A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  Not only would a treaty entered into in good faith between the Indians of the three Agencies named have a strong tendency to presume and maintain peace between the Indians themselves but between them and the people of the frontier. . . . Please say to them that as the representation of the Military in this vicinity and as one who earnestly desires to encourage the maintenance of peace not only among the Indians themselves but between the Indians and the white men I extend to them a cordial and friendly invitation to come to this post and take part in the proposed council.11

  Treaties had been successfully concluded in May and June, with Custer presiding,12 and in the Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ annual report for 1875, he had specifically lauded Custer for his peacemaking efforts.13 The Bismarck Tribune cast a more jaundiced eye on the results: “These treaties are all bosh, for as soon as members of either of these tribes get the other in a tight place, scalp lifting commences.”14

  When Standing Rock Agency’s supplies and rations had failed to arrive that March, Custer had invited the agent there, Edmund Palmer, to bring his entire population, about 5,000 Sioux, up to Fort Lincoln, where the General would provide temporary rations. “The question of how these Indians are to be provided for threatens soon to become one not of establishing regulation — but of humanity,” Custer wrote.15 However, red tape between the Departments of War and the Interior prevented the rescue. Fortunately, a last-minute arrival of cattle alleviated the situation.16

  That experience, and the visits of friendly Sioux leaders to Fort Lincoln pleading various causes, may have helped soften Custer’s position on “the Indian question.” In an unpublished article he would work on (but never complete) early in 1876, Custer stated his opposition to “exterminating the Indians” and declared that “no person who at all comprehends the necessities of the Indian question” — let alone anyone who belonged to “a Christian and civilized nation” — could “say a word in favor of extermination.”17 In this he diverged from his superiors, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who had espoused just such a philosophy for years. Lest anyone confuse Custer with Bishop Henry Whipple, one of the leading voices in the east for Indian rights, he wrote an article published in the July 1876 issue of the Galaxy praising the “civilizing and peace-giving influence” of the railroad and its unique ability to promote progress in the west in general and the Black Hills specifically. The article made clear Custer’s support of the opening up of the Hills to whites and the extinguishing of Indian title to the area granted in the 1868 treaty.18

  Aside from these official and not-so-official duties were the pleasures of the outdoors. Despite the infrequent Indian attack (though the fort was far from the heart of Indian country, a raid occasionally occurred), there was the opportunity to hunt, and Custer liked few things more than hunting. He may not have been the peerless marksman he bragged about in his letters and articles, but he was a damn good shot — by most accounts one of the best in the army — and he complemented that with his trademark energy and endurance. Few men had ever been able to keep up with Custer in the saddle — there was more than one reason his men called him “Hard Ass”19 behind his back — and even now, at the age of thirty-six, his energy and endurance seemed undiminished by fifteen years of soldiering, a good amount of it spent on campaign. True, his hairline was conducting a distinctly un-Custer-like maneuver — retreating — and his ruddy, lined face betrayed the hard years spent outside in the elements, but he was still lean and muscled, and strong as an ox.

  Custer’s idyllic life was not without problems. One constant irritant was his inability to advance in grade. But in the shrunken postwar army, every officer was affected. There were only eleven coveted generalships in the army, and the competition to obtain even a colonelcy was fierce. Seniority decided promotion through that rank, but the right combination of patronage (the support of an influential General or politician in Washington on the right side of the aisle, for example) and performance (nothing beat battlefield heroics) was necessary to kick an officer higher up the ladder. Witness Lieutenant Colonel George Crook: after a bravura performance in Arizona against the Apaches, he had been promoted over many more senior Colonels to Brigadier General.

  Men accustomed to lightning-quick battlefield promotions during the Civil War often adjusted badly to an army in which attaining higher rank might take ten, fifteen, even twenty years. Only death, retirement, or transfer made the highest rank available. Consequently, the army’s officer corps was rife with jealousy and infighting. A good many soldiers were still fussing over real or perceived slights dating back more than a decade — disagreement over proper credit for Civil War victories being the main culprit.20 Some officers of Custer’s generation would retire near the turn of the century at the same rank as, or only one higher than, their original commissions.

