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

by Stiles, T. J.

  “Me smell fire,” Little Beaver answered. (If the broken English sounds suspiciously stereotypical, other witnesses described the same speech pattern.) Custer smelled nothing, and ordered the march to continue. Less than a mile later the Osages halted again. Little Beaver pointed to a dying campfire about seventy-five yards away.69

  They were very close to their target. The regiment waited as Custer, Hard Rope, and Little Beaver crept up one hill after another, peered over, then moved ahead to the next. Around midnight, Custer met Little Beaver on another ridge as the scout returned from a search of the valley beyond. “Heaps Injuns down there,” he said.

  Custer stretched out in the snow on the crest next to his guide. He peered at the valley in the moonlight. Given the trees clustered along the Washita, it was hard to make out anything. He heard a tinkling bell, indicating a pony herd. He was convinced. Then he heard something else: “the distant cry of an infant.”70

  He ordered Clark to take Corbin and Romero to reconnoiter the village, hidden in a wooded bend in the river, and its surroundings. When they returned, Clark guessed it contained perhaps 150 warriors. Custer ordered the regiment to double back to reduce the chance of discovery. He told the officers to remove their noisy sabers and ascend the ridge to familiarize themselves with the landscape below.

  Custer quietly explained his improvised plan. The roughly 800 men would divide into four columns. Elliott would take three companies to the left and swing around to the far side—the eastern side—of the village. Capt. William Thompson would lead two companies to the right and place them south of the village. Capt. Edward Myers would take two companies to the right as well, though not so far. Each of these three detachments would use hills and ridges for cover. Custer would remain in place with one squadron (two companies) under Captain Hamilton and another under Capt. Robert West. He would also have the sharpshooters and the band. There would be no fires, and he insisted on absolute silence. They would attack from all sides at dawn, when the band struck up the jaunty drinking song “Garry Owen.” Ben Clark recalled, “Custer said that this air more nearly suggested the trampling and roar of a cavalry charge than any other he knew of.”71

  This was what Custer did best: plan and fight battles. Few if any of his officers had spent more time in combat, and none had so much command experience. He took every precaution in his approach. He assessed the terrain and improvised accordingly. He plotted the converging attack and explained it with professionalism and clarity. His plan was not an innovation, though. “The tactic was a mainstay during the Indian wars—both before and after” the coming battle, writes the historian Jerome Greene.

  As the officers listened to Custer, a star flared in the sky, catching everyone’s attention. It was so unusual that someone speculated that the Indians had gotten ahold of pyrotechnics and had fired off a signal. Clark recalled, “Custer, who was impressed by such incidents, called it ‘the Star of the Washita,’ saying that it presaged victory for him.” The meeting broke up, and the various columns moved out.72

  Frozen, exhausted, unable even to stamp around to keep themselves warm, the men of the 7th Cavalry took their positions and waited for daylight. One of Custer’s hounds, left with the wagon train, suddenly appeared. It heard dogs bark in the village, and barked in return. Fearing discovery, Custer muzzled it. It was not enough. He and Tom strangled it with a lariat. Finally the sky brightened in the east. Smoke could be seen drifting up from lodges among the trees. Custer’s detachment mounted, except for the sharpshooters. Custer turned to order the band to play. A gunshot rang out in the valley. He signaled. “Garry Owen” blared from the ridge. Custer spurred his black horse, revolver in hand, as the men cheered and galloped forward.73

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  ON NOVEMBER 20, 1868, as Custer feuded with Sully at Camp Supply, a sixty-seven-year-old man with long black hair hanging in braids on either side of his face spoke to Col. William B. Hazen, special military agent at Fort Cobb, Indian Territory. The man had lived out the history of the Southern Cheyennes. Born near the Black Hills, he had experienced his people’s final adaptation to a fully nomadic culture, their migration south, and the wars that established them as the dominant force on the Central Plains. He won fame as a warrior against the Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches, and lived through the great peace that made these nations allies. He married into the Wotapio band, and emerged as one of its senior leaders around 1850. Despite the reputation he had earned in combat, he was a realist when it came to the whites who began to appear in large numbers in the 1840s. He wanted peace with the Americans. His reward was the Sand Creek Massacre. His name was Black Kettle.74

  He came to Fort Cobb to keep his band out of the war. The reason they had camped on the Washita River, he told Hazen, was to distance themselves from the fighting. “The Cheyennes do not fight at all this side of the Arkansas, they do not trouble Texas, but north of the Arkansas they are almost always at war.”

