A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  I appeal to you as a soldier to spare me the humiliation of seeing my regiment march to meet the enemy and I not share in its dangers.

  (Signed) G. A. Custer

  Bvt. Maj. Gen. U.S. Army.51

  Terry appended a letter of transmittal that humbly requested Custer’s reinstatement and declared that “Custer’s services would be very valuable with his command.”52 In Chicago, Sheridan also endorsed Custer’s request, though in words disparaging to his subordinate. Clearly, though respectful of Custer’s military skills, he remained angered by Custer’s antiadministration activities. Sherman and Taft likely advised the same. With his top brass recommending clemency, no grounds on which to prefer court-martial charges, and most of the press castigating him for his partisan actions, Grant had little choice but to relent. Custer was at Terry’s headquarters on the morning of May 8 when word came of the President’s decision. A telegram from Sherman to Terry revealed the news: “General Custer’s urgent request to go under your command with his regiment has been submitted to the President, who sent me word that if you want General Custer along he withdraws his objections. Advise Custer to be prudent, not to take along any newspaper men, who always make mischief, and to abstain from personalities in the future.” Custer’s luck, it seemed, had held fast.

  An elated Custer left Terry later that morning to return to his room at the Metropolitan Hotel, just a few blocks away, where his niece and nephew waited. In the street, he ran into Captain William Ludlow, a longtime acquaintance who had accompanied the Yellowstone and Black Hills expeditions and who was now chief engineer on Terry’s staff. According to Ludlow, Custer revealed his good news and then claimed that he would “cut loose” from Terry at the first available chance — that he had “got away from Stanley [Custer’s commander on the 1873 Yellowstone Expedition] and would be able to swing clear of Terry.”53

  Custer may have been joshing affectionately with an intimate acquaintance or simply (and thoughtlessly) voicing the desire of every cavalryman — to be given a command of his own.54 If he was serious, the statement was a sad indictment of the cocky Custer and his lack of gratitude. At any rate, Terry was planning to give Custer a good deal of freedom; he would be able to “swing clear” rather easily.

  Custer, his niece and nephew, Terry, and several of Terry’s staff members and two of his sisters left St. Paul by rail and arrived at Fort Lincoln on the evening of May 10. The Seventh’s leader had been away from his command for seven weeks. The winter campaign was now a late-spring campaign. The advantage Sheridan had hoped for by pushing a winter strike, compromised by atrocious weather, had now been lost.

  SIX

  “Submitt to Uncl Sam or Kill the 7 Hors”

  Our Skeleton Army! It seems like the dead

  To the buzzards rapacious that wheel overhead,

  Yet its nerve is of steel, and its eye is of fire

  And the tattered old banner waves brighter and higher.

  W. A. CROFFUTT

  On a warm day in the middle of May, beside a river thirteen miles from Fort Lincoln, Libbie Custer wrapped her arms around her husband’s neck and held him tight. Sobbing, she begged him to be careful. He promised her that he would. She was a soldier’s wife, he told her, she must be brave. “Soon he’d be back and then we’d all have good times at Fort Lincoln again,” remembered Custer’s devoted personal orderly of six years, a taciturn Private named John Burkman, who held Libbie’s horse. Aside from the same year of birth, the simple, illiterate striker (an army word for an enlisted man who worked as an officer’s servant for extra money) had little in common with his CO except for their love of animals, but that had been enough to forge a curious codependency. The two would often argue heatedly over some matter but eventually make up, the Brevet Major General as often as not apologizing to the Private.

  Custer was teary-eyed himself. He gently disentangled his wife’s arms and watched as Burkman helped her mount. She leaned down and placed her hand on Burkman’s shoulder and asked him to look after her husband. Then she joined the General’s sister Maggie Custer Calhoun and his niece Emma Reed and rode away with the paymaster’s wagon, her head bowed.