  Nevertheless, the eternally optimistic Custer remained hopeful that he would receive a General’s star, and with his old friend Sheridan lobbying for him, he was in a better position than most. At the very least, he was second on the army list behind his old rival Wesley Merritt for the next available colonelcy. A promotion seemed imminent, since a sixty-five-year-old Colonel named William Emory, West Point class of 1831, was slated to retire that fall.21

  Another disappointment was his inability to make a strike in the financial world. America in the decade after the war seemed to brim with get-rich-quick opportunities, and a good many of them succeeded. But apparently “Custer’s luck” did not extend to his business activities, for few things he touched turned to gold — or silver — despite the considerable time he spent on leave with the tycoons of Wall Street. He had embarked on several investment schemes (a Colorado silver mine he persuaded John Jacob Astor to invest in was the biggest and most disappointing, though Custer sold his promoter’s shares before it went bust), but few, if any, paid off. While in New York over the winter of 1875–76, he had lost $8,500 in a wild stock speculation, a sum for which he had had to sign a six-month promissory note to a Wall Street brokerage firm22 — and an amount more than twice his annual salary. His business affairs were in such dire straits that he had requested several extensions of his time off. Two were granted, but the third was denied peremptorily by Sheridan. “If I am forced to leave now I will be thrown into bankruptcy with a positive loss of over ten thousand dollars,” Custer wired his superior. Sheridan still refused, prompting Custer to claim that “it will involve the loss of all I own if compelled to leave now.”23 Though his request was denied again, Custer somehow managed to stave off bankruptcy.

  To be certain, Custer’s failures dampened his spirits. But they were mitigated by the fact that he was almost always among friends. Indeed, Armstrong and Libbie were surrounded at Fort Lincoln by his favorite officers — his brother Tom, recently made a Captain; his brother-in-law James “Jimmi” Calhoun, the quiet, handsome Lieutenant who had married his sister Margaret (called Maggie) in 1872; and several others referred to by outsiders as part of the Custer “family.” His youngest brother, Boston, was also there; sent west so that the fresh air of the plains could mend his consumptive tendency, he had worked for the regiment as a forage master since the Black Hills Expedition of 1874. The three brothers were constantly playing practical jokes on one another, and Boston as youngest was usually the hapless victim.

  One of the reasons that Fort Lincoln seemed so much like one big family was that most of the anti-Custer faction was stationed elsewhere, no doubt deliberately, or on extended leave. None of the regiment’s three Majors, each of whom was several years older than Custer, got along with their CO. This was somewhat extreme but not unheard-of. One, Lewis Merrill, was a good officer but on detached service as Chief of Staff to the President of the upcoming Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, General Joseph R. Hawley.24 The senior Major, Joseph Tilford, was overweight and a heavy drinker, and he disliked the rigors of field duty. He was stationed at Fort Rice but on extended sick leave due to inflammatory rheumatism.25 The junior Major was Marcus Reno, a West Po
int graduate from Illinois who had been appointed to the Seventh after the Battle of the Washita in December 1868. A stolid, humorless officer, Reno had served in the Civil War with vague distinction, chiefly in staff roles, and near the war’s end was still a Captain. But he had garnered a colonelcy and the command of a Pennsylvania volunteer regiment in the last few months of the conflict, most likely through political connections (his wife’s family was one of the most prominent in Harrisburg), and by the time the war ended, he had been brevetted a Brigadier General.

