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

by Stiles, T. J.

  The court never learned precisely what maneuvers Custer made, but Gerard’s auditory observations revealed them in general terms. He advanced on the opposite side of the river from Reno in the face of increasing resistance. He came under an immense attack as Lakota and Cheyenne warriors returned from fighting Reno. The assault eventually overran his column, killing Custer and all of the men with him.

  When General Terry arrived, he found the dead in clusters—different groups that were shot down as they rode or ran or made their separate last stands. He found George Armstrong Custer’s body atop a hill, grouped with his brother Tom, his old friend George Yates, Cooke, and two other officers, amid the corpses of thirty-nine horses they had shot to improvise fortifications. Forty-nine troops were killed just down the slope. They located Custer’s brother Boston and nephew Autie Reed together, about 100 yards away. The bodies were almost all mutilated, especially that of Tom Custer, which was missing its eyes, tongue, genitals, and scalp; Tom’s skull had been thoroughly crushed, almost everything else lacerated. But Armstrong’s corpse survived almost intact. One bullet had struck him in the chest, another in the left temple. He was found stripped naked, reclining against two corpses, his thigh cut (a Lakota tradition), his penis stabbed with an arrow, but his scalp intact. Spent cartridges surrounded him.16

  Two other divisions of the 7th Cavalry remain to be accounted for: Capt. Frederick Benteen’s battalion and the pack train. Grave historical questions hover over them: Did Benteen do all he could to support Custer? Could he have saved him? Did he follow his orders? Or did his personal hatred affect his actions?

  Benteen did not answer directly, but he did take the stand in the court of inquiry. His testimony established one thing for certain: it is possible to sneer continuously for days at a time. He appeared in the full flower of his petty arrogance, steeped in an embittered subordinate’s nitpicking resentfulness and a pervasive disdain for Custer.

  On the eighteenth day of the inquiry, February 1, 1879, Lee asked Benteen to describe the orders to break the regiment into battalions. Oddly, this deceptively soft-faced man began at a point in the events just after Custer returned from the Crow’s Nest, an observation point on a peak used by the Crows in their war with the Lakotas. “General Custer told us that he had just come down from the mountain, that he had been told by the scouts that they could see a village, ponies, tepees, and smoke. He gave it to us as his belief that they were mistaken, that there were no Indians there, that he had looked through his glass and could not see any and did not see any there.”

  Benteen’s recollection was wrong. Custer had difficulty spotting the Lakotas, but he believed that Indians had sharper senses and did not doubt them. Benteen’s version made no sense. Everything Custer did thereafter proved that he believed the Lakotas were in the Little Bighorn valley; nothing indicated any doubts. Eager to cast Custer as a fool, Benteen twisted his words to make him solely responsible for his own death.

  This recollection set a pattern. He derided Custer’s every order, coloring each one as foolhardy, as picayune, wrongheaded interference with Benteen’s affairs. Custer reasonably asked his company commanders to be sure each had detailed seven men to escort the pack train and that each trooper carried 100 rounds of carbine ammunition; Benteen depicted it as an absurdity that he executed for “formality’s sake.”

  “Describe where it was that you separated from General Custer’s column,” Lee directed Benteen. “What orders did you receive…?”

  “My orders were to proceed out into a line of bluffs about 4 or 5 miles away, to pitch into anything I came across, and to send back word to General Custer at once if I came across anything.” He said further messages directed him to search beyond the first and second lines of bluffs. “I forgot to give some instructions of General Custer’s which were that I was to send an officer and about six men in advance of my battalion and to ride rapidly.” In other words, Custer wanted Benteen to send out scouts so the captain could remain in communication with him. Typically, Benteen ignored the intent of the orders and rode ahead of his own scouts.

  On cross-examination, he told Gilbert his orders amounted to “valley hunting ad infinitum.” Lee followed up, asking about the phrase. “That is the way I understood it,” Benteen said. “I understood it as a rather senseless order. We were on the main trail of the Indians. There were plenty of them on that trail.…It was scarcely worth hunting up any more.…Why I was sent to the left I don’t know.”

