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

by Stiles, T. J.

  “All signs, and the reports of our Indian scouts, indicated that they were within 20 or 25 miles of us.”

  “Please state to the court what disposition or separation, if any, Gen. Custer made of his command preparatory to his proposed advance on the hostile Indian village.”

  “About a quarter after 12 o’clock, the command was halted. Three companies were given to Major Reno, three companies were given to Capt. Benteen, and one company to Capt. [Thomas] McDougall, who was placed in charge of the pack train, and General Custer took the other five companies with him.” Wallace estimated that Reno had 110 men, Benteen had a slightly larger force, and Custer had 225 men. “Capt. Benteen with his battalion moved to the left. Gen. Custer moved down the right bank of a little stream with his command and Major Reno down the left bank.” The stream, a tributary of the Little Bighorn, would be dubbed Reno’s Creek after these events; the Lakotas called it Sundance Creek.

  “After going ten or twelve miles, Major Reno was called across to the same side of the stream on which Gen. Custer was moving. The two battalions then moved along parallel to each other for some distance further. We passed [an isolated] tepee which had some dead bodies,” Wallace explained, “and soon after passing that the adjutant came to Major Reno and said that the Indians were about two and a half miles ahead, and Major Reno was ordered forward as fast as he could go and to charge them and the others would support him.”

  A flurry of questions interrupted the narrative. Wallace said he didn’t know where Benteen’s column went, or what his orders were. Asked for the wording of Custer’s order to Reno, he quoted from memory: “The Indians are about two miles and a half ahead, on the jump. Follow them as fast as you can and charge them wherever you find them and we will support you.” Asked to describe Reno’s force, he said, “There were 22 Indian scouts and three companies of cavalry averaging from 35 to 40 men. They had been marching for three or four days, making long marches.…The men were tired and the horses worn out.”

  “You have testified that Major Reno received on the 25th of June an order to charge the Indians. Please begin at that point,” Lee directed.

  “We moved at a gallop. After going some distance the trail led to the left [away from Custer’s battalion and down to the river].…We came to a ford on the Little Bighorn that had been used by the Indians,” Wallace said. “After passing the ford…the command was halted and reformed.…The command [i.e., Reno’s battalion] moved forward, first in a trot and then in a gallop.” At this point they rode across the broad, open land of the river bottom—what Maguire called the first bench. “The Indians when the order was given were apparently running from us. There was a big dust, but as we moved on the dust cleared away, and the Indians were seen coming back.” The troops approached a bend or hook in the river that extended partially in front of them. “There the command was halted, the men dismounted and prepared to fight on foot, the horses going in the timber and the three companies then deployed as skirmishers [in a line across the river bottom].…The Indians instead of pressing our front passed around to our left and opened a flank fire.”

  The winding river was on their right, lined with timber. The Indians rode around their open left flank and into their rear. The exposed troops on the left retreated into the timber, swinging the line back like a door. Wallace claimed that they ran low on ammunition. “After waiting there some time, word was passed down that we would have to charge them. We were being surrounded, no assistance had come, and we would have to get on higher ground.…The companies were mounted and commenced getting out.”

  Wallace hinted that Reno’s “charge” was more like a panicked rout, every man racing for his life as the Lakotas and Cheyennes swirled around them. “At the creek [the enemy] halted and fired at the men as they crossed. They came over with the rear of the column, and one or two men were killed there.” The troops forded the river and spurred their horses up to a bluff above. “After getting on top of the hill the command was halted and preparations were made to give them a stand-off,” Wallace said. “Soon after it was reported that Capt. Benteen was coming up and we were joined by him. What passed between him and Major Reno I don’t know. We were out of ammunition, one company had several wounded, and I could find but seven men of my company.”

  After a time the pack train arrived and the men replenished their ammunition. “We attempted to move on, but Capt. Moylan could not move his wounded. It took six men to carry one, and the Indians were coming up thicker, and we were compelled to fall back and took the position we occupied on the 25th and 26th.” The men spent the night of the 25th digging in as best they could with tin cups and only three spades. Early on the 26th the Lakotas and Cheyennes opened fire, and kept up the siege throughout the second day. “Sometime near sunset we saw the Indian village moving off.”

