Though information from his scouts led Reynolds to believe that the camp was Crazy Horse’s, it was actually a Cheyenne band of fifty lodges led by Old Bear, who planned to lead his band into its agency come spring, and about fifteen lodges of He Dog’s Oglalas with some Minneconjou traders.57 They were working their way slowly toward the agencies and were planning to visit Crazy Horse’s camp downriver in the next few days.58 Reynolds divided his command into three squadrons and attacked at midmorning. The soldiers quickly routed the Cheyennes from their tepees and secured the pony herd, but the village’s 150 warriors regrouped and counterattacked, and Reynolds panicked and botched the withdrawal. After they torched the camp, the exhausted troopers hastily left at noon with most of the horses to rendezvous with Crook. The Cheyennes followed the force deep into the night and eventually recovered most of their mounts and seventy cavalry steeds after Reynolds neglected to post a guard over the herd and refused to send a force in pursuit.59
Reynolds returned almost devoid of results, with only a small portion of the Indian ponies. He had destroyed much of the village, true, but that included buffalo robes and furs and large stores of meat that could have been used by Crook’s hungry and freezing men.60 Only one Sioux and one Cheyenne had been killed. It was barely a tactical victory and in no way a strategic one, and the starving Wyoming column returned to Fort Fetterman low on supplies and morale. Three dead troopers had been abandoned in the village, and, worse, one wounded man had been left behind to the mercy of its inhabitants.61 Crook’s expedition and the high expectations accompanying it were finished. Sheridan’s hopes of a successful winter campaign, hitting the smaller villages before the spring brought hundreds more warriors from the agencies, were dashed.
Crook was “terribly incensed at the blunders made by the imbecility of Reynolds,” according to one of the correspondents with the column,62 and immediately filed charges against him. Reynolds then did the same to two of his subordinates. After an acrimonious court-martial, Reynolds was convicted of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline,” though there was some disagreement as to what his exact orders had been. He was suspended from rank and command for one year, and his subordinates in the battle were convicted of similar offenses.
Crook didn’t take the field again until more than two months later, heading north on the old Bozeman Trail on May 29 with a force of almost 1,100 men and no Indian scouts. His attempt at Red Cloud Agency to procure Lakotas for that purpose had been singularly unsuccessful. Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall — a tall, handsome Virginian with a full gray mustache, bright blue eyes, and a Rebel saber scar at the apex of his forehead63 — commanded fifteen companies of cavalry, and five companies of infantry were attached.64 A week out of Fetterman, couriers delivered a dispatch from Sheridan informing Crook “that all able-bodied male Indians had left the Red Cloud Agency.”65 Crook knew that the annual spring departure for the nontreaty camps was in full force, exacerbated by problems with the delivery of agency ration supplies, and he was eager to find the village before it was reinforced by the agency warriors. John Finerty, a Chicago Times reporter with the column, wrote that “Crook was bristling for a fight.”66
GENERAL TERRY HAD planned for the expedition to leave on Monday, May 15, but a huge downpour on Sunday postponed the departure until May 17. The day before, a telling scene occurred in the Custer home. Custer brought his wife into the living room, where Terry was. Custer shut the door and turned to the tall, thin man with the dark beard and soft eyes.
“General Terry,” he said, “a man usually means what he says when he brings his wife to listen to his statements. I want to say that reports are circulating that I do not want to go out to the campaign under you. But I want you to know that I do want to go and serve under you, not only that I value you as a soldier, but as a friend and a man.”67
That night Custer visited with the Arikara scouts. He recognized several from previous campaigns — some of them had accompanied the Seventh on the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 and the Black Hills Expedition of 1874. To Bloody Knife, still his favorite, Custer presented a medal he had procured in Washington and a black handkerchief spotted with blue stars. He told the scouts that this would be his last campaign and emphasized the importance of a victory over the Sioux.68
When reveille sounded at 4:00 a.m. the next day, the men of the Dakota column woke to a cold, foggy dawn. By six o’clock, after a quick breakfast of bacon, hardtack, and coffee, the wagons, more than 150 in all, were packed and started on the trail leading from the river to the prairie above the post. Three companies of infantry, about 140 soldiers, and an artillery detachment of four guns and 34 men followed as an escort.69
Terry and Custer had decided that a formidable display of bravado might allay the anxiety of the family members left behind, so the Seventh marched through the mist toward the fort, like most frontier posts an unstockaded one. By 7:00 a.m., they were marching around the parade ground in company column of fours, led by Custer and his regimental staff, accompanied by Libbie, Maggie Calhoun, and Emma Reed.70 The band, mounted on its white horses, came next, playing “Garry-Owen,” the regiment’s unofficial battle tune. The forty Arikara and four Sioux scouts (most of them married to Arikara women),71 led by the prematurely balding Lieutenant Varnum — “Peaked Face,” they called him, for his high forehead and large, sharp nose, accentuated by his thick mustache — sang their melancholy war songs and beat on small drums; as they passed their quarters, the women, old men, and children joined in. Small boys banging on tin pans and waving flags made of handkerchiefs marched alongside in a column of their own. When the companies passed Suds Row — the name given to the married enlisted men’s quarters, due to their wives’ work as laundresses — women and children stood outside and sobbed for their husbands and fathers. Libbie Custer recalled the scene years later: “Mothers, with streaming eyes, held their little ones out at arm’s length for one last look at the departing father. . . . The grief of these women was audible and was accompanied by despondent gestures.”72
Just outside the fort, the column was halted, and married officers were permitted to leave ranks to say good-bye to their families. Some loved ones stayed inside, tear-filled eyes watching from behind curtains. When the men rejoined their companies, the two-mile-long column marched westward over the hill behind the fort to the strains of another regimental favorite, “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which was almost drowned out by the many wagons, horses, and mules and the bawling of the cattle herd accompanying the expedition.