  But this elaboration came after Benteen’s original narrative, which continued. “As there were no Indians there and no valleys I thought my duty was to go back to the trail and join the command.” He reached the tepees with the corpses; the erect lodge now stood aflame. “A mile or so from that tepee I met a sergeant coming back with instructions to the commanding officer of the pack trains to bring up the packs. I told him the pack train I thought was about 7 miles back and he could take the order back as I had nothing to do with that.” Resentful of any imposition, he declined to take any responsibility beyond his official sphere, despite the importance of the order. “About a mile after that I met trumpeter [John] Martin who brought a written order.…It says: ‘Benteen. Come on. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs. W. W. Cooke P. bring pacs.’ ”17

  It was an unequivocal, positive command to join Custer, and an insistent demand for ammunition and supplies. The order was in keeping with Custer’s tactics that day; he divided his regiment for a reconnaissance in force, apparently intending to consolidate upon contact with the enemy. But Benteen moved without urgency, and declined to hurry along the pack train. He did not go in search of Custer, though his commander’s battalion left a clear trail toward the right bank of the river, along with the main Lakota trail that Benteen himself stressed was so critically important.

  In the witness chair, he made contradictory excuses for his refusal to follow Custer’s clear instructions. First he said that Martin (an Italian immigrant with imperfect English) told him the Indians were “skedaddling” and there was “less necessity” to bring up the pack train—implying that the trumpeter’s personal impression outweighed an emphatic written order. Then he excused himself by saying that he saw Reno’s retreat from the river bottom. “I thought the whole command was thrashed and that was not a good place to come. I saw the men who were up on the bluff and I immediately went there and was met by Maj. Reno.” He said he showed Reno the order. “I asked him if he knew where General Custer was. He said he did not.”

  Lee asked Benteen if he had asked Reno for permission to go in search of Custer, or to his aid. He replied with his third excuse. “Not at all. I supposed General Custer was able to take care of himself.” Then came a fourth excuse, contradicting the third. “I think now there were between 8 and 9 thousand” hostile warriors, he claimed, a number wildly beyond all other estimates. “I wish to say before that order”—the one delivered by Martin—“that I believe that General Custer and his whole command were dead.” Putting all four excuses together, Benteen claimed that he believed that Custer was perfectly safe and that he was dead; that the Lakotas were running away and that they had smashed the regiment. He never suggested the most likely explanation: that in his petty, self-absorbed spite against his commanding officer, he seized the first available pretense to avoid helping him or the hundreds of men with him. He even derided the movement from the bluff in search of Custer, initiated by Captain Weir, as “a fit of bravado without orders.”18

  After his testimony, Benteen wrote to a friend, “I was close mouthed as I could be, or my testimony might possibly looked like a too high flying of my own kite.…I almost regretted I was not allowed to turn loose on Custer, tho’ Qui Bono [sic]?” It is true that Benteen effectively took command from Reno of the troops cornered on the bluff, where he displayed true bravery and a sure hand. This portrait of a cool leader in a desperate siege colored the public’s impression of his testimony. Yet it is striking that Benteen, who loathed Custer for purportedly abandoning Maj
. Joel Elliott and seventeen men at the Washita, should so lightly excuse his own abandonment of ten times as many troops. Could his and Reno’s combined battalions have reached Custer, let alone rescued him? No one can ever know. What is certain is that they never tried.19

  —

  AFTER TWENTY-SIX DAYS, the court of inquiry exonerated Reno. Judge Advocate General William M. Dunn agreed. In his official review of the inquiry, he wrote, “The object of Gen. Custer in detaching Maj. Reno is shown to have been to attack the Indians simultaneously on opposite sides of their encampment or village. Their number appears to have been far greater than Gen. Custer imagined, and very far in excess of the force under his command.”20

  It is difficult to improve upon that conclusion. Reno may have been drunk; he may have been cowardly; Benteen may have been insubordinate; yet the most important facts were the superior numbers of Lakotas and Cheyennes and their unprecedented willingness to stand and fight. Believing that his primary problem would be preventing the escape of satellite camps from his net, Custer made a grave tactical error in dividing his force, exposing it to destruction in detail. It was fatal, but understandable. No one in the army expected him to encounter such a huge and determined hostile force. When Sherman learned of the disaster, he said, “I can’t believe that Custer and his whole command would be swept away. I don’t think there were enough Indians there to do it like this.”21

