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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Here the letter seems to veer away from gambling to other women. “I will not pretend to justify my conduct with others,” he wrote. “Measured by the strict laws of propriety or public opinion I was wrong. I knew it then as plainly as I know it now.” Their difficulties refined his love, he claimed. He had felt that way in the spring—the time when Libbie faced Monahsetah, though he never mentioned her. “I labored to free your mind from all doubt,” he wrote, “but this dream was dispelled at St. Louis.”

  Custer confronted the consequences of his nature. Again and again they had fought over his gambling; again and again he had promised to reform, only to fall back into his addiction. Again and again he had indulged in flirtations, perhaps even infidelities, then promised Libbie his heart was true, only to do it again.

  The irony of this letter is that it reveals emotional strengths. He suffered addictions; he tried to minimize them, yet he confronted them. He possessed emotional sensitivity, seen in his alertness to her merely “mechanical” behavior, her lack of real warmth. And Libbie forgave him. She accepted his contrition as sincere. But she was a smart woman, and she must have suspected that he would always be true to his nature.23

  —

  CUSTER RETURNED TO KANSAS, where the spring and summer of 1870 brought visitors, merriment, and professional stagnation. Libbie’s cousin Rebecca Richmond and Armstrong’s little sister Maggie visited them at Fort Leavenworth. They helped to throw a “grand masquerade,” which featured dancing until five o’clock in the morning, and joined them at a dinner at Colonel Sturgis’s house, eating multiple courses of turkey, oysters, veal, and other dishes, followed by dancing at the Custers’.24

  On April 30, Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield, the Department of the Missouri’s new commander, sent Armstrong back to Big Creek. He ordered him to calm the “uneasiness of the settlers” along the Saline and Solomon rivers. It was dull work. “Indian Kansas,” write two historians, ended rapidly as the dispossessed were shunted out of the state. “Where over ten thousand Native Americans had, at the beginning of the Civil War, made their homes, by 1875 fewer than one thousand…remained.”25

  The Custers remained very much on the frontier—not a meeting zone between cultures but the ragged margin of American civilization. “It was Wild Bill who said there was ‘No Sunday west of Junction City, no law west of Hays City, and no God west of Carson City,’ ” a newspaper reported, quoting Custer’s former scout, Wild Bill Hickok. “At Hays [City] a burial-place was pointed out which seemed well filled for so small and new a place,” the Chicago Tribune wrote on September 22, 1870. Only two had died in bed. “The other twenty-seven died ‘with their boots on’—that is, were shot in brawls or were hanged by their fellow citizens to the trellis-work of a railway bridge over a ravine nearby, which is considered in that neighborhood one of the most important facilities which the opening of the railroad afforded them.”26

  Hays City, located near the fort and the Big Creek encampment, seemed to consist entirely of saloons, brothels, and billiard halls, tethered to civilization with a railroad depot. For contemporary observers and mythologizers—Libbie Custer counts as both—it embodied the anarchy of life on the frontier. In fact, it represented the leading edge of incorporation into America’s economy and society. Founded as a business venture, it attracted Texas cattle drovers who rode north to exploit the rail access to Chicago, center of the meat packing industry that fed northeastern and foreign markets. The Texas Longhorn, like the Indian pony, represented a remarkable biological adaptation to the environment of the Great Plains. The result of cross-breeding between Spanish Criollos and English cattle, they needed only grass, not grain; could endure the extremes of plains weather; and resisted Texas fever, carried by ticks. Starting in 1867, a vast new livestock business emerged as Texas cattlemen drove herds to Kansas railheads. Farmers fought the passage of the tick-carrying, grass-devouring Longhorns, so the drives gradually shifted west, ahead of the line of settlement, to one “cowtown” after another: Abilene, Hays, Dodge. On June 21, 1870, the Leavenworth Bulletin called Abilene “the great Texas cattle mart…a town entirely built by this cattle trade. Cattle drovers, buyers and shippers, monopolize everything. There are now in the neighborhood waiting for transportation something like 50,000 head of stock and beef cattle.”

