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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Libbie Custer embodied the emerging modern woman: intelligent, highly educated, critical of the restrictions placed on her by society. Since her school years, the percentage of college-educated Americans had doubled—to 2 percent—and 21 percent of them were women, who also comprised a majority of high school graduates. Yet Libbie was no Anthony and certainly no Woodhull; she had too much respect for custom, too high a regard for society, to adopt an independent position outside marriage, let alone risk arrest. Her natural profession would have been writing, but that would have forced her to compete against her husband. She shared her dilemma with the middle-class women of her era. The historian Heather Cox Richardson notes that the protagonists of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, first published in 1868, sought public careers as a writer, actor, and painter, yet ultimately married and had children, “changing the world as mothers rather than independent professional women.” With no children, Libbie channeled all of her ambition into Armstrong. She believed women in the West were “making history, with our men” (emphasis added). She thought of herself as a participant, even a partner, but respectability demanded that her husband should act publicly for them both. The thought of all that he—that is, they—could achieve shrank her anxiety and swelled her enthusiasm.60

  “Autie, your career is something wonderful,” she wrote. “Can you realize what wonders come constantly to you while other men lead such tame lives?” Enthusiasm turned into calculation. Nearly five years after the Washita, his victories on the Yellowstone were “well-timed,” she wrote. She had ideas on how to exploit them—and how not to exploit them. She knew her husband. She understood his partisanship, his desire to fight the Republicans. The possibility that he might enter politics gave her “a shudder of fear.” Life in Washington had taught her that elections were best left to political professionals. “Oh how thankful I am they did not entrap you.…I tell you, Autie, I have never felt more ambitious for you nor more confident of your success than this summer. I am only a little afraid I can’t keep up.”

  “I read him in all my books. When I take in the book heroes there comes dashing in with them my life hero my dear boy general,” she had written a decade before. Her pairing of Armstrong and literature spoke to the importance of writing in her life. Now her goal for him was to triumph as both author and hero of her books. “You must write up with many an embellishment the stories of this Summer’s campaign,” she instructed. “My ambition for you in the world of letters almost takes the heart out of my body.…You are going on to more honors & greatness than we dreamed of a few years ago.”61

  Her husband agreed. Leckie observes that their relationship matured by 1873. If he wrote less priapic letters than he once did, he ceased to afflict her with boastful, jealousy-inducing tales of other women. Ironically, though, his renewed fame also gave new discomforts. In mid-October he attended the annual reunion of the Army of the Tennessee in Toledo. He had not served in that army, but was invited because he was a celebrity. During a public reception, a crowd besieged Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer. Hectored into kissing babies, they found young girls asking for pecks on the cheek; then Grant kissed a young woman on the lips. “Immediately there commenced a friendly rivalry between Generals Phil Sheridan and Custer to see who could get the most kisses,” reported Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The Chicago Tribune noted, “Custer took to the kissing as naturally as if accustomed to it from his earliest youth.” The tally of “ladies” kissed was Grant: 38, Sherman: 28, Sheridan: 63, and Custer: 67.62

  Libbie seems to have coped with it well. She took the train from Monroe to Toledo, as she had not seen him since she left Fort Rice back in June. “As I walked along the street, looking into shop-windows,” she wrote, “I felt, rather than saw, a sudden rush from a door and I was taken off my feet and set dancing in the air.” She looked into the “sunburnt and mottled” face of her husband, and was happy.63

  After a visit to Monroe, Libbie and Armstrong embarked on the long journey to Fort Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by her friend Agnes Bates. Their new home placed Libbie farther beyond American civilization than ever before. But she possessed greater internal strength than she would allow in her memoirs.