  To be sure, this brief, fragmented sketch provides nothing close to a complete portrait of the battle. It was a complex event that hundreds of experts have examined in minute detail. But the obvious answer is often the right one, and in this case it is the moral and numerical superiority of the Cheyennes and Lakotas, who fought with great skill as well as courage. If Reno had proved braver and more capable, Benteen more trustworthy, or Custer less imaginative—launching a straight-on attack with the entire regiment—probably the most that could have been accomplished would have been a tactical standoff like Crook’s battle on the Rosebud, or a different kind of defeat. But Custer might have survived.22

  Immediately after the battle, the military and much of the public concluded that it was Custer’s fault. Colonel Samuel Sturgis, who lost his son, an officer in the 7th Cavalry, railed against him. An unnamed “officer of distinction” at a Civil War reunion in Philadelphia told a reporter, “Custer threw his command away by an act of bravado.”

  Fittingly, the press split over Custer along partisan and regional lines, according to the scholar James E. Mueller. Republican newspapers echoed the Chicago Daily News, which claimed that he defied Terry’s instructions, running such headlines as, “DISOBEDIENCE OF ORDERS—A FATAL BLUNDER.” To the champions of progress, this romantic, archaic individualist brought doom down on himself and his men. The New York World and other Democratic journals praised him as a noble hero and blamed Grant’s policies for his death. “Custer’s most passionate defenders were the Southern newspapers, especially those in Kentucky and Texas, where Custer had served on Reconstruction duty,” Mueller writes. Custer had done his best to obstruct Reconstruction there; he would have been pleased at the local white support.

  But Custer as glory-obsessed, arrogant fool emerged as the persistent narrative. It prevailed just after his death, receded for many years, then rose again, predominating in the present day. Emmanuel Custer protested in vain. “They should not have said so,” he said. “He fought to whip and not for praise. He was not reckless. He had much to live for, and he would not throw his life away. No, no. They wrong my dead boy. They shouldn’t say so.”23

  The popular narrative contains some truth about every aspect of Custer’s life except his performance in battle—the one field in which he displayed consistent good judgment and self-possession. From the Civil War through his two battles on the Yellowstone, he proved decisive, not reckless; shrewd, not foolish. In every other regard, he danced along the emerging modern world, unable to adapt to it. He failed in the new sphere of finance, rejected new thinking about equality, and wrote antiquated prose. He offended his military superiors, mismanaged subordinates, alienated civilian authorities, meddled inappropriately in politics, endangered his marriage, and gambled away his estate. Again and again he saved himself through his ability to fight. And yet, ironically, we now remember him as a bad commander.

  The last word about the Little Bighorn belongs to perhaps Custer’s most insightful chronicler, Robert Utley. “The simplest answer, usually overlooked, is that the army lost largely because the Indians won,” he writes. “To ascribe defeat entirely to military failings is to devalue Indian strength and leadership.” The invasion of the Black Hills and the order to abandon the unceded lands galvanized the Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes. Inspired by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, they gathered in a huge village on the Little Bighorn. They could not remain together long: their vast pony herds consumed the nearby grazing, campsites became polluted, and demand for food forced them to spread out and hunt in smaller bands. Sheridan feared that the Lakotas would disperse before Custer reached them; it was Custer’s bad luck that they did not.24

  Soon after the victory, they did break into smaller bands. For them, the Little Bighorn turned out to be a turning point for the worst. Crook attacked them again, and over the winter they faced the dogged pursuit of Custer’s old friend, Col. Nelson Miles. Continual military pressure wore them down and prevented them from hunting and sustaining themselves. Over the next year most of the nomadic bands gave themselves up. Crazy Horse was killed on the reservation in 1877. Sitting Bull fled to Canada; he returned in 1881 and surrendered to the federal authorities. He was killed by reservation police in 1890, shortly before the massacre at Wounded Knee.25

  Contrary to white expectations, the indigenous nations did not go extinct. The Cheyennes, Lakotas, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Comanches, and others still survive, as do such former foes as the Crows, Arikaras, Pawnees, and Osages, and the many peoples whose histories did not intersect Custer’s life. They now endure incessant cultural appropriation by a majority society in the United States that celebrates an idealized American Indian but ignores reservation life—the economic blight and marginalization of what are, in effect, national internment zones, exacerbated by federal inattention and mismanagement. In Indian country there are also thriving cultural traditions and creative genius, but these often receive little more recognition than the problems.

