did six Delaware and three white scouts, including Wild Bill Hickok. The Delawares found the fleeing Indians’ trail, leading to the northwest. Custer’s column passed still-smouldering fires and worn-out ponies. The Delawares spotted Cheyenne or Lakota scouts watching them from hilltops. “We continued to gain on them and were so close that, although the heat of the sun was quite high, the earth disturbed by the feet of their ponies and by dragging their lodge poles was still damp and fresh,” Custer wrote the next day.

  They noticed smaller trails diverging off the main track, which “gradually grew less, and more faint,” he reported. They lost it entirely thirty-five miles from the village. On the horizon he saw puffs of smoke rise into the sky—“signal smokes”—yet none was closer than ten miles away.58 After a few hours of rest, he ordered a march to the Smoky Hill River, twenty-one miles to the north. On the way they mistook an elk herd for Indians, then did the same with a bison herd. The prospect of a buffalo hunt thrilled him. “General Custer was wild with excitement, and yelled as if he
was going into a desperate cavalry charge,” wrote Coates. They killed two and pushed on.59

  Custer rode ahead of the column with his chief bugler and his dogs. Spotting some antelope, he spurred Custis Lee into a gallop. Four miles later he gave up. The column and his bugler were now far behind him and one dog was missing—gone forever. Then he saw a large, solitary bison. He chased it for three miles, then came up on its left. At full gallop, he drew his revolver, cocked the hammer, and aimed it at the animal’s side. It turned on him. Startled, Custis Lee veered sharply left. Custer grabbed the reins with both hands. The cocked pistol went off, sending a bullet into the horse’s brain, killing the animal instantly. “I was thrown heels over head, clean over Lee, but, strange to say, I received not a scratch or bruise,” he wrote to Libbie. “This is the second dangerous fall I have had within ten days.” Regaining his feet, he was relieved to see the huge buffalo merely glare at him for a moment, then amble off.

  With his men somewhere over the horizon, he trudged over the treeless plain, hoping to intersect the column’s course. Finally he saw the white tops of the wagons cresting a rise of ground a couple of miles off. He sat and waited. When they reached him he borrowed a mount as a detail retrieved his saddle. Killing his horse embarrassed him—deserting his men to indulge himself did not. He tried again the next time he saw a bison. This time he succeeded. The men, on the other hand, were exhausted. “As soon as we halted every man threw himself on the ground & fell asleep,” William Cooke wrote.60

  At Downer’s Station on the Overland Mail route along the Smoky Hill River, two men told Custer of rumors that Indians—Sioux, they thought—had attacked Lookout Station to the east. With this uncertain information, Custer reported, “There is no doubt that the depredations committed at Lookout were by some of the same Indians who deserted their lodges on Pawnee Fork.”61

  On April 18 Custer advanced thirty-five miles east to Lookout Station. Riding in the lead, he reached it ahead of his men. He “found the station house, stable, & haystack a pile of ashes, a few pieces of timber being still burning. The bodies of the three men were lying near the ruins,” he reported. “The hair was singed from their heads, the skin & flesh burned from their breasts and arms and their intestines torn out.”62

  The next day they reached Fort Hays. The column’s horses were debilitated. Unlike Indian ponies, they could not subsist on grazing alone. The cavalry had to carry forage with them, grain and hay hauled in wagons. Custer expected a large supply at Fort Hays. He found almost nothing. He asked Wild Bill to ride overnight on a fresh mule to request forage from Fort Harker. “He was armed with two revolvers (and a carbine I loaned him for the trip),” Albert Barnitz wrote of Wild Bill, “and [he] thought he was good for a dozen Indians at all events”—meaning, of course, that if he were attacked he could kill a dozen hostile Cheyennes or Lakotas before he died. He made it through, but Harker had little to send.

  “It is with regret that I turn from the pursuit of the Indians, who have just gone north and who are the perpetrators of the massacre at Lookout Station and of other depredations,” Custer reported to Hancock. He had hoped for peace and a rapid reunion with Libbie. Ironically, Custer’s report on the attack at Lookout Station convinced Hancock to destroy the abandoned village. Smith, Wynkoop, and Leavenworth argued against it, but Hancock insisted. He wiped out the homes and possessions of thousands on the flimsiest evidence. The inevitable outbreak of war that followed put Custer in an impossible situation. Unable to see Libbie because of the fighting, unable to fight for lack of forage, he was stuck.63

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  “WAVES OF FLAME” SWEPT ACROSS the plain toward Fort Riley. They terrified Libbie Custer. “In an incredibly short time we were overshadowed with a dark pall of smoke,” she wrote. The soldiers deployed in a line, beating out the fire before it could reach the buildings. Yet those same men frightened Libbie far more than the conflagration.64

  “I had seen with dismay that the cavalry were replaced by negro infantry, and found that they were to garrison the post for the summer,” she later wrote. They were from the 38th Infantry, one of six Regular Army regiments staffed by black enlisted men. “The early days of their soldiering were a reign of terror to us women, in our lonely, unprotected homes,” Libbie wrote. “I was very much afraid of a negro soldier.”65

  Libbie hinted at the nature of her “terror” with the phrase, “in our lonely, unprotected homes.” She assumed they would rape her. Anna Darrah, she wrote to Armstrong, “has loaded her pistol to protect us” from “a negro.” Libbie believed in the racial stereotype of the black man as sexual predator of white women. Indeed, the racism in her letters and memoirs grew increasingly frantic.