  The General watched until his wife and the small party were just tiny dots on the endless prairie. He said softly, “A good soldier has to serve two mistresses. While he’s loyal to one the other must suffer.”1

  IN THE WEEK since his arrival at Lincoln with Terry, Custer had worked nonstop helping to oversee preparations for the expedition’s departure. Dressed in his buckskin suit, he had been everywhere fine-tuning his regiment.2 During his absence, Reno and his staff had acquired an impressive collection of white and Indian scouts, interpreters, and guides. Thirty Arikaras, including a few half-breeds (the term used for anyone of half-white, half-Indian ancestry) had been recruited as scouts and couriers from the Fort Berthold Agency, and because they were unfamiliar with the country west of the Little Missouri, four Lakota Sioux scouts also were brought along.

  Bloody Knife, a half-Arikara, half-Sioux, was a favorite. The impudent scout’s refusal to kowtow to the General had endeared him to Custer, who listed him as a guide with the Quartermaster Department so that he would be paid more than the other enlisted Arikaras.3 He had led a curious life. Raised in his father’s Hunkpapa village for the first sixteen years of his life, he had faced a good deal of ridicule for his Arikara blood — much of it from another youth, a burly boy named Gall. When he was sixteen, Bloody Knife’s mother took her children and returned to her Arikara village on the Missouri River. As a grown man, Bloody Knife decided to visit his father’s people. Upon reaching the Hunkpapa encampment, he was stripped and humiliated. Not long after that, Sioux raiders killed, scalped, and mutilated two of his brothers.

  A few years later, Bloody Knife found an opportunity for revenge. Gall, now a tall, beefy warrior and the leader of his own small tiospaye (band), had become a scourge of the upper Missouri army forts, though he would sometimes camp near one for trading purposes, and even sign the occasional treaty. In November 1865, Bloody Knife led an army detachment to Gall’s camp and identified him. When the Hunkpapa resisted arrest, the soldiers bayoneted him and left him for dead. But the hardy warrior somehow survived to continue his troublemaking ways.4

  Bloody Knife had worked for the army as a courier, mail carrier, and enlisted Indian scout for more than a decade. In the past three years, he had become somewhat of a blood brother to Custer. He knew that Gall would probably be among the nontreaty Sioux they were after and was looking forward to finding the hostile camp.

  The detachment of Indian scouts was led by Second Lieutenant Charles Varnum, West Point class of 1872, who had impressed Custer with his performance in the Yellowstone skirmishes. The appointment was a plum for a young officer without a troop, since the scouts were constantly in advance of the column and he was sure to be in the thick of things.5 Varnum’s tall, homely classmate, Lieutenant George Wallace, had held that position on the Black Hills Expedition but would now serve as the regiment’s engineering officer, tabulating the mileage and keeping the official itinerary. Joining them would be “Lonesome” Charley Reynolds, the quiet guide whom the Arikaras called “Lucky Man” for his extraordinary hunting ability.6 Reynolds was the best white scout in Dakota Territory. He had earned Custer’s respect with his excellent work on the Yellowstone and Black Hills expeditions, and earlier that spring he had returned from a long trek into hostile territory to report to Custer that the Lakotas under Sitting Bull “were gathering in force.”7 They had been preparing for war by collecting Winchester repeating rifles and plenty of ammunition. The normally imperturbable Reynolds was convinced that the Lakotas were deadly serious in their intent to fight.8

  As each Indian tribe needed a translator, two excellent ones were hired. The blue-eyed, fair-haired Frederic Gerard, a former trader once married to an Arikara woman, had been the Fort Lincoln interpreter for that tribe since 1872. As a youth years before, he had worked as a printer’s devil in a St. Louis
newspaper office, and at one time he had served as a correspondent for the New York Herald.9 He had lived and worked in the upper Missouri area for almost thirty years, much of that time for fur companies around Fort Berthold, and Custer thought highly of him. “I consider his knowledge of Indians and the country west of the Missouri river invaluable,” Custer told Terry. “He is an educated man and I have never met his equal as an interpreter.”10 The two had something else in common: their disgust with the fraud perpetrated by crooked Indian agents. While at Berthold in 1868, Gerard had complained to Washington about the agent there cheating the Arikaras out of their annuities. The agent had caused Gerard to lose his position.11 His fortunes had declined since then — besides his interpreting duties, he sold butter and eggs to the Fort Lincoln soldiers — but he had somehow managed to send his three young half-breed daughters to a Benedictine school in St. Joseph, Minnesota, for a proper education.12