  —

  ON OCTOBER 24, 1885, IN Athens, Ohio, a roughly forty-year-old black woman composed a letter to Elizabeth Bacon Custer. She could write, after a fashion, but appears to have dictated the note to someone capable of better spelling and penmanship. “I receive your kind and welcom card and my heart leaps for joy to think that I have heard from you once more,” she said. “The card has brought back to me memery of many places we have been together and its make me feel as if I must see you. and have a talk with you. I have often pray to the Lord to spar me till I could see you once more. I have change very much since I saw you.” Her hair was turning gray, her health declined, but she had a good home and a “very good husband.” Her son John sent his love as well, she wrote.26

  Her name was Eliza Brown Davison. She had thoroughly reconstructed her existence since the day she stormed out of the Custers’ lives—or was thrown out, accused by Libbie of being “insolent.” She had a good life, one that spoke to the future of American society. Her husband was Andrew J. Davison, a prominent black attorney in Ohio and a sought-after public speaker—a level of professional attainment scarcely imaginable for an African American before the Civil War. The revolution in race relations had been slowed, even reversed in the South, but had not been erased.

  The card from Libbie reminded her that she carried her extraordinary history within her still. Eliza wrote again to Libbie in her own hand, in March 1886 and on June 6. “My Dear friend, i rite you a few Lines to Let you [know] i am Well and reSived the Book all rite an i am very proud to get the the Book i could not help Shedding teers When i reSived the Book thinking of the Times
that has past and gone.”27

  Libbie’s decade between the Little Bighorn and her correspondence with Eliza had been hard. The loss of a spouse can be shattering, but Libbie’s pain had been compounded again and again. There was the violence of Armstrong’s death; the newspaper stories and comments by army officers that blamed her husband for the disaster (even President Grant faulted him); the annihilation of two of Custer’s brothers and his nephew and namesake; and the death of the husbands of Maggie Custer Calhoun, Annie Roberts Yates, and other women in her circle.

  And then there were the debts. The first inventory of Armstrong’s estate assessed the total value at $2,140. Adding in 116.4 acres on the Raisin River that Armstrong had shared with his sole surviving brother, Nevin, the tally came to $2,790.15. The liabilities, including a $2,000 mortgage on the real estate, came to $4,372.28. She received a federal pension of only $30 per month; an attempt to increase her benefit failed in Congress. The Army and Navy Journal raised $13,800 for the widows of the 7th Cavalry, out of which $900 went to Libbie. She also received a claim of $4,750 from New York Life—only after a struggle, since Armstrong missed his final premium payment.

  Now, at the worst possible moment, Libbie learned of Armstrong’s financial betrayal—his gambling on the stock market. Emil Justh presented his $8,500 promissory note for payment. With interest, the debt came to $9,260. She finally settled her debts, paying Justh ten cents on the dollar. (Victimized by a fraud, the hard-pressed Justh filed a revealing lawsuit against note cosigner Ben Holladay, to biographers’ delight.)28

  She struggled. She refused a federal post, angry at Grant’s treatment of her husband. She took a job as secretary for the Society of Decorative Arts in New York, and moved to Manhattan. She publicly criticized a statue of Armstrong at West Point; it was taken down. Eventually her finances improved. She received an inheritance when her mother-in-law passed away in 1882, and Congress raised her monthly pension to $50. She left her secretarial job to write the first volume of her memoirs. Even then trouble followed her. Fire ravaged the apartment she shared with Maggie Custer Calhoun; her husband’s letters survived, locked inside an iron safe.