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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Custer caught the fever. After an interregnum in Kansas in the Washita’s wake, he would leave the edge of American civilization and go to its center. He would go to New York, the capital of business, media, and (in some ways) politics, where the future of each was being made. He largely rejected the changes to the country, yet he would try to profit from them. He would seek the secret of his times.

  “He saw people, all around him, poor yesterday, rich today, who had come into sudden opulence by some means which they could not have classified among any of the regular occupations of life,” Twain and Warner wrote. It takes no imagination to see Custer making the same observation, and concluding that he “will find somehow, and by some sudden turn of good luck, the golden road to fortune.”4

  —

  ELIZA BROWN WENT to see the Indians. The women and children seized at the Washita remained prisoners after the Custer household reunited in April 1869 and settled into a tent camp on Big Creek near Fort Hays, which had been rebuilt after the floods that Brown and Libbie had endured two years earlier. The three hostages Armstrong took at the end of the campaign were held there as well, as the Cheyennes slowly surrendered.5

  They were a curiosity to Brown as well as the whites all around her. With emancipation, African Americans belonged to the same economic and political system as every white from Custer to Cornelius Vanderbilt—though with vast disadvantages and cultural and social distinctions, to be sure. Black citizens handled the same currency, spoke the same language, argued about the same political questions as whites. As Custer’s cook, Brown came to the West as a small part of the federal government’s presence in the region, which had a tremendous impact on this sparsely populated landscape. That was true of many Western black men and women, who often found employment with the military or enterprises that served the military. The Cheyennes did not belong to this society and economy. They had a separate history, culture, language, and economy, even a separate system for relations with other nations.

  They had been treated as external clients of the American economy—though that would soon end. Already the U.S. government attempted to break down the Indians’ distinctiveness in order to digest them. The Medicine Lodge Treaty defined a fixed location for the residence of the Southern Plains nations—giving three million acres in exchange for the ninety million they had roamed across—and promised them farm implements, schools, teachers, skilled artisans. Grant called for their integration into U.S. society; in his inaugural address, he supported “any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” He inaugurated a “Peace Policy,” relying heavily on Quaker missionaries as agents to the Indians; he meant well, but the policy constituted an attack on their religions, cultures, and languages. He named as commissioner of Indian affairs Ely S. Parker, his former military secretary. Parker was a Seneca with an extensive English-language education and engineering expertise, integrated into American society—the symbol of what Grant wanted for all Indians.6

  This was a great contradiction, or conundrum, produced by the civil rights revolution of Reconstruction. With the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and later the Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, Americans brought to fruition the vision of universal, individual rights expressed by the Declaration of Independence. As noted earlier, the triumph was flawed. The framers of the Civil Rights Act meant to exclude resident Chinese and “Indians not taxed,” and the latter phrase reappeared in the Fourteenth Amendment. With black men, the intended beneficiaries, equality long remained merely theoretical; and women did not receive the right to vote until the twentieth century. Still, for the first time, the nation’s basic law guaranteed the same freedoms to every person regardless of race. It was a profound break with the European past. Before the modern era, liberty generally referred to the protected status of a given location or population, not universal, personal rights. The Edict of Nantes, for example, issued by France’s King Henry IV in 1598, exempted the Protestant Huguenots from religious laws and granted them armed sanctuaries in designated towns; it did not establish a general principle of freedom of conscience. And the British colonies in America were long exempt from taxation.7 Something of this traditional concept of liberty persisted in relations between the United States and the Indian nations. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Worcester v. State of Georgia in 1832, the federal government acknowledged “the Indians as a separate and distinct people, and as being vested with rights which constitute them a state, or separate community—not foreign, but a domestic community…existing within [the United States.]” American Indian rights were community rights, in the eyes of U.S. law—the exemptions and privileges of people who stood apart, yet lived within the domain claimed by the federal government. Grant wished to extend to the indigenous the revolution of individual rights—but their autonomy stood in the way. They would have to move out of the category of “Indians not taxed,” or the category itself would have to be abolished, if they were to be citizens. The Peace Policy’s irony is that it could only work after the Indians’ functional independence had been crushed.8

  The Washita captives showed that the crushing continued in the summer of 1869, when it came to the Southern Cheyennes. “The whole camp seemed like an animated zoo,” Libbie later wrote. She referred to the wild animals kept as pets by the soldiers—antelopes, wolves, and wildcats—but she could have been speaking of the women and children, penned in the stockade, examined by curiosity seekers.

