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

by Stiles, T. J.

  As Custer exchanged telegrams on preparations for his march with Stanley and Department of Dakota headquarters in St. Paul, he squabbled with virtually the entire chain of command. Asst. Adj. Gen. O. D. Greene forwarded Custer’s messages to the department commander, General Terry, who was temporarily in New Jersey; the two commiserated about his barrage of demands and complaints. “Custer’s request for wagons is absurd,” Terry wired to Greene, after learning he wanted scores more than he was allowed. “He can have made no calculations.” Remind him a steamboat will accompany the march to carry baggage and the laundresses, he added. Custer complained to Greene about Colonel Stanley’s orders, saying Stanley was too far away and didn’t understand the problems in Yankton. He requested a new superior—“someone…familiar with the questions which should determine this movement.” Greene wired Terry that Custer had sent “a telegram of ten pages…principally fault finding and making unnecessary difficulties in regard to the march.…I report it extremely difficult to get along with the present Commander.”

  Terry authorized Col. Samuel Sturgis, still senior officer of the 7th Cavalry but now on duty in St. Paul, to go to Yankton and straighten out the mess. Once on the scene, Sturgis largely supported Custer (the regiment did lack sufficient wagons for the march, for example). This controversy, insignificant in itself, shows that the army saw Custer as a problem officer. Department headquarters viewed everything he wrote with skepticism, taking umbrage at his requests. And Custer was not the man to alleviate the problem. His pestering and indignant tone only made it worse.13

  Sturgis disentangled affairs at Yankton and returned to St. Paul. On May 7 the regiment set out for Fort Rice. A month and a half later the column finally arrived. But the post had no lodging for the officers’ wives, and housing at Custer’s permanent station, Fort Abraham Lincoln, had not been completed. Libbie and Armstrong said good-bye, and she returned to Monroe with her sister-in-law, Maggie Custer Calhoun. Armstrong prepared for a summer in the wilderness with Stanley and the Sioux.14

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  “THE GREAT, HEAVY COLUMN WOUND slowly along like an immense black serpent,” an infantry officer wrote to the Chicago Tribune. It set out from Fort Rice on June 20, aiming to unite on the march with the railroad engineers and their military escort, who moved west from the Northern Pacific’s terminus on the Missouri River, farther north. Even disassembled, it was an impressive body for the Northern Plains: 79 officers and 1,451 men, 4 three-inch rifled artillery pieces (known as Rodman guns), 353 civilian employees, 27 Indian scouts, hundreds of head of cattle, more than 2,000 horses and mules, and 275 wagons, each overburdened with 4,000- to 5,280-pound loads, including a total of sixty days’ worth of rations and forty-two days’ forage.

  “It is indeed a strange sight to see the hundreds of great army-wagons lumbering along,” wrote the Tribune’s correspondent, “laden with every conceivable implement of war and all kinds of food, picks, shovels, hoes, shells, thousands of cartridges, tons of hard bread, bacon, coffee, sugar, rice, flour, grain, and an endless number of ropes, chains, spare wagon-tongues, wheels, and tents. The mules tug and pull, and the monster machines roll slowly on to the westward.” The column struggled and straggled slowly onward in suffocating heat, beset by thunderstorms. It rained fourteen of the first seventeen days, Stanley reported; “the usually hard prairie…usually as good as a macadamized road…became a swamp.” It took six days to go forty-five miles.15

  The pace aggravated Stanley, a true officer of the Old Army. “Dignified,” Larned thought, on meeting him in June. “Impressed me very favorably.” An 1852 graduate of West Point, he had served on a reconnaissance for the first transcontinental railroad from 1853 to 1854, among other assignments in the West. He rose to the rank of major general of volunteers in the Civil War, and would later receive a Medal of Honor for his heroism in the defense of Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864. Promoted from captain to full colonel in the reorganized Regular Army, he had commanded the escort of the Northern Pacific surveyors in 1872, completing an impressive résumé of service on the Great Plains. Ostensibly he was the ideal leader for the 1873 survey—but he drank. His alcoholism had marred the 1872 expedition, pockmarking it with binges that threw him into a dark place. He looked as if he were much more than eleven years older than Custer, with lines around light-colored eyes and a full beard threaded with gray.16