  Despite the blunt refusals of Terry and Sherman, Reno had still expected to go out in command of the regiment before Custer’s return. In anticipation, he had fired Gerard on May 6, telling the interpreter that he had to economize and could hire three teamsters at Gerard’s salary. Gerard thought the reason suspect and the termination personal. Custer immediately reinstated him the day after his return.13 Besides being a likable sort,14 Gerard was capable, knowledgeable, and brave. He was admired by the Arikaras for his part in helping defend them against a Yankton Sioux attack, when he had held out in his trading post alone for ten days. Their nickname for him, for the number of Sioux he had killed, was “Seven Yanktons.”15 During one bartering session with Sitting Bull years before, the two had argued vociferously and wrestled over some Iroquois shells. The Hunkpapa had raised his double-barreled rifle toward Gerard, but Gerard had managed to push the gun away and knock the firing caps off with his thumb. Sitting Bull had later voiced his respect for the trader, and the two did business again.16

  To handle the Sioux language, Custer had hired a tall, quiet black man named Isaiah Dorman, who had worked as an interpreter and courier for several years at Fort Rice. A former slave from New Orleans, Dorman had earned the respect of soldiers and civilians at the fort. He was married to a Dakota Sioux woman named Visible; they had no children. Not a young man, he signed on with the expedition because he loved the wild country and said he wished to see that western land once more before he died.17

  The main body of the Dakota column comprised all twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry, three infantry companies, and a battery of Gatling guns. Accompanying the column in various roles were Boston Custer, hired, for no valid reason, as a guide18 at $100 a month; Autie Reed and Dick Roberts, along for the fun of a summer expedition; Mark Kellogg, the sole newspaperman with the column, who had been more or less stuck with the Seventh since he had met Custer on the snowbound Northern Pacific train in March, his plans to return to the Black Hills put on hold when Bismarck Tribune publisher Clement Lounsberry had obtained permission from General Terry to send a correspondent;19 four or five doctors;20 and several teamsters overseeing the pack train.

  The reputation of the “Fighting Seventh” — “the best cavalry in Uncle Sam’s service,” as Custer had proudly described it to his good friend Lawrence Barrett21 — preceded it. In truth, however, its reputation was a hollow one. The Fighting Seventh had not fought anyone, much less Lakota Sioux, in three years. Their most recent action had consisted of two skirmishes on the Yellowstone in the summer of 1873. Four of the regiment’s companies had not participated in either of those fracases and had no combat experience in the previous seven years, save some chasing after the Ku Klux Klan and moonshiners. The other eight troops could boast of only five skirmishes with an Indian foe during the same period.22 Only about 172 men — 30 percent of the total — could claim to have fought Indians.23

  Outside of the two Yellowstone encounters, in which a total of five soldiers had been killed, the Fighting Seventh had fought only one large-scale contest. The Battle of the Washita had made the regiment’s name, but that had hardly been an epic contest, and few of those enlisted men were still around eight years later. Finally, there was the matter of recruits. The previous October, 150 new men had joined the regiment; 60 of these had served in the army previously. On May 1, barely two weeks before the departure date, 63 more had arrived at Fort Lincoln. The long, severe Dakota winter of 1875–76 had afforded few opportunities for cavalry training. Reno had ordered four to six weeks’ worth of steady drill earlier that spring, but that instruction had been elementary, mostly company and battalion drill, with very little squad drill and little if any work in horsemanship or marksmanship.24

  It certainly did not help matters that recruits received only the most basic instruction during their short time at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, the cavalry’s recruit depot. Training in marksmanship, horsemanship, skirmishing — any practical lessons that Indian fighting might actually involve — was virtually nonexistent. Formal military training of recruits consisted mostly of elementary drill aimed at making a grand appearance at dress parade.25 After a week or two at most of close order drill and fatigue duty, they were sent directly to their units, presumably to learn the finer points of soldiering from company officers and noncommissioned officers. “Recruits are sent to the cavalry companies with practically no knowledge whatever of their duties,” complained Major Lewis Merrill.26 And with only fifteen rounds a month per soldier allotted for target practice (just increased from ten rounds the previous September),27 which was highly irregular at best, few of the many recruits from the big cities in the East gained any kind of proficiency with a rifle or pistol. The Indians were aware of this. Remembering a fight against a group of plainsmen whose marksmanship was impressive, one Hunkpapa Lakota said, “The warriors knew that they were not fighting soldiers, because soldiers were poor shots.”28