  Hays City embodied entrepreneurship poured into a civic void, where a robust marketplace established itself before civil institutions and rule of law. It was suffused with a culture of violence bred in Indian conflicts and the Civil War. Here old Confederates from Texas collided with their former foes from abolitionist Kansas, in streets awash with alcohol and firearms. The businessmen of Hays City turned to a paragon of that culture to keep it under control.27

  In August 1869, the people of Ellis County, Kansas, elected Wild Bill Hickok as their sheriff. His job was to stabilize Hays City. “His buckskin suits were discarded in favor of a Prince Albert coat and all the trimmings,” writes his biographer Joseph Rosa. His nickname associated him with bloody, untamed nature, yet he now represented the establishment. He developed a “passion for taking a bath, at first frowned upon by the wild men of Hays,” Rosa adds. He put up signs around town announcing that firearms were forbidden.

  He was still the killer his electors wished him to be. Within two months of taking office, he shot two suspects dead. Perhaps the only reason he killed no more was that he left town, and his office, in January 1870. He returned as a private citizen. On July 17, 1870, he got into a brawl with several troopers from the 7th Cavalry. He ended the fight by shooting two privates, Jerry Lonergan and John Kyle. Lonergan recovered; Kyle did not. But Custer did not mind. “I have personal knowledge of at least half a dozen men whom he has at various times killed, one of these being at the time a member of my command,” Custer wrote. “There is not a single instance in which the verdict of twelve fair-minded men would not have pronounced in his favor.”28

  Annie Gibson Roberts described Custer much as Custer described Wild Bill. The daughter of a noted civil engineer working on a revolutionary iron and steel bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis, designed by the famous James B. Eads, she went out to Fort Hays in the summer of 1870. “I should think [him] about 165 pounds—no spare flesh, well-knit—strong muscles lean & lithe,” she later recalled. “Eyes—A piercing blue; keen, thoughtful, observant & very quick in glancing at any object & sizing it up.…Voice—Pleasant in tone but quick & energetic with sometimes a slight hesitation if words rolled out rapidly.…A nervous forceful manner in speaking.” He filled her with confidence and impressed her with his generous nature. “He was slightly moody at times & sometimes silent for hours—but usually possessed high animal spirits and was very humorous, and very appreciative of that quality in those around him.” She observed him to be an excellent horseman and a remarkable shot with a rifle.29

  Roberts’s warm impression of Custer stands out because she also befriended Benteen. She spent a great deal of time with the officers of the 7th Cavalry at Big Creek and on hunting expeditions on the plains; she shot and killed buffalo herself, breaking with expectations of femininity. She grew close to the stocky, blond-haired Capt. George Yates. Before many months passed the two were engaged to be married.

  The summer of 1870 also revealed to her the crueler side of Custer. July 6 found Roberts on a bison hunt with Libbie and Armstrong, Mary Reno (wife of Maj. Marcus Reno, a relatively new officer in the 7th Cavalry) and her young son Robert, Col. Wesley Merritt, Tom Custer, Lt. Edward Mathey, and other officers. Strange riders appeared on the horizon. Custer quickly saddled, as did Tom and a few others, and left Mathey and Merritt with the women. They rode out toward the approaching figures, who turned out to be Indians. Shots rang out. Someone toppled from a saddle. Mary Reno clutched her boy as Libbie fell to her knees and screamed, “Autie will be killed!”

  Mary Reno guessed from the behavior of Mathey that the attack was staged. “Mr. Mathey, if they are Indians, tell us so and don’t make a fool of yourself.” Mer
ritt, “now thoroughly irate,” broke in. “Yes, quit this damned nonsense—don’t you see they are frightening the ladies?” Mathey sheepishly admitted that it was a practical joke; the Indians were army scouts. Roberts recalled that they laughed when it was all over. But it took a peculiar sense of humor for Custer to derive amusement from convincing his wife that he was about to die in front of her eyes. If, that is, one can call it humor at all.30

  —

  CUSTER CAME HOME—or to the place closest to home other than Monroe itself.31 After visiting St. Louis with Libbie in December 1870, staying at the Southern Hotel, he went to New York, alone. He took a room in the Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway and Prince, the five-story monolith next to Niblo’s Garden where he had stayed in 1863 while assisting McClellan. Indeed, he saw much of his old hero in the coming days.