  Custer, on the other hand, enjoyed himself. He commanded less than half the total force—his ten companies of cavalry were outnumbered by nineteen of infantry, not counting the artillery and civilians—and wore his responsibilities lightly. He brought his band, of course, which played throughout the march. He trotted beside the trudging foot soldiers and lumbering wagons, his pack of hunting dogs trailing behind him. Other officers brought dogs as well. Custer led hunters into herds of antelope that often swarmed around the column on the soggy grasslands. He took great pleasure not only in hunting but in the praise of others. He boasted in a letter to Kirkland Barker, as he often did to Libbie, “My fine shots have been discussed not a little.” His perennial look-at-me hunger for attention seems juvenile because it was; yet the hunters’ marksmanship, the racing dogs, and the band delighted the bored soldiers. Even the cynical Larned wrote, “The dogs…afford many an exciting chase.”17

  As Stanley steeped in the frustration of command, Custer emerged as the star of the expedition. One infantry officer exclaimed, “What an admirable cavalry-soldier Custer is! Not only his dash and bravery, which are [famous] world-wide, but his good sense, makes him just what a successful leader of cavalry should be.” A newspaper correspondent wrote, “In buckskin hunting jacket and familiar broad-brimmed slouched hat, from beneath which streams his long flowing locks, mounted on a blooded horse, with rifle in hands,…he dashes with a free rein over hill and through valley.…The general is a crack shot.” Professor William Phelps of the scientific corps that accompanied the expedition drafted a more careful and revealing portrait. “Gen. Custer is of medium stature, with body slightly inclined forward in walking, face spare, nose rather large and pointed, and hair hanging in slight curls to the shoulders,” he wrote. “In talking he is intensely earnest and lively, and during [an] interview he sat leaning forward with his arms crossed and resting on his knees, which were also crossed—not a very soldierly attitude, to be sure. His manner is quick and nervous and somewhat eccentric.” Phelps admired Custer’s energy. They all found him fascinating.18

  “I have had no trouble with Custer, and will try to avoid having any; but I have seen enough of him to convince me that he is a cold blooded, untruthful, and unprincipled man,” Stanley wrote to his wife on June 28. “He is universally despised by all the officers of his regiment excepting his relatives and one or two sycophants. He brought a trader in the field without permission, carries an old negro woman and cast iron cooking stove, and delays the march often by his extensive packing up in the morning. As I said I will try, but am not sure I can avoid trouble with him.” He saw Custer’s popularity and independence, and concluded, “He was just gradually assuming command.”19

  “General Stanley is acting very badly, drinking, and I anticipate official trouble with him,” Custer wrote to Libbie (using Stanley’s brevet rank, as was the custom). Custer often asserted moral superiority by accusing a rival of drinking. He compensated for his character flaws by giving special emphasis to one clear strength, his freedom from alcoholism. In this case, of course, Stanley was an alcoholic, which filled Custer with towering self-righteousness.20

  Stanley ordered Custer to take the cavalry and move ahead of the main column to rendezvous with the railroad engineers, whose wagons had been smashed in a fierce hailstorm on the far side of the Heart River. Relieved to be released, he soon reached their camp, where he met his old academy friend and wartime foe, Thomas Rosser.

  Rosser had spent five hard years trying to recover from the defeat of the Confederacy. He studied law to no end, failed with enterprises in New Orleans and Baltimore, and del
ivered lectures to empty halls. In St. Paul, with “three cents to my name,” he found a job as an engineer with Northern Pacific. He had participated in the 1872 surveying expedition, and led the 1873 contingent.

  Professor Phelps described Rosser as “about six feet two inches in height, broad and erect…weighing about two hundred and twenty pounds. His face is round and full, his hair black, his complexion fair, and with a ruddy tinge.” Phelps listened as Rosser and Custer discussed their battles, clearing up mysteries and misconceptions. One such conversation, he wrote, “was well worth the trip to Dakota to enjoy.”21

  Rosser and Custer’s friendship further aggravated Stanley. For his part, Custer unfairly blamed a delay in the arrival of the main column on Stanley’s drinking. Then came successive incidents that provoked an open break. First Custer took off without orders and escorted Rosser several miles ahead to continue the survey during the delay. Next, on July 7, Stanley sent Custer an order prohibiting him from using the cookstove that Stanley hated so, and demanded to know why Custer had loaned an army horse to Fred Calhoun, a civilian and brother of Lt. James Calhoun. Stanley called Custer to his tent. Custer, visibly angry, approached in his shirtsleeves and refused to salute. Stanley placed him under arrest and forced him to ride behind the column the next day.