  Black Kettle knew there was little he could do. High-plains culture was shaped more by consent and consensus than authority. His past disaster and his opposition to militancy drained his influence, even in his own band. “I have always done my best to keep my young men quiet, but some will not listen, and since the fighting began I have not been able to keep them all at home.” He asked to camp at Fort Cobb. Hazen refused. Sheridan was sending soldiers to fight, he said, “and with him you must make peace.”75

  In the midst of the same blizzard that enveloped Custer’s column, Black Kettle and his handful of companions rode back to their camp. They arrived late on November 26. Black Kettle called a council of his band’s senior men, and told them soldiers were on the march, searching for them. The group discussed the situation late into the night, as Custer peered down on them from a ridge to the northwest. They decided that they must improve their defenses by moving to camp with the other Cheyenne bands nearby.

  The evening before Black Kettle came back from Fort Cobb, the war party tracked by Elliott had appeared. The 150 or so men had split into two groups at the South Canadian, one heading directly for the main Cheyenne village, the other for Black Kettle’s. Some of the warriors lived in the latter camp; others likely had friends and relatives there. According to Edmund Guerrier’s sworn statement, a number of warriors from Black Kettle’s band took part in the August atrocities on the Saline and Solomon. One of them, Man Who Breaks the Marrow Bones, led the attacks and carried out the rapes, along with Red Nose of the Dog Soldiers.

  Black Kettle and the others who had stayed up late for the council slept through the predawn hours of November 27. Fifty-one lodges comprised the village, containing perhaps 250 people, including a handful of Arapahoes, a visiting Kiowa warrior, and perhaps more men from other Cheyenne bands, back from the raid.76

  Black Kettle awoke to a woman’s voice. She ran through the camp, warning of soldiers. He grabbed his rifle, darted outside, and fired in the air to alert his people.77

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  THE OPENING NOTES of “Garry Owen” echoed in the valley, followed by the cheers of the 7th Cavalry. For the first time in three and a half years, Custer enjoyed the thrill of a cavalry charge. Ben Clark said he “rode stirrup to stirrup” alongside him. He watched Custer leap his horse clear over the Washita, nine to twelve feet wide, landing on the south bank where the village was located. A warrior emerged from a lodge and raised his rifle. Clark saw Custer aim his revolver and shoot him down, then ride straight through the camp to a rise of ground beyond, where he could better observe the fight.78

  Captain Hamilton rode next to Custer. As they plunged into the village, Custer heard him say to his squadron, “Now men, keep cool, fire low, and not too rapidly.” Almost immediately a bullet struck and killed him. The young aristocrat—grandson of Alexander Hamilton—had begged to join the attack, and was the regiment’s first casualty.79

  Soldiers galloped through the camp, firing revolvers into lodges. Women and children ran screaming from the tepees as men fired back. Many of the Chey
ennes took refuge in the freezing Washita, where they found a kind of natural trench behind its high banks. Black Kettle rode his iron-gray horse into its waters with his wife, Medicine Woman Later (or Woman Here After), behind him. They were both shot dead. The soldiers gained control of the village in a few minutes. They began to root out the people who had fortified themselves in the river, firing whenever a head appeared. Some of the warriors took to the trees or ravines outside the village. Steady, slow sniping, led by the sharpshooters, brought them down, one by one.

  The cordon Custer had thrown around the village proved incomplete. Some escaped the camp, followed by detachments of cavalrymen. Clark told Custer that one squadron was gunning down women and children, and he ordered it stopped at once. He told Romero to gather all the women and children he could find in a central location, and assure them that they would be spared. In the chaos of the initial attack, though, the troops shot down dozens. And all Cheyenne men, writes Jerome Greene, were executed “as a matter of policy.”80

  Lt. Edward Godfrey received orders to gather up the pony herds around the camp. As he finished up, he later wrote, “I observed a group of dismounted Indians escaping down the opposite side of the valley.” He took part of his company and followed them downstream, riding farther and farther until two of his sergeants began to grow nervous. He ascended a ridge for a better view. “I was amazed to find that as far as I could see down the well wooded, tortuous valley there were tepees—tepees. Not only could I see tepees, but mounted warriors scurrying in our direction.”