  Custer had initially been glad of Reno’s appointment to the Seventh. He wrote to Libbie in early 1869, “Reno I know well, he is a finished gentleman and a most capable officer. He served in the Shenandoah and is a good friend of mine.”26 But his opinion of the man would change over the years. By the time he joined the Seventh, Reno had lost any knack he had of making friends, and most of his fellow officers in the regiment disliked him. Since the death in 1874 of his wife, who had seemed to temper his lack of sociability, his drinking had increased. He had missed the excitement on the Yellowstone in 1873 and the grand picnic in the Black Hills the next year, as he had been busy with two companies of the regiment escorting the Northern Boundary Survey Expedition. He had then taken a year’s leave of absence to spend time with his only son, eleven-year-old Ross, after his wife’s death. Now, in the spring of 1876, he was at Lincoln — his boy stowed safely with his in-laws — and chafing for a chance to prove himself and gain a command.

  Captain Frederick Benteen, Custer’s most open enemy in the regiment, was stationed twenty-five miles down the Missouri at Fort Rice, near Standing Rock Agency. Benteen and his wife, Kate, had just lost their fifth-born child to spinal meningitis, the fourth of their children to die of the disease they had inherited from their father; all four had perished before their first birthdays. The embittered Benteen’s dislike of Custer had not abated since the Washita incident, but the two saw little of each other unless they were in the field. Though Custer was not a man who normally bore grudges, and did not in this case — “It seemed to me that Custer often went out of his way to mollify him,” remembered one officer27 — the arrangement suited both just fine. Benteen was an intelligent man, and a brave and inspiring leader, and was more like Custer than he would ever care to admit. But for all his smarts, he never indulged in the self-examination necessary to admit that jealousy was at the root of his hatred for his commanding officer.

  In total, fourteen of the regiment’s officers were on leave or detached service: recruitment service in one of the big eastern cities, art instruction at West Point, or, in the case of Captain Michael Sheridan, serving as aide-de-camp to his brother, General Philip Sheridan. Another officer was aide-de-camp to General William Sherman, and still another to General John Pope. The understaffed army was stretched thin, and the result was several companies of the Seventh commanded by Lieutenants.

  Custer himself had long ago stopped worrying about whether his enlisted men, or even his officers, liked him. “I never expected to be a popular commander in times of peace,” he had written his wife in 1869.28 So he was probably unperturbed by the fact that he had made some enemies during the march up from Yankton in the summer of 1873. To straighten out what he no doubt saw as a slack command, Custer had decided to implement dozens of disciplinary orders. In the words of one officer, they were “annoying, vexatious, and useless orders which visit us like the swarm of evils from Pandora’s box, small, numberless, and disagreeable.”29 Eleven of his subordinates had subsequently complained en masse to departmental headquarters during a series of courts-martial in which Custer continued to meddle.

  Custer had eased off somewhat since then, but he was still a tough administrator and a by-the-book commander. While some of the enlisted men still swore by him, others swore at him. (The latter liked to cite the instance when, returning from the Black Hills in 1874, Custer had ordered sick men out of the ambulances and into heavy government wagons to make room for his dogs, whose paws were sore from prickly pear cactus.)30 Few of his soldiers loved him as did those who had served under him during the war, but they respected him, if not for his formidable reputation, then for his strict but fair command style.

  One who did love him unconditionally was his “darling durl,” his “little gypsy,” his “bunkey,” Libbie. Though spoiled since birth and queen of the Custer court, she put on no airs at this frontier post. Twelve years of following her cavalier from battlefield to battlefield and then from post to post had tarnished somewhat her once radiant beauty, but she was still his soul mate, his confidante, the understanding angel he increasingly shared every concern with. When they were apart, he felt compelled to write her almost every day from waiting rooms, military offices, committee rooms, restaurants, anywhere he could find a moment’s respite from his busy social schedule. The flirtatious Custer even regularly apprised her of the constant parade of attractive women he encountered. That their marriage had produced no children was a great disappointment to them, but it was one they had accepted and adjusted to. Their family comprised the always overstuffed menagerie of animals Custer acquired or adopted — dogs, wolves, mice, raccoons, wildcats, antelope, and many others — and the close-knit group of relatives, friends, and officers that surrounded them. They had weathered other marital problems — likely a sexual indiscretion or two on his part — and if anything, their love for each other had deepened over the years.31 “Your magnificent letter of 42 pages sent me into the seventh heaven of bliss,” Libbie wrote to her husband in July 1873 while he was in the field with the Yellowstone Expedition. Only a few days later, he wrote her an eighty-page missive, noting, “How we have managed to preserve the romance.” No wife could be more supportive of her husband and his ambitions, and few men confided more completely in their wives. Both apparently obtained what they needed from the relationship.