  Brown went too. Custer, always passionate for the exotic, had studied the sign language commonly used on the plains; he took Brown in and introduced her through signs. The Cheyennes gathered around the young black woman, felt her skin, patted her on the shoulder, “rolled up my sleeve to see if I was brown under my dress,” Brown recalled. “They had never seen a colored person.” Brown herself was now the curiosity.

  Custer slipped out, leaving her alone with them as a practical joke. The older women were “making ready to give me a pipe to have me smoke their tobacco,” she said, when “I looked around and found the ginnel gone.” She darted out of the stockade as Custer watched and laughed at her. “Well, I was scared.” But she overcame her fear. Her experience allowed her to perceive them as others did not. She saw their anxiety at their imprisonment. She remarked on how they often asked Custer when he would release them, and their joy when the time finally came. Brown recognized women who had suffered. “I never did see such hard old women. They looked like they had been lashed with trouble.”9

  Libbie came and looked as well. She wanted to see one captive in particular, the young woman who was daughter to Little Rock, the member of the Cheyenne Council of Forty-Four killed at the Washita. “Monahsetah had in many…ways made herself of service to the command,” Libbie wrote. “She was young and attractive, perfectly contented, and trustful of the white man’s promises, and the acknowledged belle among all other Indian maidens.” It is unclear what “service” Libbie meant. Had she heard the stories of how Romero had provided the prisoners for sex—how Armstrong had taken Monahsetah as his concubine? As the biographer Louise Barnett observes, he wrote publicly of her as a woman with “sex appeal.”

  Monahsetah presented Libbie with a conundrum. On one hand, she embodied Armstrong’s sins. Libbie had remarked even before she married him that he “fibs” with regard to other women. No one had to tell her the rumors for her to see that he might have slept with this young Cheyenne woman. On the other hand, Monahsetah represented the romance and excitement of life with Armstrong. As Barnett observes, Libbie called her “the Princess,” imposing on her a literary archetype that dated back to Capt. John Smith’s account of Pocahontas at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Monahsetah personified the pain and pleasures of her marriage to Custer. The one thing she was not, in Libbie’s eyes, was a full, complex human being.10

  Nor in Custer’s eyes. On May 26, 1869, he mailed a special shipment to his friend Kirkland Barker for presentation to the De
troit Audubon Club. It included a variety of artifacts captured at the Washita: a large shield, a bow and a quiver of arrows, a beaded buckskin dress. He also sent a scalp, cut from the head of a man killed in the battle. It belonged to Little Rock, father of Monahsetah.11

  —

  “WE TOOK TURNS IN GIVING our cook an order, if it was absolutely necessary to give her any,” Libbie recalled. “It was very odd to hear a grown person, the head of a house, perhaps, say, ‘You tackle Eliza this time. I did it last time.’ ”12

  On Big Creek, Eliza Brown steeped in frustration. Having experienced a rich social life in a post with a black garrison, she now found herself in a remote tent camp, surrounded by white soldiers, officers’ wives, tourists, and wild animals. “I ain’t got nobody,” she said. Libbie claimed that Brown had an on-and-off relationship with the Custers’ private teamster, Henry, and quoted him as saying, “We kissed and we fought and we loved and we fought.” If so, it did not make up for her isolation.