  Soon he journeyed to Washington, appearing as a material witness before one of the “Benzine Boards” that culled out inferior officers. He had other business with the army bureaucracy that year, too: he applied to be superintendent at West Point (he failed), and asked for Lt. James Calhoun’s transfer to the 7th Cavalry (he succeeded). He returned to spend several days with Libbie at Leavenworth. As soon as he could obtain a leave—on January 11, 1871—he hurried back to New York alone.32

  On his return he lodged at his new favorite, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, situated far uptown on Madison Square. “Within an hour I had received more invitations than I can accept,” he wrote to Libbie. He attended a dinner thrown in his honor by stockbrokers; he called it “elegant,” held in a house filled with fine art. Custer knew the wife of the host and wondered at her absence, but he was told she was “indisposed.” The host said quietly, “To tell the truth, General, there is nothing the matter with her, and she is disappointed, but I thought we would have a better time without her, so bade her remain upstairs.” Custer commented in his letter, “I thought of a little girl without money whose Bo would not want anyone at this table without his Bunkey.” The fact that he went to New York without her tended to lessen the romantic impact.

  The “without money” part clawed at him. He dined out on his celebrity with relish, but it only reminded him of his relative poverty. This brownstone and private-art-gallery world was far from his nearly illiterate father’s anvil, fire, and water barrel in little New Rumley—far even from Monroe, where his mother had once feared to ask him for $5 to fix a shed. As an army officer, he always felt short of money. He breathed it in and out without ever accumulating any. Now, as a guest of the men of finance, he dined well, had an admirer’s fine carriage at his disposal, and attended performances at the patricians’ theater, the Academy of Music. Prolonged exposure to luxury when financially shackled is a goading experience, especially for one prone to self-indulgence.

  Custer felt it, too, because it touched the reason why he came to New York. He faced a hard choice about his future. The Washita gave him a new reputation as an Indian fighter, but to what end? The army treated him no differently. He remained an interchangeable component in a regiment that was posted according to the army’s bureaucratic procedures, not any particular merits or capacities. Was this all there was? To waste years without hope of promotion, in primitive stations, attending to petty regulations? He had finally regained some public admiration, but derived nothing from it. Others acquired power or fortunes on the credit fame gave them. He would too.

  He came on a mission. He hinted at it in his letter to Libbie. He mentioned that he had been invited to go on a two-week press excursion on the Northern Pacific Railroad, one of the new transcontinental lines being built after the completion of the Union Pacific–Central Pacific axis. “But business will prevent,” he wrote.33

  This “business” was an enterprise of his own. He hoped it would allow him to raft the whitewater currents on Wall Street. His exposure to financiers revealed the scale and power of financial markets, which created millions seemingly instantly. Capital was changing the world. He could see it in the very landscape of New York.

  He needed only to step outside his hotel door, board a horse-drawn railcar, and ride twenty blocks up Fourth Avenue, through the Murray Hill Tunnel and onto 42nd Street. There a vast new railroad depot rose. Started in 1869, it would be completed in late 1871. It stretched 692 feet long, 240 feet wide, and 160 feet high at the top of its central tower. Teams of workers scurried over scaffolding and milled between the skeletal walls; they assembled ten million bricks and eight million pounds of iron, and placed 80,000 feet of glass in the vast train shed roof alone. It would be the largest railroad station in the hemisphere, second largest in the world. They called it Grand Central.34

  Grand Central would be the capitol for a new kind of empire: the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, one of the first truly giant corporations in American history. It was formed in January 1870 by the merger of two of the nation’s largest and most important railroads. It carried more than seven million passengers and four million tons of freight in 1870, running nearly 10,000 locomotives and cars. The New York Times called its first semi-annual dividend, $3.6 million issued on April 15, “the very largest single dividend ever paid in this country by any one corporation.”35