  “The sympathy for him was deep and universal outside of Stanley’s headquarters as far as I had any opportunity to observe,” a reporter wrote. “But there was no disguising the fact that Custer had used language that was disrespectful toward his superior officer.…The provocation, however, was great, as it was felt that Stanley’s conduct was unnecessarily irritating in his interference with the domestic concerns of the cavalryman’s headquarters.” On July 8 Rosser intervened, and Custer went free.22

  Rosser called it “a reconciliation” in his diary, but the meeting left each man convinced that he was right. “I was placed in arrest for…the strict conscientious discharge of what I knew was my duty,” Custer wrote to Libbie, “feeling self justified in my course.” He claimed, unbelievably, that Stanley apologized and admitted being wrong. Stanley wrote to his wife, “I had a little flurry with Custer as I told you I probably would.…I knew from the start it had to be done, and I am glad to have had so good a chance, when there could be no doubt who was right.…Now he knows he has a commanding officer who will not tolerate his arrogance.”23

  The “reconciliation,” then, resolved nothing. Custer compensated by escaping. He frequently volunteered to ride ahead and find a campsite for the evening, essentially abandoning his command duties, and Stanley let him go. He led Rosser and an escort on a search for the steamboat that waited for the expedition on the Yellowstone River; he took terrible risks guiding them up and down impossibly steep bluffs and hillsides as they hunted for a way down into the valley. At one point, he wrote to Libbie, “It was impossible for us to retrace our steps as the sides of the peak were so steep our horses could not turn about without great danger of tumbling hundreds of feet.” They escaped when Custer found an alternate path, first dislodging a boulder that blocked the way, sending it bounding down the slope.24

  He also enjoyed the company of the scientific corps. He enthusiastically hunted for fossils in cliffs and river bottoms, boxing up specimens that included “reptiles” and “sea fish.” He studied taxidermy with an expert in the column. The coral-like rock formations of the desolate badlands they encountered fascinated him. He spent hours with Fred Grant, the president’s son and a recent West Point graduate now on Sheridan’s staff, who accompanied the expedition for the first month or so.

  And he socialized with his “royal family,” as Larned called his loyalists and family members. “I have told Satan to get behind me so far as poker goes,” he wrote to Libbie, acknowledging “the excitement and pleasure I used to take in it.” But Tom played (well) as did Calhoun (badly). Tom won $300 and Calhoun borrowed from any who would lend. “How do they tease and devil Mr. Calhoun,” who had no sense of humor, Custer wrote. When Buffalo Bill’s success onstage came up in conversation, Tom exclaimed that they should go on tour; they could call Calhoun “Antelope Jim” and make him the star. “I think that’s a little thin,” Calhoun said, and they laughed. Custer said that “all [were] jolly and good humored, full of their jokes, all disgusted with the infantry and prouder than ever of the modest 7th.”25

  On July 20, Stanley went on a three-day drinking binge. “Stanley is very drunk, and I fear Custer will arrest him and assume command,” Rosser wrote in his diary on July 21. Despite Stanley’s state, the army might treat his arrest as mutiny, unless Custer could prove the column faced imminent danger. The fact that Custer openly contemplated it reveals the depth and danger of their hostility.26

  At the end of Stanley’s bout, soldiers destroyed whiskey belonging to Augustus Baliran, the civilian sutler who came with Custer. When Custer complained, Stanley claimed that he gave no orders on the subject. Custer believed Stanley’s subordinates acted independently to save him from himself. Baliran filed an official protest, claiming $4,000 in losses, and Custer supported him. It had been perhaps the best thing for Stanley, yet it only aggravated his feud with Custer.27

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  THREE PROTAGONISTS COLLIDED on the Northern Plains in 1873—if large groups or organizations may be described as protagonists. And a single sentence describes them all: They came from the East, determined to take lands in the West regardless of the peoples who already lived there.