  The Custers lived in a very pleasant canvas structure with a gallery overlooking the creek, but the kitchen consisted of little more than a cookstove and the grass, under the constant bombardment of high winds. “In the kitchen tent we found it well to leave the field completely to Eliza,” Libbie wrote. She battled floods, the lack of “anything cookable,” and the taunting of Armstrong and Tom Custer, who kept a pet wolf named Dixie, a raccoon, and a chest full of live rattlesnakes. “Under these various circumstances it was a marvel how she kept her temper at all,” Libbie added.13

  Years later, Libbie would emphasize the social pleasures that she, Armstrong, and Tom Custer enjoyed on Big Creek. Col. Nelson Miles, commander of Fort Hays, showed them great hospitality. Numerous hunting parties arrived on the Kansas Pacific Railroad, eager to be taken out to look for buffalo. Some were random, tiresome visitors. Some were welcome strangers, such as two English aristocrats, Lord Berkeley Paget and Lord Waterpark, whom Armstrong and Libbie both liked very much. Some were close friends, including Kirkland Barker, who was so fat, at 230 pounds, that he had difficulty mounting a horse. On his expedition, a soldier accidentally killed Maida, Custer’s favorite dog. Sheridan—promoted after Grant’s inauguration to commander of the vast Military Division of the Missouri, with headquarters in Chicago—sent some of these visiting hunters, hoping to impress his friends with an escort by his favorite subordinate, newly famous as a frontiersman.14

  There were tensions, too. Monahsetah embodied Armstrong’s dalliances, flirtations, or infidelities—whatever Libbie believed them to be. And his gambling continued, worse than ever. Lacking a mission, with no hope of seeing combat, he found his excitement in risking money over cards and horse races, to Libbie’s rising frustration.15

  The bloodshed sputtered on. On May 9, Big Head and Dull Knife—two of the three hostages Custer seized at the Sweetwater camp in Texas—died in a fight with their guards. Cheyennes—the Dog Soldiers in particular—launched a dozen raids in May, June, and July in the Solomon, Saline, and Republican valleys of central Kansas. The 7th Cavalry chased them fruitlessly; Custer himself took part only once. He left it to Carr to strike a decisive blow against the Dog Soldiers at Summit Springs on July 11.16

  On the banks of Big Creek in the fall of 1869, the long-building conflict between Libbie and Eliza Brown finally erupted. For five years they had been allies in the most masculine of environments; yet they also had made each other suffer. At her worst, Libbie had afflicted Brown with blatant racism and open mockery. For her part, Brown had subtly defied Libbie, manipulating her and siphoning the Custers’ resources to maintain her social position. At times she openly scorned her employers. Now she became short-tempered, and Libbie grew more determined to assert her dominance. Her rising irritation is reflected in her words, “You tackle Eliza this time.”

  “Have you heard that Eliza has left us? We had to send her away as she got on a spree & was insolent,” Libbie wrote to a friend on September 18. “I thought the whole establishment would fall through on her departure as she had so long been supreme as general superintendent.” A spree? It implies drunkenness—but the rest of the sentence reveals the truth. Insolent. It is a nasty word, spoken only out of a belief in one’s own superiority over others. It says that Libbie found Brown guilty not of disrespect, but of a refusal to show deference, a refusal to accept her inferior status. Pressed by Libbie’s condescension, Brown had finally lashed out. The only evidence of what she said, of her open anger, is that word. Perhaps it is all we need.

  Libbie, too, had changed. Brown’s authority over the kitchen had long perplexed her, and increasingly troubled her. “She had so long been supreme,” she wrote of Brown; she wrote disapprovingly, appalled at the inversion of mistress and servant, white and black. In firing her, Libbie restored the old order upended by the war. “I am now attending to the superintending myself,” she added, “& with my very economical cook [a black woman named Mary Adams], I think we shall manage to ‘eat up’ considerably less of the pay than we did while Eliza cooked for us & entertained her visitors.”

  Libbie enjoyed deference at last. “Mary’s temper has never failed her,” she later wrote to Rebecca Richmond. “She is so much better than Eliza.”17 It was a foreboding change. For eight years, Custer—later Custer and his wife—had lived “on the picket line of freedom,” to quote another Union soldier.18 In the Civil War, he had effectively destroyed slavery everywhere he had marched. In his private life, he had given Eliza Brown responsibility and respect, and proved more tolerant of her cultural distinctiveness than Libbie ever had. But Brown’s assertiveness and authority had come at the cost of Libbie’s own. In the wider world, the fight for civil rights raged on. Within the tents’ white walls on Big Creek, Libbie decided that she did not want an equal.