  Its creation told the story of the changing corporation and the rise of finance. Its mastermind was Cornelius Vanderbilt. Born in 1794, this tall, tough former sailor won the nickname “Commodore” (the highest rank in the U.S. Navy before the Civil War) with shipping lines from New York to California and Europe. He spent his early career condemning corporations as monopolies. In the early republic, they were tools of mercantilism, used to create privately funded public works. But Vanderbilt and others came to see their potential and changed them from within. When he first seized a ferry corporation in 1838, he was promptly sued for operating it “with the sole view of profit.” That complaint reveals a silent revolution that helped to make modernity.36

  Railroads began as community enterprises, chartered to serve the public in specific locations. Vanderbilt and his peers changed that. In 1863 he took over the New York & Harlem Railroad, followed in 1864 by the Hudson River Railroad, followed in 1867 by the New York Central. His merger of the latter two lines created a single corporation that spanned the entire width of New York State. In 1869 he won the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, connecting the Central to Chicago. The mercantilist public-works corporation of the past was dead; the modern business corporation was born.37

  The titanic scale of these behemoths startled the public. As early as November 10, 1866, the Times blasted “The Tyranny of Corporations,” arguing, “The tendency of power—of the modern aristocracy of capital—is toward disregard of individuals and individual convenience and comfort.…Every public means of transit is in the hands of the tyrants of modern society—the capitalists.” Harper’s Weekly and other major publications joined in the outcry. In January 1867, during Vanderbilt’s battle with the New York Central, he refused to accept its trains onto his own Hudson River or Harlem railroads—during a winter storm that prevented most ferry or ship traffic from reaching Manhattan. One man was able to blockade America’s largest city. Charles Francis Adams Jr. wrote in July 1869, “Vanderbilt is but the precursor of a class of men who will wield within the state a power created by the state, but too great for its control. He is the founder of a dynasty.”38

  The corporation had created a layer of economic reality that existed purely in the imagination. A secondary market arose, where shares of corporate ownership could be traded. The New York Stock Exchange emerged as the most important of many. In a formal trading room and in a mob on the curb outside, brokers bought and sold stocks and bonds at prices that varied from minute to minute. As in a mirror facing a mirror, there appeared a limitless vista of derivatives—tradable rights based on the share.

  The stock exchange became a major source of revenue in the 1850s and especially the ’60s, quite apart from actual business operations. Financiers manipulated the market, driving stock prices up and down, sometimes for sho
rt-term profit, sometimes for strategic reasons as well. In 1869, Vanderbilt seized the Lake Shore Railway in a fierce battle with LeGrand Lockwood, who owned his stock in the company on margin—on credit, with the stock as its own collateral. Vanderbilt seized a moment when money was tight in New York, then dumped all his Lake Shore stock at once, sparking a collapse in price and contributing to a panic. Lockwood was forced to sell off all his stock, and went bankrupt. Vanderbilt used the transatlantic telegraph to borrow money from Baring Brothers in London. He bought back all his and Lockwood’s stock at reduced prices and ended the panic. His profits were immense, his control complete. This vast operation revealed how finance now overshadowed the American economy.39

  Corruption abounded. An early credit bureau reported that Daniel Drew, as treasurer of the Erie Railway, habitually engaged in insider trading, but it merely noted that this made him a good credit risk. J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott, managers of the Pennsylvania Railroad, skimmed money by channeling the company’s business through dummy corporations. They demanded kickbacks from contractors—which gave their assistant and protégé, Andrew Carnegie, his start as an investor.40

  In the twilight world of Wall Street, perceptions mattered almost as much as business reality—more, in fact, in a short-term campaign to manipulate a stock price or win initial investors. Augustus Melmotte, the master financier in Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel The Way We Live Now, describes “the nature of credit, how strong it is,—as the air,—to buoy you up; how slight it is,—as a mere vapour,—when roughly touched.” The underlying truth of business profits or losses could not be escaped forever, but a fortune could be made in the dark space between anticipation and realization.41