  ARMSTRONG AND LIBBIE had spent several months of the fall and winter of 1875–76 in New York, enjoying the social whirl that the General especially was addicted to: nights at the theater, where he would laugh and cry demonstrably; invitations to dinners, dances, and receptions at private clubs and tony mansions; and much time spent with his good friend, actor Lawrence Barrett. All this despite a singular lack of funds. (To save money, the Custers stayed in a room across from their usual quarters, the Hotel Brunswick, though they still received their mail and took their meals there.) Their financial future had, however, been brightened by an offer from a Boston speakers bureau: a lucrative series of lectures that could earn Custer up to $1,000 a week. The General hoped to begin the tour (with some coaching from Barrett and Libbie) after the summer campaign had concluded.

  Custer had a good reason to delay his lecture series: he was convinced there would soon be a large-scale field operation against the nontreaty Sioux, and he was confident that the Seventh would be involved. In January he wrote to his brother Tom, “I think the 7th Cavalry may have its greatest campaign ahead.”32 The restless Custer remained disappointed that Lieutenant Colonel Dodge, not he, had accompanied the previous summer’s expedition into the Black Hills to officially confirm the presence of gold. Sheridan had picked Custer to lead another expedition that season, this one up the Yellowstone, but that had been shelved indefinitely.33 Custer was hopeful of action in 1876.

  After Custer’s request for a third extension of his leave was refused by Sheridan and Secretary of War William W. Belknap (Custer had no respect for the Secretary, suspecting him of crooked dealings, and had snubbed him socially during Belknap’s visit to Fort Lincoln the previous year), the couple took the train to St. Paul, arriving there on February 15, the day Custer’s leave officially ended. He spent the next two weeks at the Department of Dakota headquarters, conferring with General Alfred H. Terry.

  Terry, a tall, gaunt man with gentle eyes, was soft-spoken, kind, and an excellent administrator. Before the Civil War, he studied law at Yale. He left after only a year and soon passed the state bar. To supplement his meager earnings as a lawyer, he be
came a court clerk in New Haven, Connecticut. At the onset of hostilities in 1861, he raised a regiment of state volunteers and entered the war as a Colonel. He soon found that he had an aptitude for command. After his brilliant assault on the nearly impregnable Fort Fisher in January 1865, he reached the rank of Brigadier General in the volunteer army, aided by a recommendation from Grant. When the war ended, he was rewarded with a regular army brigadiership and the command of the Department of Dakota. The forty-eight-year-old bachelor lived in St. Paul with his mother and four doting sisters and had become quite comfortable as an office administrator. Terry had no Indian-fighting experience to speak of and was glad to have Custer, an old hand at it, leading the expedition against the hostiles, although the younger officer’s high-handed ways taxed Terry’s patience at times.34

  The two men differed on the answer to the Indian question. Although Custer was no proponent of extermination, in the spring of 1875 he had recommended to Sheridan that the Sioux be given a “sound drubbing” and that the Black Hills be opened. Terry, more sympathetic to the Sioux’s plight, had disagreed,35 at one point proposing that the region be settled with Indian farmers.36 But the prickly and fruitless negotiations to obtain the Black Hills from the Sioux, a mid-December meeting in Chicago with Sheridan to discuss the situation, and Terry’s appreciation of military hierarchy may have altered his views.37 Sheridan had told him of the decisive conference at the White House on November 3, 1875, in which President Grant had been persuaded by the more hawkish elements of his Indian brain trust to allow miners into the Black Hills and provoke the Sioux hunting bands into war. Orders were orders, and the soft-spoken Terry was not one to challenge his superiors, who were delighted with his refreshing lack of aggressive ambition.38