  She needed all her resilience soon after arriving. On February 6, 1874, their new house—the commander’s house, largest in the fort—caught fire in the middle of the night. She demonstrated courage as the blaze consumed the building, as she waited inside until Armstrong escaped into the bitter cold of the Dakota winter. But she lost her most valuable dresses and many sentimental items, including a wig made from her husband’s famous long hair, cut when they married a decade ago. Soon she moved back into the reconstructed house, and endured.64

  —

  “THE PANIC,” READ THE New York Times headline on September 19, 1873. “The first intimation which came into the Stock Exchange [on September 18]…was contained in a brief notice, which said authoritatively that Jay Cooke & Co. had suspended payment. To say that the street became excited would only give a feeble view of the expressions of feeling. The brokers stood perfectly thunderstruck for a moment…[then] surged out of the Exchange, stumbling pell-mell over each other in the general confusion, and reached their respective offices in race-horse time.” Rumors spread that the “strongest banks” stood to fail, due to losses on loans to Jay Cooke, who could no longer sustain the weight of Northern Pacific. “In an hour or two after the announcement hundreds of people gathered about the concern [i.e., Cooke’s New York office], on the sidewalks, and peered curiously into the windows, as if some wonderful transformation was about to be witnessed.”65

  It was—though it would not be so wonderful. Nor would it be inside Cooke’s firm, but rather on the streets, even within the crowd itself. The sell-off of stocks that immediately ensued led the New York Stock Exchange to close for ten days, starting on September 20. It did not stop the crisis. Fifty-five railroads defaulted on payments on their securities within the first month. Over the next thirty-six months, half of all the railroads in the United States would go bankrupt. Iron and steel production, closely tied to the demands of railway companies for new and replacement rails, plummeted by nearly half in the year following the panic. A quarter of all New Yorkers lost their jobs within a few months. In January 1874, 7,000 unemployed workers rioted in the city’s Tompkins Square. Wages fell and fell, eventually descending to the level of 1860. Cooke’s failure led to sixty-five months of economic contraction. As one historian notes, before 1929 the term “Great Depression” referred to the one that began in 1873.66

  Perversely, Custer benefited from the catastrophe. His status as a federal employee immunized him from firing or pay cuts. His real income rose as deflation gripped the economy, cutting the cost of living as his salary remained constant.

  Yet the panic complicated his public image. He had close ties to Northern Pacific, the railroad that sparked the conflagation. His involvement with the line went beyond the Yellowstone expedition to personal relationships with key figures in the company. Rosser, of course, was his friend. Alvred B. Nettleton, a wartime subordinate who published Custer’s attack on his court-martial in the Sandusky Register, served as agent for the trustees. The line’s chief engineer, William Milnor Roberts, was the father of Annie Yates, wife of Capt. George Yates, Custer’s friend and subordinate. The railroad hired Custer’s old Monroe chum, Fred Nims, as well. It rewarded Custer himself with passes and the use of private cars. And it asked for help.67

  “Inclosed I send you an effusion of the gallant Col. of the ‘6th foot,’ ” Rosser wrote to Custer on February 16, 1874. The article in question appeared in the New York Tribune, written by Col. William B. Hazen of the 6th Infantry, commander of Fort Buford on the upper Missouri. It condemned the railroad in the strongest terms.

  “I am as certain as can be that Jay Cooke is perpetrating a grand swindle,” Hazen wrote privately to Representative James A. Garfield. After reading the railroad’s advertising, he had felt compelled to respond public
ly. “For two years I have been an observer of the effort upon the part of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company to make the world believe this section to be a valuable agricultural one,” Hazen wrote in his piece. He called these claims “shameless falsehoods” and “wicked deceptions.” The lands in question would not sell for more than “one penny an acre” except through “fraud or ignorance.”

