A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  The regiment’s noncommissioned officers, fortunately, were over-whelmingly Civil War veterans, chiefly of Irish or German descent. But many of these grizzled veterans were absent on leave or detached service, weakening the ranks even further. One of the most experienced was Sergeant John Ryan, a young man who had joined the Union army at sixteen and had served with the Seventh almost since its inception, nearly a full decade. Ryan, who was often referred to as the handsomest man in the regiment, had witnessed the horrors of Antietam and was not impressed with the mettle of the enlisted men around him. “Individually the Indians were better soldiers than our troops, for every Indian was a perfect rider and a good soldier,” he wrote later. “The regular army was composed mostly of green recruits and so unreliable that even Custer did not dare to fight them mounted on some occasions and had to turn his men into mounted infantry.”37 That Ryan was there at all was a surprise to some. He had just that spring been court-martialed at Fort Rice for harsh discipline and busted to Private. The acting post commander, Captain Benteen, could have mitigated the punishment but did not, likely due to bad blood between the two. Ryan’s company CO, Captain Thomas French, had gotten Ryan reinstated by Major Reno just days before the regiment’s departure.38

  The officer corps could boast a bit more Indian-fighting experience than the enlisted men. Half of the twenty-eight officers had taken part in an actual battle with Indians. Ten had fought at the Washita eight years before, and four more had engaged the Sioux in the two skirmishes on the Yellowstone. Several of the Second Lieutenants were recent graduates of West Point: the diminutive, irrepressible Benny Hodgson, a favorite with everyone, who had been thinking about resigning — his father wanted to set him up in the sperm oil business in his hometown of Philadelphia39 — until his good friend Lieutenant Varnum persuaded him to stick around for one last campaign; Lieutenant James “Jack” Sturgis, the unpretentious only son of the regiment’s commander and a member of the most recent West Point graduating class; Lieutenant Luther Hare, the big, unassuming Texan who was as fine a horseman as General Custer; and Lieutenant Henry Harrington, who had been on leave with his wife and two small children in the East but had returned early to Fort Lincoln to ride out with his company.

  These young West Pointers and others were well versed in drill and the essential elements of a gentleman’s education but woefully inexperienced in campaigning and leading men into battle. Despite their shortcomings, many graduates of the Point had acquired an air of superiority regarding those officers who had not walked those hallowed halls: the “rankers,” enlisted men who, through a demonstration of leadership or bravery, or simple diligence, had made officer grade during the war and had passed the tests for a regular army commission afterward; Civil War volunteer officers who had gained a regular army commission; and men appointed to the officer corps from civilian life, the result of superior test scores or influential patrons. Needless to say, this lack of respect was usually repaid in kind, and serious problems of cooperation, communication, and distrust sometimes developed between these two classes.

  Despite the fact that the regiment’s officers were generally of a better class than the enlisted men, they had their own moral and professional failings. The “Benzine Boards” — appointed to weed out the officer corps and named after a popular cleaning solvent — and attrition had purged most of the worst cases since the Civil War, but the army still had its share of “soldiers of fortune, drunkards, gamblers, and libertines,” as one historian put it.40 A variety of vices and weaknesses, among them sexual misconduct and abuse, theft, corruption, and racial prejudice, also damaged the leadership and cohesiveness of the regiment. Alcohol was the most prevalent problem. Many of the old-line officers who had fought in the Civil War had lost their illusions and ambitions in the decade since and now relieved their boredom and apathy the same way they had endured the horrors of the war — by turning to the bottle. Almost all of the officers imbibed, and many of them did so heavily. It was a drinking man’s army, and a drinking man’s regiment, despite the fact that its field commander abstained.