  Godfrey and his men made a fighting retreat, one squad firing to cover the withdrawal of the other. He sought out Custer and told him of the big village. “He exclaimed, ‘What’s that?’ and put me through a lot of rapid fire questions.” Godfrey said he had found Barnitz’s horse. Custer told him Barnitz had been shot.81

  Custer ordered the camp destroyed. The troops piled the lodges and their contents together and set an enormous fire—though not until after Custer had selected, as his personal trophy, an exceptionally large, fine tepee. He also ordered the slaughter of the horse herd. One by one, 875 ponies were shot dead over an hour and a half.82

  By then scores of warriors swarmed on the heights around the valley. Some of them found the pile of greatcoats left by Custer’s detachment; they waved them in the air and dared the soldiers to come get them. Skirmishing erupted around the perimeter as the cavalry drove back the enveloping Indians. Ammunition ran low. Just in time, the two wagons carrying additional rounds and forage for the horses burst onto the scene, driven at top speed by Lt. James Bell.

  Custer interrogated Godfrey further about the huge village he had seen—clearly the source of the fighters who surrounded them. (It was, in fact, a mass encampment a few miles downstream of about 6,000 Arapahoes and Southern Cheyennes.) And Elliott could not be found. Custer asked Clark if he knew where Elliott was, without success.

  The men of the 7th Cavalry faced growing danger. They were surrounded, perhaps outnumbered. They were cut off from their supply train, which was vulnerable to capture. They could not risk remaining overnight, despite their exhaustion. Custer believed that fighting his way back would simply lead the enemy to his own wagons.

  Instead, he thought up a ruse. He ordered the regiment into a consolidated formation, with the captive women and children in the center. He put out flanking riders, Clark recalled, to look for Elliott and snipe at their besiegers. With the band playing, “Ain’t I Glad to Get Out of the Wilderness,” they marched slowly toward the main village. The warriors immediately rode back to defend their own. The heights above the valley emptied. As darkness fell, the column abruptly changed face and rode quickly in the other direction. And still they had found no sign of Elliott.83

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  TWO WEEKS LATER, Sheridan and Custer looked down at Elliott’s body. It was one of eighteen naked corpses, mutilated, perforated with bullets and arrows, and “frozen as solidly as stone,” an observer reported. They were inside a perimeter fifteen yards wide, surrounded by spent cartridges.

  Custer had returned to Camp Supply immediately after the Battle of the Washita, as the fight was called. Sheridan delighted in his success. It was precisely what he had demanded of his protégé. But Elliott’s disappearance haunted the victory celebrations. The 7th Cavalry rested and refitted for several days. On December 4, Sheridan and all the officers of the regiment buried Hamilton. (Barnitz survived his wound, to everyone’s surprise.) On December 7, they had set out again for the Washita along with Sheridan and the 19th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, which had finally arrived.84

  They had come on December 10. The next day they went to the killing field. Dense black clouds of flapping crows and ravens, startled by their approach, lifted off the corpses of horses and men, women, and children. A number of the dead had been tended to by survivors and placed in branches of trees, in the custom of the high-plains peoples. Soon afterward they found Elliott and his party. Early in the battle he had seen some Cheyennes escaping, and had called for volunteers to go after them. They were surrounded by warriors riding up from the main village and wiped out.85

  The discovery of Elliott and his men completed the list of casualties the 7th Cavalry suffered on November 27. Two officers and eighteen enlisted men died, and two officers and twelve enlisted men were wounded. Tom Custer suffered a minor wound to his hand. The losses inflicted on the Southern Cheyennes and their allies remain uncertain. Custer tallied up reports from his subordinates and gave a total of 103 warriors killed (with fifty-three women and children held as prisoners). He did not tally the dead noncombatants. After returning to the Washita, he claimed that his report undercounted the Indian fatalities. Ben Clark later guessed that the 7th Cavalry killed seventy-five warriors and roughly the same number of women and children. Custer’s prisoners and Cheyennes who spoke to federal agents identified their dead as thirteen Cheyenne men, three more from other nations, sixteen women, and nine children.