If ever I get off the trail and the Indians don’t find me,
I’ll make my way straight back to the girl I left behind me
That sweet little girl, that true little girl,
The girl I left behind me.
Bringing up the rear were almost eighty fresh recruits without mounts, sentenced to trudge along behind their comrades until horses were obtained for them.
Near the front of the column, Custer turned frequently to admire his men, calling Libbie’s attention to their grand appearance. Each company rode horses of the same color, making the regiment even more distinctive. As the column mounted the prairie hill, Libbie, on Custer’s horse Dandy, looked back toward the fort. The early-morning mist hanging over the Missouri River floodplain broke, and she saw a mirage appear “which took up about half of the line of cavalry, and thenceforth for a little distance it marched, equally plain to the sight on the earth and in the sky.”73 To anyone aware of the regiment’s fate, the sight might have seemed a premonition: the Seventh Cavalry’s troopers floating above the ground, halfway to heaven.
II
ADVANCE
SEVEN
“The Hide and Seek for Sitting Bull”
The Game of War is carried on very much on the principle of “Blindman’s Buff.” The Indians can always, in summer, avoid a single column, or select their own time and place for meeting it.
COLONEL JOHN GIBBON
Major Marcus
Reno, West Point class of 1857, was not a happy man as the Dakota column made its way westward over the rolling prairie. He had commanded Fort Lincoln as its acting regimental CO since the previous November, covering Custer’s lengthy absences that winter and spring. Custer, upon his return, had rescinded a few of Reno’s orders and also rearranged the Seventh’s regimental assignments, creating two wings consisting of two three-company battalions each. Reno would lead the right wing, Captain Benteen the left.
Custer had directed Reno to get the regiment in shape for “prolonged service in the field” against the hostile Indians, and he had had two months to do it. By all accounts he had not done a satisfactory job. Before previous campaigns, Custer had implemented an intensive regimen of morning and afternoon skirmish drill and target practice,1 and he liked to take the regiment out for a two-week march to shake the rust off. Reno had begun daily hour-long target practice on March 62 (trimmed to a half hour on April 3)3 and instituted daily morning drill, but he had neglected extended marches and other matters designed to increase the regiment’s efficiency.4 These actions, and his clear disloyalty in strenuously attempting to obtain command of the regiment during Custer’s troubles in Washington, increased the coolness between the two.
Reno’s dislike of Custer was shared, of course, by Benteen. But the two men were not friendly with each other either. One night years before, in the officers’ club room of a post trader’s store, Benteen had slapped the Major in the face in front of a group of officers, called him a son of a bitch, and dared Reno to challenge him to a duel, an offer Reno had declined.5 That episode had most likely been fueled by alcohol. Even before his wife’s death in 1874, Reno had been a fairly heavy drinker, but since then his intake had increased. Most of the regiment’s officers did not like him, an attitude that was shared by many of the enlisted men.6 Some of the officers purportedly asked Custer to keep Reno away from any kind of command.7
Reno had met and courted his wife, Mary Hannah Ross, in the fall of 1862 while stationed in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to purchase cavalry mounts.8 Back then he had been young and somewhat dashing in appearance, and he had swept the pretty, impressionable eighteen-year-old off her feet. The two had been married the next fall. Besides an attractive wife, Reno had gained valuable political connections, for Mary’s family was one of the most prominent in town. Over the next decade, Reno’s social ineptitude and introverted manner had been offset by his wife’s outgoing personality,9 but her death in 1874 had clouded his situation. Mary Reno’s health had been fragile since the difficult birth of their son, Ross, in 1864, and she had died at the age of thirty while Reno was in command of a Seventh Cavalry squadron protecting the Northern Boundary Survey Expedition. His request for leave to return to Harrisburg had been refused by General Terry. More than two months had passed before he had arrived in Pennsylvania, and his in-laws had found it difficult to understand the reasons for his absence. Reno had taken his son on a long trip to Europe and then arranged for his wife’s cousin to become Ross’s legal guardian. He had not returned to active duty at Fort Lincoln until November 1875.