  The force that precipitated the Yellowstone expedition was the Northern Pacific Railway, part of the second wave of transcontinental railroads that followed the Union Pacific/Central Pacific trunk from Omaha to San Francisco. Outwardly it embodied the future of the United States: organization, industrialization, and capital, combined to tame the wilderness and exploit its resources. This giant business corporation operated on a scale unknown just a generation earlier. It made use of the latest technology, engineering methods, and scientific knowledge. Its fixed infrastructure and motorized trains would eliminate the immensity of distance in the West, bringing it into immediate contact with the rest of the country, integrating markets and society. Northern Pacific would centralize, modernize, and dominate the lives of thousands of individuals who would work for it or depend on its services.

  Ironically, it also embodied the past. As mentioned earlier, corporations began in America as mercantilist tools of government policy. Legislatures chartered corporations to persuade private investors to finance projects believed to serve the public good. By the 1870s, businessmen had turned the corporation into a vehicle for private profit. But the old concept lingered in transcontinental transportation. In 1847, for example, Congress subsidized steamship corporations to connect to California. During the 1850s, Congress debated a transcontinental railway, and the army scouted the routes. Under President Lincoln, the Union Pacific railroad received its federal charter. Its executives, together with those of its connecting line, Central Pacific, secured extensive government backing because federal policy makers saw them as a means of enhancing national unity.

  From a business point of view, the first transcontinentals were highly speculative. Relatively few white Americans lived on the Pacific coast, and very few in the interior of the West; railroad management could only hope that, if they laid the tracks, the people would come. Leaders of successful eastern railroads tended to stay away from the early transcontinentals, except for short-term stock speculations. As the Railroad Gazette observed, “A connection a hundred miles long in a State east of Chicago might easily give a more profitable traffic [to the Vanderbilt railroads] than the entire thousand miles of the Union Pacific.”28

  To encourage private investment, the federal government offered the first transcontinentals such support as vast land grants (which the lines could sell to settlers) and federal bonds. But this aid also invited profiteering. The transcontinentals helped inspire the 1873 novel The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, a satire of government corruption, not the l
avish lifestyles of the rich. For example, Congress insisted that Union Pacific’s government-backed shares and bonds could only be sold at par, or face value; but investors demanded a discount, making them unmarketable. Union Pacific’s managers, acting as private individuals, bought a dummy corporation to use as an intermediary; named Crédit Mobilier, it took UP securities at par and resold them at market prices or issued them to its own stockholders. The scheme gave Union Pacific access to credit markets, but invited self-dealing. Union Pacific pretended Crédit Mobilier was a construction company and overpaid it for work that it passed off to real contractors. Insiders collected huge profits, as much as 610 percent of their investment in just five years. The controlling ring kept congressional investigations at bay with bribes until a major scandal broke in 1872.29

  Congress chartered Northern Pacific in 1864 as another tool of federal policy, and, like Union Pacific, the corportion faced skepticism from experienced railroad men and possessed great potential for corruption. As Cornelius Vanderbilt said of the line in 1873, “Building railroads from nowhere to nowhere at public expense is not a legitimate undertaking.” And yet, one of the greatest American bankers, Jay Cooke, began to back the railroad in 1870, serving as its financial agent and guarantor. Famous for successfully marketing huge volumes of federal bonds during the Civil War, Cooke kept the line going as it laid track west from Duluth to a point opposite Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River, where the town of Bismarck sprouted. Immediate market conditions lured him, but he saw Northern Pacific’s immense long-term potential. As historian Richard White writes, its federal land grant equaled all of New England rolled out in a strip from Duluth to Puget Sound.30

  If Northern Pacific’s origins were rooted in the past, Cooke’s involvement pointed to the future—and its problems. He represented the centrality of finance in the new economy. (Cooke himself was a Philadelphian; Northern Pacific kept its headquarters in Manhattan.) Large corporations raised funds through bonds and stocks sold on formal exchanges to (or through) banks and investment firms. Investors and institutions traded these securities or used them as collateral for further borrowing, often from New York banks that held the reserve deposits of banks located across the country. The result was a web of equity and debt that sustained and endangered the entire economy. Each component was necessary to prevent the entire structure from collapsing. Should a major player—such as the house of Jay Cooke—fail to pay its debts, those it owed could not pay their own obligations; even firms unaffected directly might panic and curtail their operations or call in loans. The resulting shut-off of capital and revenue could force corporations, now the dominant economic force, into bankruptcy. That could lead to a depression.31