  Wallace’s account established the basic narrative of the battle, as experienced by Reno’s battalion. Of course, Custer’s movements remained unclear. Lee asked how many Indians they faced at the outset. “When we halted and went on the skirmish line, there were some two or three hundred Indians there, and they increased from that time till we got out of the bottom.”

  “What movements, if any, did the Indians make?”

  “They were fighting in regular Indian style, riding up and down; some few on foot, and some few in the hills to the left passing around and coming in on our rear, filling the whole space in our rear.…Not a solid mass, but riding around, yelling and hooting and those within range were shooting.” During the escape from the trees, he thought the enemy were “as thick as trees in an apple orchard or thicker. The men were moving in column of fours, and as they would come up to the Indians the Indians would give way and let them pass through and then fire on them. After the men passed through, if they saw a man was not using his pistol they would ride close to him and fire.…They would ride along with the men and shoot at them.”

  “State when you last saw Gen. Custer or his column,” Lee directed.

  “Soon after the order was given to move forward. He was moving to our right as we moved off at a gallop. He was moving at a slow trot. I did not see him again. I supposed he was following.” Gilbert objected to the question, knowing Reno might be doomed by any evidence that his battalion was aware of Custer’s movements, but he was overruled. Yet Wallace’s testimony helped Reno. In fact, he probably lied. When Terry arrived on June 27, Wallace had said that he last saw Custer on a bluff across the river, headed toward the village, while Reno was still fighting in the river bottom.

  Lee asked if anyone who retreated to the hill expressed “any solicitude or uneasiness” over the fate of Custer’s force. “There was no uneasiness whatever. I heard a great deal of swearing about Gen. Custer running off and leaving us.” Lee asked about the movement forward from the hill, “in the direction which proved to be toward Gen. Custer’s battlefield.” Wallace admitted that it had been initiated by Capt. Thomas Weir, not by Reno or Benteen. He could not explain why the advance was made if no one suspected Custer’s location or knew that he had launched an attack.8

  The next day, Wallace answered more questions. He approved of Reno’s decision to retreat from the river-bottom timber to the hilltop refuge. Gilbert scarcely needed to cross-examine him, though he did induce Wallace to describe Terry’s arrival on the morning of June 27, after the battle. They spotted a dust cloud in the distance, Wallace said, and scouts reported the approach of Terry and Gibbon. “I mounted my horse and rode down…and met Gen. Terry beyond the point where our skirmish line had fallen back.” He told Terry that Reno, Benteen, and seven companies occupied a nearby hill, and described the battle. “When I got time I then asked him where Gen. Custer was, and received a reply that gave me to understand that they all had been killed.”9

  —

  LEE CALLED HIS THIRD WITNESS, who presented a different view of these events. He was a drab-looking middle-aged man in a civilian suit with “short-cut hair and stiff beard,” according to the press. His n
ame was Frederic F. Gerard, translator for the Arikara scouts. “Mr. Girard [sic] has spent thirty-one years among the North American savages and has been the hero of many strange adventures,” the Chicago Times wrote. Heading west at the age of sixteen, he had worked as an Indian trader and interpreter. In 1857, he told a reporter, he had stumbled into a Hunkpapa camp and faced certain death. Running Antelope, a friend he had cultivated over the years, rescued him. “He mounted our wagon and cried out in a loud tone, ‘This is a fine day to die’—an Indian idiom meaning he was ready to lay down his life for his friends.”10

  On the stand, Gerard took the court even farther back than Wallace’s account. At eleven o’clock in the evening on June 24th, he said, Custer told him to ride with him at the head of the column, along with the Arikara scouts Half-Yellow Face and Bloody Knife. Half an hour later they set out on an overnight march. Custer told Gerard “to be sure to have the Indians follow the left-hand trail, no matter how small it might be—he didn’t want any of the camps of the Sioux to escape him. He wanted to get them all together and drive them down to the Yellowstone.”