  Given the ferocity of Hazen’s assault—and the precarious position of the railroad—Rosser understandably wanted a rebuttal from a third party, one who could speak authoritatively, like Custer. “A line or two from your pen would render us great service at this time and I hope you will now come to our aid. You are in better condition to discuss this question than any officer in the army,” Rosser wrote.68

  Fortunately for Custer, in this case it was Hazen who bridled against the Army’s conventional wisdom. Hazen proved to be a contentious officer over the years; he had feuded with Stanley, for example, since the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. Hazen had arrested Custer in 1861, leading to his first court-martial, and clashed with him and Sheridan during the campaign of 1868–69. Even as Hazen published his attack on Northern Pacific, he accused Sheridan of assigning the 7th Cavalry to Fort Abraham Lincoln as part of a corrupt scheme to enrich the sutler there. More important, Hazen flouted army policy of supporting Northern Pacific, regardless of the veracity of its claims. Sherman wrote to Sheridan, “I think our interest is to favor the undertaking of the Road, as it will help bring the Indian problem to a final solution.” Sheridan agreed.69

  Custer went to work on a reply, producing more than 4,000 words, many of them taken directly from railroad promotional materials. His voice did ring through. He mocked Hazen, for example, as following the advice of an unnamed humorist: “Never kick a man who is down—unless you are sure he cannot get up again.” Oddly, the joke implied that Northern Pacific would never recover. Custer made another unintentional jest by presenting himself as objective, “one who is engaged in the public service, and…is entirely free from personal feeling in the matter.” He praised the agricultural potential of the Yellowstone basin, and stated that “rich mines of gold, silver, lead, copper, iron and coal” were waiting for “the coming of that most enterprising and persevering member of our western population—the miner.” He finished it on April 9 and the Minneapolis Tribune published it on April 17. It thrilled the managers of Northern Pacific, who sent him their thanks and printed his letter as a pamphlet.70

  Custer entered Hazen’s list of enemies. After the 1874 publication of Custer’s Galaxy articles as a book, My Life on the Plains, Hazen took offense at his claims that the Kiowas killed two captives and escaped punishment with Hazen’s connivance. In 1875 he published a rebuttal in a pamphlet, Some Corrections to “My Life on the Plains.”71

  Custer hated public criticism, but it followed him everywhere. The very fame he sought as an Indian fighter made him a symbol of the use of force against native peoples, and a target for those who opposed it. The Independent noted that his only previous success in the West came when, “in midwinter, at the break of day, he surprised a camp of sleeping Indians, greatly inferior in number, and after killing indiscriminately men, women, and children, beat a hasty retreat, refusing an open battle on equal terms with pursuing Indians.” On the Yellowstone, instead of punishing hostile Indians, “the punishment was all the other way.” It was a polemic, inherently unfair, yet held just enough truth to feed Custer’s resentment.72

  As the defender of Northern Pacific, he appeared to be a modernizer, a champion of the transformative railroad. Under the surface, it was more complicated. As mentioned earlier, the transcontinentals were a mercantilist atavism, an almost obsolete kind of corporation. And this one had brought down the economy and was headed for bankruptcy in June 1875. It laid no new tracks in Custer’s lifetime. His advocacy of it is understandable, but it did not reflect sound economic judgment.73

  Isolated in the remote upper reaches of Dakota Territory, he had little contact with the depression that shadowed the rest of the country. He passed the months with Libbie and his inner circle, hosting dances, throwing dinners and parties, playing cards, and presenting plays. Libbie saw her husband frequently retreat from social events to his office. “None of Custer’s West Point classmates would have recognized the studious individual Libbie described, a man who shunned company,” writes Louise Barnett. True—but at West Point he had performed for an audience of fellow cadets. Now he addressed the entire nation. He reached the public through his writing. The company of relatives and subordinates mattered less than the acclaim of anonymous readers.74

  In this insular post, Custer awoke once more to the Stevens Mine. On April 14, 1874, he wrote to Jairus W. Hall to tell him that the New York investors had demanded to know its status. “Of course I am unable to give them any information,” he wrote. Custer’s letter went awry and did not reach Hall until mid-August—or so Hall claimed. He replied optimistically, but revealed that little work had been done apart from some digging. Necessary buildings had not been constructed nor equipment acquired. The Crescent Company had mined so deeply that it had dug into their segment. Hall promised imminent profits, but they seemed more remote than ever. He never even mentioned their biggest threat: the Coinage Act of 1873, which demonetized silver. Previously anyone could take refined silver to a mint and have it stamped into coin. The 1873 act abruptly ended silver’s status as a legal-tender precious metal, throwing the value of their mine in doubt. Undercapitalized, undermanaged, and oversold, its very purpose in question, Custer’s mine staggered on, just barely alive.75