Reno’s parents had died when he was young, and he did not stay in close contact with his siblings. The sudden loss of his wife, the estrangement of his in-laws, and the surrender to her family of his only son all contributed to an increase in his drinking and a darkening of his already dour personality. He had nothing left except his army career, and his actions in the spring of 1876 suggest a desperation to improve his standing in any way he could. Reno’s Indian-fighting experience was almost nil. He had chased various depredatory bands of Shoshones in Oregon Territory before the war but had come into actual contact with only two warriors, whom he had personally captured with the help of a Sergeant and promptly hanged.10 He had also spent several weeks chasing but not finding belligerent Sioux tribes in 1870. Perhaps if the current expedition encountered Sitting Bull’s camp near the Little Missouri, where Terry suspected it to be, there would be an opportunity for action and recognition.
BUT THE INDIANS were not on the Little Missouri, the first of several waterways west of Lincoln that flowed north into the Yellowstone. The Sioux always camped near one of these streams, but it would take several weeks, and much scouting, to discover which of them Sitting Bull had chosen this summer.
At the column’s first campsite out of Fort Lincoln, Custer directed the paymaster to tender the men their wages. Terry and Custer had decided that these troopers would receive their long-overdue pay11 away from the saloons and fleshpots of Bismarck’s Fourth Street or the ramshackle collection of seedier gin mills and “hog ranches” of Whiskey Point, situated across the river from Lincoln with the express purpose of emptying the eager enlisted men’s wallets. The risk of hangovers, desertions, and absences due to alcohol was too high. (More than one soldier had drowned trying to swim across the Missouri after “Taps” was sounded.) The men received their pay and immediately stepped over to the table of the post sutler, John Smith, who had accompanied the paymaster specifically to settle debts.
Two weeks of marching took the column westward over the flat, grassy Dakota prairie toward the Little Missouri River. On the march, the four battalions of the Seventh constituted the points of an elongated diamond, between which trudged the infantry, the long wagon train (which included the only woman with the expedition, Custer’s personal cook, a black woman named Mary Adams; both she and her sister Maria worked in the Custer household), and the horse and beef herds. Mail carriers and message couriers operated between Fort Lincoln and the column. The scouts roamed miles ahead in search of hostile Sioux and camped separately from the soldiers, who rarely saw them except to buy the game they had bagged that day.
Though this was enemy country, no sign of Indians was seen except for the warm embers of a few small campfires — until May 23, five days out. The General had been chasing an elk far ahead of the column, his usual place, when he came upon an abandoned campfire still burning. That evening at dusk, Indians were seen on a bluff three miles away, observing the expedition. Their tribal identity was unknown, but it was clear that the column’s progress was being monitored.
Ten days and almost 150 miles out of Lincoln, the Badlands of the Little Missouri, a harsh landscape of deep ravines and sparse vegetation, came into sight. After three days of tortuous maneuvering up and down the canyons, the expedition made camp on the east bank of the river, and orders were issued forbidding the discharge of any firearms: this was a favorite wintering area for the nontreaty bands.
Terry’s intelligence, garnered from reservation agents and Indian and white scouts, had been contradictory and distorted. Terry had written to Sheridan two days before the column’s departure:
Information from several sources seems to establish the fact that the Sioux are collected in camps on the Little Missouri between that and the Powder River. . . . It is represented that they have 1,500 lodges, are confident, and intend to make a stand. Should they do so, and should the three columns be able to act simultaneously, I should expect great success.12
The next day, Terry wired that he had “no doubt of the ability of my column to whip all the Sioux we can find”13 and suggested that Crook’s column be moved up as quickly as possible. Sheridan replied, somewhat peremptorily:
I will hurry up Crook, but you must rely on the ability of your own column for your best success. I believe it to be fully equal to all the Sioux which can be brought against it, and only hope that they will hold fast to meet it. . . . You know the impossibility of any large number of Indians keeping together as a hostile body for even one week.14
No one — not Sheridan, not Terry, and certainly not Custer — fretted over fighting the Sioux. To catch them before they scattered — that was the only worry, one voiced by everyone. During the harsh winter of 1875–76 at Fort Lincoln, while the troopers had huddled around their stoves, old-timers among them had told Indian-fighting stories. “About all there was to it,” remembered one recruit, “was to surprise an Indian villag
e, charge through it, shooting the Indians as they ran, and then divide the tanned buffalo robes and beaded moccasins before burning the lodges and destroying the supplies.”15
Terry’s belief in the proximity of the Sioux could not have been shared by many; even the enlisted men suspected that their trek would take them as far west as the Little Bighorn River.16 Custer’s own reconnaissance certainly didn’t dispel their suspicions. He led four troops on a scout twenty miles upriver and returned the same evening. Not only were there no Indians, but all signs indicated that no large number of Sioux had passed through the area in the past six months. Any hopes of a quick strike within reasonable distance from Lincoln were dashed. A disappointed Terry apprised Sheridan of the situation and moved on, angling southwestward toward the Powder River, the bounteous region that many of the hunting tribes considered home. “I did hope . . . that we should find the Indians here in force prepared to fight but now I fear that they have scattered and that I shall not be able to find them at all,” Terry wrote to his sisters.17 The command left the Badlands a few days later, after a sudden snowstorm on June 1. They reached the Powder River on June 7 without seeing a single hostile Indian.
A Terrible Glory Page 16