  The true number of Indian dead must lie between these figures. Custer’s total of 103 may be taken as an upper limit of lost fighting men. But, as Robert Utley writes, the “Indian calculations…are as improbably low as Custer’s are high.” At least two, Cranky Man and Double Wolf, were killed as they emerged from their lodges; Barnitz alone killed at least two, and likely a third, elsewhere; Elliott’s doomed party killed at least a few; and Black Kettle himself died on his horse. It is highly improbable that in the many hours of fighting, including clashes with the warriors from the main village, the entire regiment killed only four or five more men. More women and children may have died as well. The Cheyenne count was subject to human error just as Custer’s was. Witnesses agreed that it had been an extremely bloody affair. It essentially wiped out Black Kettle’s band, and cost the Cheyennes dearly in destroyed goods and horses.86

  On December 12, Sheridan and the two regiments passed through the abandoned site of the main village. There they found Clara Blinn and her son, Willie. They had been murdered while eating corn bread. Custer blamed the Kiowas. But Hazen sent word that the Kiowas were peaceful, and their leaders Satanta and Lone Wolf rode to meet Sheridan’s force. Sheridan arrested the two men and held them as hostages until all the Kiowas reported at Fort Cobb. To bring in the remaining Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Custer selected one of his prisoners, a woman named Mahwissa, as an envoy. She was Black Kettle’s sister. She said she could convince them to surrender, since Custer held so many prisoners from the Washita. Some came in, but she herself never returned.87

  Large numbers of members of various nations poured in to Fort Cobb before the end of 1868, all fearing that Sheridan would attack them if they remained at large. On New Year’s Day, Custer held his own council with the Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahoes, Plains Apaches, and Southern Cheyennes. “The arrogance and pride is whipped out of the Indians,” he wrote to Libbie. “They have surrendered themselves into our keeping.” Recognizing that humble Fort Cobb was overwhelmed, Sheridan established a new post thirty mile
s away on the edge of the Wichita Mountains. He called it Fort Sill.88

  Custer took a detachment to search the Wichita Mountains for the other Southern Cheyennes. After returning to Fort Sill in February he wrote to Libbie, “None of us feel that we could or aught to leave here until we see the end of the Indian matter.”

  As he prepared the regiment for another foray, he remained as demanding as ever. He made a point of arresting his own brother for a minor offense, along with Capt. Robert West, the man who had charged him with murder. He hectored Tom to write home, and complained that “he is becoming more profane & a little vulgar.” But he displayed none of the brittleness that marked his nadir in 1867. He felt wonderful, as exuberant as during the war. He joyfully promised Eliza Brown a buffalo robe. “Custer luck” would prevail, he wrote. “It is better to be born lucky than rich.”89

  Spring approached. Soon the grass would spring up, the Cheyennes’ ponies would regain their strength, and the army would lose its advantage in mobility. The army estimated that the Cheyennes still at large comprised 1,400 individuals in 200 lodges—a group four times larger than the band Custer had crushed at the Washita. Increasing the pressure on Custer were two white women held by the Cheyennes as captives, twenty-four-year-old Anna Brewster Morgan and eighteen-year-old Sarah White. Morgan’s brother, Daniel Brewster, was a civilian teamster, driving a wagon with the troops.90

  Custer moved out from Fort Sill on March 2 with the 7th Cavalry and ten companies of the 19th Kansas, which lacked horses for many of its men. He led them southwest toward the Texas Panhandle. Custer divided the force in half. Captain Myers took the dismounted men to a supply depot near the Washita battlefield. Custer led troops who still had horses, from both regiments, into the emptiness of Texas.

  “We had marched but one day when we struck the trail of a single lodge, which we followed through a country almost impassable, and utterly destitute of wood or pure water, for several days,” wrote a noncommissioned officer in the column. “We were now on the edge of a desert, with no wood or water west of us for two days’ journey,” he added. “We were nearly all dismounted, one-fourth of our wagons had been burned [for fuel], and we were subsisting entirely on mule meat.”