  Gerard relayed the instructions. Bloody Knife replied, “He needn’t be so particular about the small camps; we’ll get enough when we strike the big camp.” Gerard recalled how Custer “asked me what number of Indians I thought we would have to fight. I told him it wouldn’t be less than twenty-five hundred.”

  Custer worried that the Lakotas would learn of their approach. The scouts told him they could not cross the divide into the watershed of the Little Bighorn before daylight, and were certain to be discovered. So he pushed hard. They marched twelve miles that night, Gerard estimated, made coffee, advanced another five miles to the divide, then marched another dozen or so miles to the river. When Custer ordered Reno to launch his attack, he gave him the Arikara scouts, so Gerard went with Reno.

  Gerard remembered passing the lodge with corpses inside. (He referred to “lodges,” plural; there appear to have been two, one of which had collapsed.) What no one realized at the time was that the bodies were casualties of a fierce fight on June 17, 1876, on the Rosebud. The Lakotas and Cheyennes had attacked a column led by General Crook. Casualties were light compared to a clash in the Civil War, but it had been a pitched battle, a rarity in Indian warfare. Though tactically indecisive, it was a resounding strategic victory for the Lakotas, and they knew it. They halted Crook’s advance and induced him to retreat in search of ammunition and supplies. The funerary tepees sent a message that even Custer’s Indian scouts could not understand, that the Lakotas and Cheyennes were more confident and belligerent than ever before.11

  Near the lodges of the dead, Gerard recalled riding up a hill and spotting the Lakotas and their allies in the river bottom in a flurry of movement. He waved his hat at Custer and shouted, “Here are your Indians, running like devils!” The phrasing suggested that he saw them fleeing, which is precisely what Custer feared most. The high-plains nations always ran rather than expose their women and children to an attack like that at the Washita. But Gerard’s impression changed as he descended to the river with Reno’s command. “The scouts…called my attention to the fact that all the Indians were coming up the valley. I called Maj. Reno’s attention to the fact,” he testified. “I thought it was of importance enough that Gen. Custer should know of it, and I rode back toward Custer’s command.” Under cross-examination, Gerard later specified, “I knew that Gen. Custer was laboring under the impression that the Indians were running away, and if he knew they were coming to meet us I thought he would do something. I did not know what.” He encountered Lt. William Cooke, Custer’s adjutant, and said the Indians were riding to attack Reno’s force. He replied, “All right, Gerard. I will go and report. You go on.” He wheeled his horse around. Both Reno and Custer followed Indian trails, he recalled; Custer tracked the larger one, veering to the right.12

  Gerard crossed the river and followed Reno’s battalion to the timber where the horses of the dismounted skirmishers were being held. Just short of the trees, he encountered Bloody Knife, a legendary white scout named Charley Reynolds, and some others. Gerard counted Reynolds as perhaps his closest friend, and he had never seen him like this. Twice on the march, Gerard later explained under cross-examination, Reynolds had “told me he had a presentiment of his death—that he would never return from that expedition.” He had asked Terry to be excused, but “Gen. Terry shamed him out of it.” Here, Gerard continued, near the largest Lakota village the army had ever encountered, “he asked me if I had any whisky. He said he never felt so in all the days of his life, and he felt depressed and discouraged, and he thought it would be well to have something to stimulate him, and I gave him some.…I took a little myself.”

  Gerard and Reynolds joined Reno’s skirmish line and opened fire. Then the two men decided to tie up their horses in the timber. As they did so, the skirmish line suddenly collapsed, rotating and falling back into the trees. Bullets began to strike home. Though Gerard did not see it, Bloody Knife—Custer’s most trusted scout—took a round to the skull directly in front of Reno, spattering the major with his brains. Gerard heard, “Men! To our horses! The Indians are in our rear!”