  She invariably called these men “darkies.” She compared them to “apes” and “monkey acrobats.” The “black-faced and shiney-eyed,” she wrote, were, “as usual, slack and careless.” She took offense when some off-duty men danced as another patted out a beat, complaining, “[W]e seemed transformed into a disconnected minstrel show.” As she sat in church, depressed over her husband, “two darkies who sat behind me began to sing some of the service,” one humming as the other “shouted in regular camp-meeting style.” She scornfully assumed they were ignorant of the lyrics. “If I had not been so forlorn, I would have thought it too funny to refrain from laughing at.”66

  Many were indeed fresh recruits, in a new regiment still establishing its identity. As with all raw troops, some broke protocol on occasion, or consumed their pay or rations too soon; to this day officers struggle to keep young soldiers away from payday lenders who flourish on the outskirts of bases. At that very moment white troops in the field committed misdeeds worse than any at Fort Riley. But Libbie interpreted everything in terms of race.

  “I had known enough of their life, while in Texas and Louisiana, to realize what an irresponsible, child’s existence it was,” she wrote. “Entirely dependent on someone’s care, and without a sense of obligation of any kind, they were exempt from the necessity of thinking about the future.” This was how she defined the killing stress of being enslaved: the threat of random whipping, the struggle to care for one’s own family in the moments away from serving the master, the realistic fear that a spouse or child might be taken away and sold, the constant deprivation, the fear of being caught communicating between plantations, the slave-catching patrols, and the frantic few hours, if one was lucky, spent earning a little money by selling one’s labor on Sundays. They had worked, planned, schemed, struggled, and seized the chance at freedom when they could. They had taken care of themselves as Libbie never had.67

  Most white Americans shared Libbie’s views—yet this was also the moment when African Americans began to challenge them. After decades of slave owners’ propaganda that blacks could not manage their own affairs, they were organizing politically, starting schools, demanding to be heard. Many white Northerners who went to the South saw this, and learned that the freed people were as fully human as themselves.

  The black regiments brought this revolution to Kansas. African American men saw military service as an assertion of citizenship. The chaplain of the black 10th Cavalry said the troops “are possessed of the notion that the colored people of the whole country are more or less affected by their conduct in the Army.” They wished to be full participants in the society they had helped to build as slaves. Black recruits were more likely than whites to see the military as a career; their units’ desertion rates were far lower and reenlistment rates higher than those in white regiments. Barred by the Johnson administration from deployment in the South on Reconstruction duty, they served year after year in the West, becoming some of the most effective troops in the Indian wars. But all this was lost on Libbie, even though she had her own tutor living and working alongside her, outspoken and righteous.68

  “Eliza kept my sympathies constantly aroused,” Libbie recalled. “Her whole soul was in the wrongs, real or fancied, of her race.” In 1867, Libbie could not see those wrongs. She felt vul
nerable and isolated. The sheer irrationality of her attitude flummoxed Eliza Brown. One day, as black troops protested the withholding of part of their rations, she saw that Libbie was terrified. “Lord, Miss Libbie,” she said, tapering Lord so that it sounded like law, “they won’t tech you.” There was no persuading Libbie that African American men were not congenital rapists, but Brown reasoned with her. “You done wrote too many letters for ’em, and they’s got too many good vittles in your kitchen ever to ’sturb you.”

  “To me she was worth a corporal’s guard,” Libbie wrote of Brown, “and could not be equaled as a defender, solacer, and general manager of our dangerous situations—indeed, of all our affairs.” This statement put Libbie in the role society expected of a respectable white woman: one of vulnerability, frailty, dependency—femininity, as they saw it. Yet it was also a frank admission that this diminutive young black woman, ostensibly Libbie’s inferior, dominated their relationship. Brown had more fortitude and control over her place in the world than Libbie ever had. It’s startling to realize that Libbie wrote this even though Tom Custer remained in the same house as he recovered from rheumatism. He did not reassure her as Brown did.

  Part of Libbie’s problem was that she had been dropped into Brown’s world when Fort Riley suddenly became a black community. Brown “profited by the presence of the negro troops,” Libbie admitted. As usual, Brown exploited her control of the Custers’ larder for her own social advantage. Men from the regiment “waited on her assiduously, and I suspect they dined daily in our kitchen, as long as their brief season of favor lasted,” Libbie added. Some tried to cultivate Brown by giving gifts to Libbie; one planted a garden for her. The illiterate asked her to write letters for them to family and girlfriends (though black regiments organized well-attended literacy classes). Libbie did the same for Brown, who would learn to read and write in time.