  Brown eventually reached Ohio, where she began a new life, made possible by the revolution of civil rights, incomplete as it was. She would meet Libbie again one day.

  —

  ON MARCH 3, 1869, Andrew Johnson’s last full day as president, he signed an act that decimated the army. Twenty out of forty-five regiments disbanded, including two of the four black infantry regiments. The number of brigadier generals fell from ten to eight. The authorized strength of the service went from 54,000 to 37,313.

  The reduction pushed the transformation of the army from a war-fighting organization to a constabulary service—sufficient to provide garrisons, concentrate on one or two major outbreaks of fighting with the Indians, and enforce Reconstruction in the most troubled parts of the South. It further restricted the room for the patronage and nepotism that flowered during the Civil War; retirement committees and “Benzine Boards” (named after the petroleum refining process) sought to eliminate low-quality officers to maintain professional standards. Nepotism still existed, of course. Custer continued to practice it, as did Sheridan and many others. But the reduced size of the force put a premium on institutional processes, and tended to squeeze out personal exceptions.19

  Colonel Samuel D. Sturgis, the new commander of the 7th Cavalry, respected Custer. But Sturgis represented the obstacles facing the younger man if he were to advance up the ranks of the shrinking army. An 1846 graduate of West Point, Sturgis had served in the Mexican War, and in California, the Great Plains, and New Mexico in the succeeding years. He had fought in Missouri and elsewhere in the West during the Civil War. He accumulated a respectable record, but attained none of the spectacular achievements that made Custer a national celebrity. He rose to command one of only twenty-five regiments simply because it was his turn. There were many, many officers whose turns came before that of the twenty-nine-year-old Custer.20

  The autumn of 1869 brought the Custers back to Leavenworth, and winter separated them. They visited the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, then in November Armstrong headed east alone. He enjoyed himself with his friends on Sheridan’s staff in Chicago. He journeyed to New York and returned to Michigan for the holidays, where he tended to the affairs of Judge Bacon’s estate—a s
ource of trouble rather than a bounty—and visited Kirkland Barker in Detroit. He spent his thirtieth birthday and another Christmas apart from Libbie. It was becoming a pattern, contrary to her later claim that they had pledged never to be apart again. Armstrong had repeated many patterns lately, and finally provoked a crisis in his marriage.21

  He spoke to it in an extraordinary letter. Libbie’s literary executor, Marguerite Merington, edited it by clipping, preserving three fragments in two different archives. She did not retain any portion with a date, but Armstrong’s mention of his visit to Chicago, their time at the Southern Hotel, and his discussion of returning to the plains, with other references, make December 1869 the most likely date, though he might have written it in late 1870. The letter is a tissue of guilt, creased with characteristic efforts to minimize his misdeeds. Perhaps misdeeds is the wrong word—addiction serves better.22

  He earnestly declared that he would give up gambling. “You may laugh at me, perhaps taunt me with the remark that I am unable to carry out the resolution,” he wrote. “I have often heard you express the idea that I was incapable of doing it.” This was a revealing passage, showing the depth of his gambling problem, but also Libbie’s sarcastic cutting edge, something she acknowledged but that rarely appears in her curated archives. They had fought at the Southern Hotel. He wrote that she had “seen me in anger” and that he had used a “profane word.”

  “I know that however badly I may have acted at times there have been periods when you were satisfied with me. I can scarcely write my eyes are blinded with tears but I will try.” He feared that any warmth she showed him before he left concealed contempt. “I am not judging merely from the distressing words you spoke at the Southern. They were merely the culmination of thoughts which have long filled your mind against me.…In your manner you have been more or less mechanical.” He longed for her to show real love for him again. He hoped to persuade her that she was wrong, that “however errattic [sic] wild or unseemly my conduct with others may have been, you were still to me as you always have been, the one great all absorbing object of my love.”