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

by Stiles, T. J.

  As the Yellowstone expedition moved across the plains, Cooke’s worries multiplied. The all-important European market for American securities had softened over the last year; ironically, cheap American exports had hurt the continent’s economies. In May, a financial crash in Vienna prompted many European investors to dump the riskier securities of American railroads. Northern Pacific overspent, forcing Cooke to step in and personally make up the difference, even as his own finances tightened. And corruption afflicted the line. With the vast enterprise trembling, the last thing Cooke needed was war with the Sioux.32

  To the army, though, the entire point of Northern Pacific was to defeat the Sioux. Just before the 1873 survey mission began, Sherman explained to Congress, “This railroad is a national enterprise, and we are forced to protect the men during its survey and construction through, probably, the most warlike nation of Indians on this continent, who will fight for every foot of the line.”33

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  “THE WINNING OF THE WEST”: That was the title Richard White gave a seminal 1978 article on the Sioux. Ethnologists and Western historians, he observed, had long described the fighting among American Indians not as true warfare, but as “individualistic.…A series of raids and counter-raids; an almost irrelevant prelude to the real story: Indian resistance to white invasion.” In reality, he writes, the Sioux fought for national objectives. Starting in the early eighteenth century, they expanded westward from the Minnesota woodlands onto the Northern Plains, seizing valuable territory. Black Hawk, a Sioux leader, told American officials in the mid-nineteenth century, “These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped those nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.”34

  The Sioux, like the Comanches far to the south, maintained national identity despite the absence of an overarching governing structure and an abundance of internal fissures. They divided into three groups, with a broad spectrum of territory, dialect, and material culture. The eastern group was known as the Santee: four tribes (sometimes called subtribes) who lived along the Minnesota River in comparatively permanent communities, hunting, harvesting wild rice, engaging in horticulture. Many had fled west during the 1862 war known as the Sioux Uprising. The result of corruption and mistreatment by government officials, it saw the killing of hundreds of white settlers and Indians, including the largest mass execution in U.S. history, when thirty-eight Sioux were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota.

  Sioux was a name imposed from the outside—reportedly a French corruption of the Ojibwe word for “enemy.” It’s convenient because of the range of Sioux dialects. The Santee called themselves Dakota. So did the Yankton (or Yanktonai), the middle group, who by the 1870s occupied the plains east of the Missouri River. Farther west were the seven tribes of the Teton Sioux—or, to use their own word, Lakota. As Robert Utley enumerates them, with translations of their common French or Lakota names, they included “the Oglala (‘Scatters Their Own’), Brulé (‘Burned Thighs’), Miniconjou (‘Planters by Water’), Two Kettle (‘Two Boilings’), Sans Arc (‘Without Bows’), Hunkpapa (‘Campers at the Opening of the Circle’), and Sihasapa (‘Blackfeet’),” the last tribe being distinct from the Blackfeet nation to the west.35

  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Lakotas advanced from the eastern edge of the Northern Plains to conquer the middle Missouri River country, the stretch of river that extended north through the center of what became the Dakota Territory. In the first half of the nineteenth century, they expanded south and west, to the Platte and Yellowstone river basins. Like the Comanches and the other high-plains nations, the Lakotas were attracted by natural resources, trade, and the need for space as they acquired horse herds and abandoned horticulture and beaver trapping for bison hunting. Ironically, the arrival of smallpox gave them an advantage over sedentary neighbors such as the Arikaras, Hidatsas, Mandans, and the Omahas and Poncas to the south. Three epidemics between 1779 and 1802 afflicted those peoples’ fixed, fortified communities far more heavily than the dispersed Lakota bands. The Lakotas then hit them hard, wiping out entire villages at times. They turned the Arikaras and others into vassals, controlling their trade and punishing them for resistance.

  Meanwhile the Teton Sioux grew in strength, thanks in part to high birth rates, smallpox inoculations administered by American emissaries, and an inflow from Santee and Yanktonai tribes. Drawing on admittedly inaccurate counts, White estimates that the Lakotas rose from as few as 5,000 in 1804 to perhaps 25,000 in the 1850s. They climbed out of comparative poverty in horses (which lasted as late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century) to ownership of large herds, often acquired through attacks on their neighbors. They developed a reputation as fine riders, which they previously had lacked. Yet they suffered heavy casualties in these wars for land and horses, as did their enemies. In the early nineteenth century, men died in such large numbers that women constituted 65 to 75 percent of the population of the various Northern Plains nations.