  Other factors further impinged on performance. Fifteen of the regiment’s officers were absent, several of its officers were assigned to companies they were unfamiliar with, and it had been two years since any substantial number of the twelve troops had served together as a body. As a matter of fact, all twelve had never been together before. Custer, desperately short several officers, had even allowed the temporary transfer in of a young infantry Lieutenant only a week before leaving. Second Lieutenant John Crittenden had flunked out of West Point — a disappointment, since he was from a long line of distinguished officers — but with the help of his father, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Crittenden, he had secured a commission only seven months before. He had lost an eye in a hunting accident in October and now wore a glass one. He badly wanted some field experience, and his father had persuaded Custer to replace an officer on medical leave with his son. Young Crittenden was possessed of a delicate physique — his West Point classmates had called him “their baby” and relieved him of many of the harsher duties of cadet life.41 But he was determined to make a career of the military and planned to enter artillery school after the campaign.42 The Seventh’s chain of command was shaky at best.

  But with Custer at its head, supported by a mostly veteran officer corps and a solid group of noncoms, the Seventh managed to muster up an impressive degree of esprit de corps. “You felt like you were somebody when you were on a good horse, with a carbine dangling from its small leather ring socket on your McClellan saddle and a Colt army revolver strapped on your hip,” observed Charles Windolph, a Private in Benteen’s company. “You were a cavalryman of the Seventh Regiment. You were part of a proud outfit that had a fighting reputation.”43 The Seventh might have had its problems — problems endemic to virtually every regiment in the frontier army — but, like the rest of this glorified police force, it usually got the job done. More than anything, that was due to its field commander, to whom the regiment owed its identity and fame. Despite the grumbling in the ranks of both enlisted men and officers, Custer’s reputation as a beau sabreur could still inspire. When he boasted that the Seventh could handle all of the Indians in the West, as he frequently did, most of them believed him, and with good reason. No disciplined force of soldiers larger than an eighty-man squadron — specifically, the one led by Captain William Fetterman in 1866 at Fort Phil Kearny that had been lured away from the fort and annihilated by some 1,500 warriors — had ever been defeated in battle by Plains Indians. Ever.

  There were several reasons for this. To white thinking, “acceptable losses” were part of war and the cost of gaining an objective. Indians thought otherwise. The Sioux and their allies usually avoided any confrontation in which they did not possess an advantage in numbers — which sometimes coincided with the strength of their “medicine” on any particular day. “They will not venture an engagement unless they hold all the winning cards,” noted an observant officer. “To risk as little as possible — such is their fundamental maxim.”44 The seminomadic life of the Plains Indian also dictated against protracted, costly stands. Since they had no permanent villages, they were not required to protect them unless completely surprised, as when Custer had surprised the Cheyenne camp on the Washita. Warriors were not required to follow leaders, who did not “command” in the sense whites understood it. Instead, they followed a man because of his reputation, which was based on personal skills and previous success in battle, charisma, and medicine. Good leaders planned their raids well, came home with more battle honors, sustained fewer casualties, and thus instilled confidence, the best medicine of all.

  The Sioux and Cheyennes relied primarily on two basic strategies: the lightning strike and the ambush. In the Plains Indians’ warrior culture, a man’s status almost completely relied on honors gained in combat against either enemy tribes or wasichus. Once a group of warriors engaged in battle, every man’s primary focus was on achieving as much pe
rsonal glory as possible, and group strategy other than the most basic was almost nonexistent. Complicating this — at least to the ignorant white observer — was the Plains Indians’ honors system of bravery. The highest honor involved disarming an enemy without hurting him, and killing ranked low on the bravery scale. The reasoning was based on degree of risk. Shooting someone with a rifle at long range involved none, at least to the Indians’ way of thinking. Approaching close enough to insult the enemy by disarming or at least touching him with a hand or a stick held in the hand — counting coup — was a high honor. A warrior kept track of his coups, each of which required a witness for verification, and boasted of his deeds for years to come.45 Whites often viewed the Plains Indians’ style of fighting as cowardly. The warriors felt the same about the wasichus’.