  Individual combat training — learning how to fight a foe in close quarters — was virtually unknown. Horsemanship took the bulk of the enlisted men — mostly city boys — a long time to master. “Many of the men had never been on a horse,” recalled one Lieutenant a few years later. Another complained that “the men are never drilled at firing on horseback, and the consequence is that the horses are as unused to fighting as the men themselves, and become unruly in action.”29 With horses new to the cavalry and untrained in battle (either to gunfire in general or against Indians in particular) — the case with half the Seventh’s mounts — the regiment’s effectiveness was further decreased.30

  It should come as no surprise, then, that the fighting ability of the Seventh, and of virtually every cavalry unit on the plains, was questionable. Any tactics discussed at the officer level reflected the military’s preoccupation with a European-style war involving massed forces battling in a straightforward manner. This “conventional” warfare was dramatically different from the guerrilla warfare conducted by the Plains Indians. The recent Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 occupied the minds of the army’s higher-ranking officers, as several of them had traveled to Europe to observe a few battles. (Upon his return, Sheridan had told Armstrong, “Custer, you with that Third Division could have captured King William six times over.”)31 Indian warfare was not taken seriously enough to inspire any kind of accepted, widespread doctrine. Commanders on the plains learned as they went along, and such knowledge was rarely shared with anyone outside their units. Frontier duty was viewed in the East as a kind of police action, with little chance of glory and an excellent chance of either disappointment when the Indians couldn’t be caught or embarrassment when they were.

  As mediocre as the soldiers’ training and fighting ability was the caliber of their character. One general officer said, “The enlisted personnel consisted largely of the dregs from the Union and Confederate Armies and of recent immigrants from Europe.” A cavalryman remembered that “criminals and semi-criminals made up a large part” of the one hundred men in his group of enlistees, and he described them as “the toughest sort of city rowdies.”32 One
Seventh Cavalry Private, who at the age of sixteen had abandoned his six months’ pregnant wife to enlist, claimed that “some of the hardest cases that I ever came across are at present serving in this company.”33 Another described his comrades in arms as “vile and wicked . . . a set of thieves and gamblers yea murderers.”34 This was not the army of a dozen years earlier, composed of motivated young volunteers from all walks of life and almost all levels of society, and all dedicated to “the cause.” The country was still reeling from the Panic of 1873, and a third of the workforce could not find a job. Many of the unemployed joined the army solely to get fed, housed, and paid $13 a month. The military’s desertion rate was so high — about 30 percent for much of the 1870s — and the reenlistment rate so low that recruiters largely ignored mental and physical requirements. If a man could mount a horse and carry a gun, he was good enough for the cavalry. Age mattered little. One man two weeks shy of his forty-first birthday enlisted at the “official age” of eighteen.35 One older trooper, John Armstrong, had returned home from the Civil War to find his wife living with another man and in a family way, and had immediately reenlisted.

  Foreigners made up almost half of the Seventh’s ranks, with the United Kingdom and Germany contributing the lion’s share. Most of the Germans, ironically, had fled to the United States to avoid conscription into the Prussian army. Some of these foreign-born men became excellent soldiers. Many joined to survive while they learned their new country’s language. The Scottish-born John Forbes was using an assumed name, John Hiley, and keeping secret his noble birth. He had got into some trouble in his native country but had just received a letter from his mother telling him the problem would soon be settled and he could return. His five-year hitch would be up in January.36

  There were some active young men of good character who had joined the army for the sake of adventure or for some other reason. Here and there in the ranks was a schoolteacher, a lawyer, or a trained artisan such as a stonecutter or watchmaker. But the position most frequently listed under “Previous Occupation” was laborer, which usually meant an unskilled, unlettered ruffian from a big city in the East. The overall caliber of the Army’s enlisted ranks had deteriorated noticeably since the end of the Civil War. In the Seventh Cavalry alone, more than 10 percent of the men had enlisted under an alias.