  In fierce competition for bison with white hunters and other Indian nations, they continued fighting even after they seized the terrain they would occupy in 1873. To the south they struck at the Pawnees, who mixed a low-plains horticultural economy with seasonal bison hunting on the high plains. To the west they fought Crows, Shoshones, Blackfeet, and others. As White observes, the bloodshed created unoccupied terrain between the hostile nations where the buffalo flourished—which in turn became an incentive for further aggression. The summer of 1873 saw the climax of the long war against the Pawnees, when an Oglala offensive slaughtered perhaps the last major Pawnee hunting party, on the Republican River. But the Lakotas formed alliances as well. With the great peace forged on the Arkansas River in 1840, they formed close bonds with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes.36

  American observers mostly noticed the military virtues of Lakota society: stoicism, courage in battle, shrewd tactics, brilliant riding, and the formal displays of war paint, feathers and headdresses, decorated lances and shields. What they generally knew of the rich Lakota spiritual life was limited to the dramatic sun dance ritual. Few whites knew much about their military and religious societies, the office of the Shirt Wearers, the police who helped coordinate the people under their leaders’ guidance, their highly social culture, or their robust humor. At times young Hunkpapa men cracked jokes about their most dignified and public-spirited leader, Sitting Bull. They even did so when he was present. He didn’t mind.37

  Sitting Bull gained influence across Lakota society, far beyond the Hunkpapas, thanks to the impact of two leaders of the Oglala tribe. From 1866 to 1868, Red Cloud rallied opposition to the opening of the Bozeman Trail from the North Platte River to Montana, running along the eastern side of the Big Horn Mountains. The army constructed new forts to protect migrants on the Bozeman. As with the trails and posts on the Central Plains, these represented points of continual consumption and destruction of water, forage, and game, desolating resource-rich areas. They also represented an intrusion into hard-won Lakota territory, which had suffered far less from such incursions than the lands of the Southern Cheyennes and Arapahoes between the Platte and Arkansas rivers. Red Cloud helped to convince Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Brulés, and others to join the Oglalas in harassing the posts and traffic on the trail.

  As Red Cloud led politically, Crazy Horse inspired militarily. On December 21, 1866, he led a small party in an attack on men cutting wood for Fort Phil Kearny. Captain William Fetterman and seventy-eight soldiers, plus two civilians, marched out of the post in pursuit. But Crazy Horse’s group was a decoy—an old Lakota tactic, though difficult to execute. This day they executed it perfectly. The Lakotas ambushed Fetterman’s column, killing everyone. They even put an arrow into a soldier’s dog as it tried to run away. It was the greatest defeat the army suffered in its wars against the Plains Indians, until another not quite ten years later.38

  The Fetterman Massacre, as Americans called the battle, produc
ed profound results. First, it began Crazy Horse’s rise as a legendary foe in the American mind, and boosted his status among his own people as well. Second, it elevated the Teton Sioux in the eyes of the army and the U.S. public as the most powerful and intransigent native enemy. Third, it helped convince the 1867 Peace Commission to close the Bozeman Trail and its guardian forts, an unheard-of admission of defeat by the federal government in an Indian war. Perhaps it was an embrace of expediency, since impending completion of the first transcontinental railroad would soon make the trail unnecessary, but it was remarkable nonetheless. In April 1868, federal officials and Indian leaders signed the Fort Laramie Treaty. It created the Great Sioux Reservation, including all of modern-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River. It granted hunting rights as far south as the North Platte and Republican rivers, as long as the buffalo were abundant enough “to justify the chase.” It also designated the region west of the reservation to the highest points in the Big Horn Mountains and south to the North Platte as unceded Sioux territory. The army could carry out official business on the reservation, but needed permission to enter the unceded land, whose northern border remained undefined.39

  This rousing triumph led to a fourth consequence of the Fetterman Massacre. The treaty established agencies for the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, granting annuities in food and goods. It offered incentives for the Indians to settle permanently on the reservation and take up farming. Contemporary white observers, and many writers since, have characterized the Lakota response as a binary division between “treaty” and “non-treaty” Indians—those who settled and accepted rations, even wearing American clothes and adopting agriculture, and those who rejected it all. But the real response appears to have been a spectrum, with the vast majority of the people adapting to new conditions with a great deal of historical continuity.

  Viewed from the perspective of the United States, the only meaningful conflict was between “Indians” and “whites.” Therefore the Sioux appeared to be either accepting or rejecting white civilization. Viewed from the Lakota perspective, however, the Americans were only one enemy in a matrix of hostilities, as Richard White points out. They continued to battle Crows, Pawnees, and other nations over territory, resources, and access to trade. If the U.S. government recognized their territory, so much the better; if the U.S. government issued them rations, it gave them another advantage. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail of the Brulés were considered leaders of the “treaty Indians,” but into the 1870s they hunted buffalo, fought, and traded between visits to the agencies to collect the offerings of the Americans. In many respects, the Lakotas stood at the height of their power at the time when Custer first entered their domain. That sense of strength invigorated them. They even forced the removal of two agencies from the Missouri River, on the reservation, to northern Nebraska, the homeland of the Oglalas and Brulés. At times Lakotas intimidated agents, assumed control of distribution of treaty rations and goods, even killed officials and soldiers, thus establishing their authority. Indian cooperation with the army must be seen in the same light. Osage, Pawnee, Arikara, or Crow scouts were not race traitors or mercenaries. They simply made a rational alliance against a dangerous enemy.40