  The Indians also seemed incapable of driving home attacks in any sustained way, but there was a good reason for that. Battles against other tribes and the bluecoats had resulted in a low male-to-female ratio in the Indian population. A war of attrition had become a fundamental concept of the U.S. Army, but the Indians never seriously considered the thought of repeated attacks against an entrenched enemy until superior numbers won the day. When confronted with any force of regular army troops that held their ground, the Indians usually gave up after making one or two attempts at breaking their ranks. Then, in the words of one historian, “Plains Indians made a lot of noise, raised a lot of dust, but in the end fled or fired a few annoying, but generally harmless, long-range shots.”46 For example, seven months after the Fetterman Massacre, on August 2, 1867, in the vicinity of the same post, thirty soldiers and two citizen woodcutters had forted up behind fourteen wagon boxes placed in a semicircle and held off a small army of Sioux and Cheyennes led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and the Cheyenne chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf — at least five hundred warriors47 — for six hours. The whites had lost only four men. The day before what became known as the Wagon Box Fight, some seventy-five miles up the Bozeman Trail as many as eight hundred warriors48 had attacked a hay-mowing detail working in a meadow near Fort C. F. Smith. Ensconced behind a rudimentary corral of stacked logs, the twenty-one soldiers and nine civilians had fought off their attackers over several hours. Finally, there was the celebrated Battle of Beecher’s Island in September 1868, when Custer’s good friend Major George Forsyth and his handpicked company of fifty “first class hardy frontiersmen” had gone looking for hostile Indians and found plenty. Caught off-guard by six hundred or so Oglalas and Cheyennes, they had dug in on a small, brush-covered spit of sand in the middle of the dry Arikara Fork of the Cheyenne River. The veteran Indian fighters withstood several fierce frontal charges and then a weeklong siege that ended with a rescue by the buffalo soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry. Six of Forsyth’s men (most notably, Lieutenant Fred Beecher, the nephew of the famed New York clergyman Henry Ward Beecher) were killed and fifteen wounded, but the battle was celebrated for years afterward as a triumph of grit and bravery over vastly superior numbers. These and other lesser-known engagements supported the belief that a well-armed and disciplined command could hold its own against an Indian force many times its size.49

  The specific aim of the Dakota column — indeed, of the entire campaign — entailed far more than merely avoiding defeat. The hostiles were supposed to be chastised. The army was to punish them and force them onto their reservations. The three-pronged strategy had worked before; there was no reason to think it could not work again. And Custer, who had led the successful strike force at the Washita and then scoured the southern plains securing peace through war and treaty, could surely do the same on the northern plains.

  Many of the men of the Seventh had written home, often sharing thoughts they could not within their companies. Irish-born Sergeant William Cashan of L Company told his cousin, “If I will be lookey anoughf to get this thrue I will be a feerefull warrier Sutting Bulls scalp mus be mine if posible.” A Scot in the same troop, Charles Scott, wrote his sister with details of the expedition: “We air going to what is cauld the Big Horn River . . . and will Be Gone 3 months.”50 Another Private in L, a farm boy named Ami Cheever, sent his mother $100 and told her, “I thought I would come home spring but changed my notions. I guess I will put it off awhile longer.”51 In a letter to his sister, a Private from Indiana named Marion Horn waxed dramatic about Sitting Bull and then offered a surprisingly accurate reason for it all: “I expect they will have a time to capture him for he is a notorious heathen scoundrel and has been commiting depridation along this river for years and I hope they will scalp every one of them. . . . All the Indians along the River are all for war[;] there is one of the greatest Indian war expected this year that has been for years and it is all on account of them being frauded out of there rations and the miners going in the Hill.”52 And a blacksmith in I Company, Henry Bailey, summed up the feelings of many of the soldiers in a letter to his sister: “We expect to go out after Sitting Bull and his cut throats, and if old Custer gets after him he will give him the fits for all the boys are spoiling for a fight.”53

  Some of the officers, however, seem to have foreseen that “old Custer” might not have things his own way. Captain Myles Keogh had suffered a variety of ailments over the previous year, and he had recently applied for one month’s leave to begin October 1, provided the Indians were rounded up by then. Now he wrote a longtime female friend whose family the melancholy Irishman had grown close to: “I have requested to be packed up and shipped to Auburn in case I am killed, and I desire to be buried there. God bless you all, remember if I should die — you may believe that I love you and every member of your family — it was a second home to me.”54