  An individualist in an increasingly organizational society, Custer struck the denizens of institutions as a problem, even an enemy. He did not rotate smoothly as a cog in the Army’s bureaucratic machine; he misled investors on Wall Street, wittingly or not; he promoted a necrotic railroad. He flourished only in the most solitary work, as a writer, but could not sustain himself that way. An offender against Old Army culture, an infuriating kink in the chain of command, he rescued himself from yet another crisis with his fine performance on the Yellowstone. But for how long? Custer himself foresaw a time when he could no longer survive in the Army—unless, of course, he could save himself once more with a well-timed victory.

  Sixteen

  * * *

  THE ACCUSER

  “THE FINAL SOLUTION”: After Adolf Hitler, the phrase became synonymous with systematic, industrialized genocide. In an unfortunate coincidence, William T. Sherman used it in the 1870s in reference to the “Indian problem,” as noted earlier. Though unrelated, it draws attention to other unfortunate coincidences, such as naming an entire minority population as a “problem.” The words “extermination” and “extinction” often appeared in discussions of American Indians. The white public in the West, Sherman wrote to Grant in 1867, “are clamorous for extermination, which is easier said than done, and they have an idea that we are moved by mere human sentiments.”

  Sentiment played no part in his or Sheridan’s thinking, but neither did genocide. Sherman often spoke outrageously (as when he seemed to reject extermination for mere practical reasons, “easier said than done”), but his ruthlessness did not extend to indiscriminate massacres—just discriminating ones. “I would not hesitate to approve the extermination of a camp” that sent out “thieving, murdering parties,” he specified, “but I would not sanction the extermination” of a band that remained quiet.1

  The quote shows that his rejection of genocide hardly equaled humanitarianism. Sherman and Sheridan, like most Americans of the 1870s, believed in an aggressive ideology of civilization—defined, of course, as the European-derived society, free labor market economy, and elective government of the United States. In this view, civilization marched onward by force of arms. In the South, Sherman held that civil rights could only be established through social conflict, not rule of law or federal enforcement of civil rights. “Until the Union whites, and negroes too, fight for their own rights they will be t
rodden down,” he wrote approvingly.2 In the West, as the historian Richard Slotkin and others have observed, Americans believed that civilization must be staked out in the wilderness through violence. Indeed, civilization must supplant nature. It was the Indian who was natural—savage, to use their word—and savagery must be conquered.3

  In particular, Sherman and Sheridan wished to destroy the natural basis of the power of the high-plains nations: the buffalo. The Medicine Lodge and Fort Laramie treaties granted hunting rights well beyond the reservations as long as bison herds “justify the chase.” That perpetuated their nomadism, wars with other Indians, and clashes with migrants and settlers. As the historian Paul Hutton writes, “Sheridan wanted quickly to reduce the buffalo population so as to terminate the hunting right.” He desired one kind of extinction to promote another—for many believed that the American Indian would wither and disappear upon the destruction of his “savage” existence. Sheridan approved of the rapid increase in commercial buffalo hunting, which harvested millions on the Southern Plains. The Indians themselves conducted a large portion of this market-driven slaughter. As the historian Andrew Isenberg notes, “Although the nomads knew how to utilize nearly every part of the bison…when they hunted bison for the fur trade they sought only the animal’s marketable parts: its skin and, less often, its tongue. In pursuit of robes and tongues, Indian hunters were exceptionally destructive.” Yet the numbers of white hunters multiplied in the 1870s, dramatically reducing the once-massive herds. The Comanches responded with an attack on a party of hunters at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle on June 27, 1874, igniting the Red River War of 1874–75, the final conflict in that region.4