  Yet a faction of Lakotas did reject any relationship with white culture, apart from the traditional, transactional one of trade. The Hunkpapas provided the core of this core, and their leader was Sitting Bull. Born perhaps in 1831, he won fame as a warrior and a holy man. As his biographer Robert Utley notes, Lakota accounts of him may be exaggerated, given how supremely admiring they were, yet they were notable for the complete lack of dissension. Generous, brave, skilled, mystical, he possessed profound moral clarity that drew followers to him. He saw their entire culture at stake, their independence and survival as a people. “Look at me—see if I am poor, or my people either,” he said to those who settled at the agencies. “You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.”41

  Sitting Bull raided forts on the Upper Missouri only days after his people signed the 1868 treaty. He emerged as a galvanizing force for independence, often allied in the field with the Oglala Crazy Horse. He directed his followers, in part, against Northern Pacific. As Richard White observes, “The government did not actually own much of this land” given to the railroad in its land grant; “it belonged to the Indians.” The treaty failed to define the northern boundary of the unceded territory, but legalisms mattered little to either side. The Lakotas saw their ownership of the Yellowstone basin as a living fact. For its part, the government was happy to transfer land “directly from the Indians to the railroads,” White writes, free of “competing claims from settlers.”42

  In 1872, Sitting Bull personally took part in fighting against the Northern Pacific survey party. At the beginning of August 1873, his people spotted another expedition after it crossed over to the north bank of the Yellowstone—known as the Elk River to the Lakotas—and marched toward a point opposite the mouth of the Tongue River, a tributary. “Some four hundred lodges of Hunkpapas and Miniconjous, with Sitting Bull in residence, were camped in the very path of the military column,” writes Utley.43

  And so the Lakotas—Sitting Bull himself—directly confronted the third force shaping events in 1873: the United States Army.

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  “I PRESUME YOU HAVE SEEN the July Galaxy by this time and read the Washita account,” Custer wrote to Libbie. “But oh no I forgot—you do not read those articles I believe except when the author is present and you are forced from politeness to glance at them.” Whatever the quality of his writing, he certainly had a writer’s mind-set. His life reached a climax in print, but his current expedition proved undramatic. “I do not believe we are going to have any serious difficulty with the Indians at least that is Gen Rosser’s opinion.” More than forty days passed without a single incident.44

  “No day since the expedition started opened more monotonously” than August 4, wrote Samuel Barrows, the correspondent for the New York Tribune. Roughly speaking, the Yellowstone River ran from west to east, curving in a northeasterly direction toward its junction with the Missouri River. On July 26, the column had crossed to the northern side with the aid of a steamboat, and headed west toward Pompey’s Pillar, a natural stone monolith marked with petroglyphs that Lewis and Clark encountered in 1806. The troops marched over the bluffs and on “arid, barren” plains above the river. Thermometers went up to 120 degrees in the sun. “It is too warm to write, read, or think,” a scientist told Barrows. A soldier snapped, “Curse the Jay Cookery that got up this expedition.” Custer rode ahead with a cavalry squadron—two companies—to select a nightly bivouac close to the water for the expedition.45

  Some days before this monotonous August 4, they had found evidence that they were being shadowed. A scout named Bloody Knife had pointed it out to Custer. The cavalryman would write of Bloody Knife as his “favorite” native auxiliary, and most accounts repeat the word. It did not yet apply. They first met on this expedition; Custer still knew so little about him that he misidentified him as a Crow in his official report. But Bloody Knife rapidly earned his regard. About the same age as Custer, he had a Hunkpapa father and an Arikara mother. (The soldiers commonly called the latter nation “Arickaree,” or simply “Ree.”) He grew up with the Hunkpapas, enduring bullying from the other children because of his mixed ancestry. He received his worst treatment from Gall, who grew to become a powerful young man and disciple of Sitting Bull. As a teenager, Bloody Knife left to join the Arikaras, and fought the Lakotas in the years that followed with deepening bitterness. In 1862, two of his brothers fell to a war party led by Gall, who killed and scalped them. Bloody Knife found it logical, both on a personal and a tribal level, to ally himself with the U.S. Army against his enemies.

  Custer always enjoyed associating himself with what he saw as exotic, but he began to admire Bloody Knife’s personal merits. He described him as perceptive, shrewd, and dignified, “his Henr
y rifle poised gracefully in his hands.” He even wrote that he had a “handsome face” under shoulder-length black hair, parted in the middle. And everyone recognized the scout’s mastery of tracking the Lakotas. “Bloody Knife,” wrote Barrows, “reads dates and numbers, histories and prophecies, in the travois tracks, the pony foot-prints, and the whole alphabet of Indian signs and evidences as easily almost as your readers will read this letter.” (A travois was a frame and platform for carrying baggage, made from poles and dragged behind a horse.)46

  At about 9:30 a.m. on August 4, about ten miles in advance of the main column, Custer’s squadron descended from the bluffs on a buffalo trail to the Yellowstone, and stopped at a fine campsite in a stand of cottonwoods. Up the river, a mile or two to the west, they saw another, larger grove. It was quiet. They did not expect the infantry and wagon train to arrive until the afternoon. Custer ordered the men to unsaddle their horses and put them out to graze in the tall grass in the trees. He posted a picket to stand guard in a spot with views up and down the valley. He told his bugler to stay close at hand, then lay down on the ground and went to sleep in the heat.