  “Charley Reynolds looked at me and I said, ‘What damn-fool move is this?’ ”

  “I don’t know,” Reynolds replied. “We will have to go. We will have to get out of here.” Reynolds mounted his horse and whipped it ahead as Gerard led his own animal on foot. “As I saw Mr. Reynolds just then, I saw several Indians cut him off and shoot him down, and he fell.…I knew I was discovered and I turned my horse…and hunted a place where I could defend myself.” He returned to the trees to hide or fight.13

  The court adjourned and reassembled the next day, January 18. Gerard took his seat once again in that elegant hotel room in Chicago, and tried to describe to the officers in their dress uniforms and the decorous civilians the chaotic escape of Reno’s battalion from the river-bottom trees, the panicked race through the swirling current of Lakota horsemen, who shouted in triumph as they rode alongside the troops and gunned them down like so many stampeding buffalo. “The troops I saw in the timber were in a great hurry to get off. There seemed to be no order at all. Every man was for himself.” Rather than risk death in the open, Gerard hid in the trees until dark.

  As he waited for nightfall, he heard another fight erupt. “I could see Indians going up these ravines on the right-hand [far] side of the stream”—that is, on Custer’s side of the Little Bighorn. “I could hear the firing as though they were firing at troops going up there. I knew there was some troops going by, because I had seen them.…There was a continuous firing all the time.” He could hear the fighting across the river move downstream, toward the village, “scattering shots, sometimes three or four,…and when it got down below there, where Custer’s battlefield was, it became heavy.”

  “How long did that general firing last?”

  “I should judge it to be about two hours.” It died down to scattered shots, one or two at a time. “It is customary with Indians, even if they find an enemy that has been killed two or three days, in riding by they will be pretty apt to put a shot into him as he lies there.”

  Lee asked if Reno could have held the timber, from which point his battalion might have threatened the village and directly supported Custer’s attack. “Yes, sir, I think they could have held out against the whole number of Indians as long as their ammunition and provisions would have lasted—that is, resolute, determined men.” Gerard had already established that Reno’s men were the opposite of resolute. Despite a fierce cross-examination on January 20, Gerard stood by his testimony.14

  —

  IN AN INSIGHTFUL account of the hearing, James Donovan notes that the officers of the 7th Cavalry were reluctant to impugn Reno, as demonstrated by Wallace’s apparent perjury. Yet points against him added up. Gerard and Lt. Charles Varnum both testified to seeing Custer across the river riding to the attack, contradicting Reno’s claim that he had no ide
a where Custer went. The major clearly had not executed his orders to charge the village; his only “charge” had been a panicked retreat. The civilian packers John Frett and B. F. Churchill described Reno as drunk. More than likely he was.

  Reno can only be described as troubled. His wife had died in 1874, deepening the isolation of a man who did not make friends easily. After the Little Bighorn disaster he got drunk and engaged in a fistfight at Fort Abraham Lincoln, and nearly faced charges. He was assigned to remote Fort Abercrombie, where he sexually assaulted the wife of an officer while the husband was away. Her resistance prompted him to take revenge by slandering her. In 1877, Reno was court-martialed and convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer, and was sentenced to dismissal. President Rutherford B. Hayes commuted his punishment to a two-year suspension. But then came Frederick Whittaker’s campaign against him. Whittaker had published an admiring biography of Custer with the support of Libbie, who gave him access to private correspondence. He blamed Reno for Custer’s death. Reno’s fragile career could not survive this hammering. He saw little choice but to ask for an investigation to clear his name.15

  Leaving aside Reno’s guilt, the testimony so far established the basic outline of the battle, and some of the key officers’ motives. Custer feared the Lakotas would escape. Anticipating an archipelago of encampments, he wanted to catch them all and drive their inhabitants down the Little Bighorn toward Gibbon. He sent Reno with a smaller battalion to follow a smaller trail into the upper valley, and he followed the larger trail with a larger detachment toward the lower valley. Reno halted his attack to dismount his men; outflanked and outnumbered, he and his troops broke for the rear. They found refuge on a hilltop, where Benteen and the pack train joined them.