  GENERAL GEORGE CROOK’S Wyoming column had not been the first in the field that year. That honor belonged to the battalion of the elderly Major James “Grasshopper Jim” Brisbin, so nicknamed for his interest in and frequent discourse on the agricultural potential of his station in western Montana. Despite suffering from rheumatism so severe that he could not ride a horse or even walk without crutches, Brisbin had led a two-hundred-man cavalry force and a contingent of fifty-four Crow scouts from Fort Ellis to rescue a group of besieged traders and wolfers at Fort Pease, a recently constructed structure on the north bank of the Yellowstone, a few miles below the mouth of the Bighorn. Built in anticipation of increased river traffic and trade, the crude collection of log huts connected by a log palisade was no military post, and the angry Sioux began a series of attacks on the enterprise, killing six men and wounding eight. The Sioux had disappeared by the time Brisbin arrived, and he returned with nineteen citizens on March 17. That same day, more than a hundred miles to the southeast, Crook drew first blood.

  Crook was tall, taciturn, and thoughtful, and a bit of an eccentric. He braided his long whiskers into two forks, and he liked to wear civilian clothes, sometimes donning moccasins and overalls, other times a canvas hunting suit and pith helmet. On this campaign, he wore a Private’s uniform and overcoat with a high-crowned black hat. Like Custer, he neither smoked, drank, nor swore, and he often neglected to share his plans with his subalterns. Also like Custer, he had been a lackadaisical student. As a West Point classmate of Sheridan’s, his immediate superior, he had ranked even lower than Custer, thirty-eighth in a class of forty-three. Both were publicity hounds and avid hunters with a passion for taxidermy, and both liked to ride far ahead of their columns, hunting for game — though unlike Custer, Crook preferred riding a mule to a horse while on campaign. He had developed meticulous and superior mule-packing techniques that greatly contributed to his success. One aide close to him, Lieutenant John G. Bourke, claimed that Crook “made the study of pack-trains the great study of his life.”55 His men liked serving under him and enjoyed his quirks.

  Crook had risen to Major General during the Civil War despite a mixed record of achievement, and after the war and the usual reduction to regular army rank, his success in hunting down and fighting small bands of Apaches in Ariz
ona had garnered him a coveted generalship and a transfer to the command of the Department of the Platte. He had fought none of the horse tribes of the northern plains, but he was eager to begin.

  Crook launched his expedition from Fort Fetterman, Wyoming Territory, on March 1, the day after a heavy snowstorm. His force was relatively small: two companies of infantry and ten troops of cavalry under fifty-five-year-old Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds, a man with some severe health problems. A longtime army veteran with service in both the Mexican War and the Civil War, Reynolds had been on the frontier for only a year.56 But no one in the army was better at preparing an expedition than Crook, and his men were equipped with extra-heavy clothing and bedding. Crook hoped to surprise the hostile camps before spring, when warm weather saw the exodus of young warriors from the agencies.

  A week out of Fetterman, to increase his mobility, Crook sent the wagon train and infantry back with all of the tenting and bedding save for two blankets a man. The weather had been bitterly cold, but in a few days it plunged to twenty-three degrees below zero and remained there or lower for a week. Soldiers had to break up bacon with an ax before heating it, and often the ax broke first. The stripped-down column continued north.

  On March 16, scouts reported two Sioux hunters nearby, a likely indication of a camp. Crook split his command, giving Reynolds a strike force of almost four hundred men and remaining behind with four companies and the pack train. Reynolds pushed forward on the hunters’ trail through falling snow, guided by the astonishing tracking abilities of Frank “the Grabber” Grouard, a half-Polynesian, half-white scout who had recently returned from spending eight years with the Sioux, most of them as an adopted brother of Sitting Bull and later as a friend of Crazy Horse. The next morning at sunrise, they found an unsuspecting camp of about sixty-five lodges nestled on the west bank of the Powder River. The temperature was forty or fifty degrees below zero, and a thick fog covered the river bottoms.