A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  Custer wore a fringed buckskin jacket and pants — six or seven other officers and both of his brothers wore similar coats — and a dark blue, wide-collared “fireman’s shirt,” like most of the officers. His trademark red scarf encircled his throat, and a light gray, broad-brimmed hat sat atop his reddish blond hair, which had been cropped short before leaving Fort Lincoln. Many of his officers had followed suit and cut their hair short as well.18

  On a sling hooked to his horse, each enlisted man carried the regulation single-shot, breechloading, 1873 Springfield carbine — a solid weapon with superior range and stopping power, though its soft copper cartridges would occasionally heat up and jam upon firing and need to be pried loose. The Springfield had won out over many other American and foreign rifles, some of them repeaters, after extensive testing supervised by an army board that had included Marcus Reno and Alfred Terry. Army appropriations were at an all-time low, and a key factor in the Springfield’s favor was its low production cost. The standard-issue sidearm was the reliable Colt .45 pistol. Each man carried 100 rounds of carbine ammunition and 24 pistol cartridges with him — as many as 50 on a belt or in a pouch and the remainder in his saddlebags.19 (The pack train mules carried 26,000 more carbine rounds.) Some of the higher-ranking officers and a few Sergeants supplied their own, more expensive arms. Custer carried a Remington sporting rifle, a hunting knife in a beaded scabbard, and two stubby English revolvers on his belt. He thought the handle of the .45 was too short.20

  Despite the regiment’s ragged appearance and thin ranks, the somber thoughts and forebodings of the night before had seemingly been abandoned. The men were eager, excited, and confident. A fresh Indian trail lying not too far ahead would likely lead to a large village of hostiles. Within the next few days, the soldiers would probably engage these warriors in battle. Few of them had fought Indians before, but they were part of a proud regiment of the U.S. Army. They had been chosen to strike the enemy first, and the man who led them was one of the most celebrated Generals of the Civil War, a seasoned Indian fighter, and seemingly invincible. If Custer had been a Lakota warrior, his tribesmen following him into battle would have thought him bulletproof.

  The column proceeded at a leisurely pace down the western side of the clear-running Rosebud, only a few feet wide and a few inches deep, until the bluffs closed in and forced them to the left. A thick tangle of wild rosebushes covered the banks, and cottonwoods and willows lined the sides of the bluffs. The rain the night before had moistened the ground and made progress more difficult. The column marched some distance away from the Rosebud, occasionally traversing ravines and small tributaries and crossing the stream now and then. At four o’clock, twelve miles upstream on the east side of the river, Custer called a halt. The pack train was still giving fits, largely due to the several crossings, which caused the most trouble. The last of the mules straggled into camp around sunset.21

  The horses were tended to first, in a routine even the greenest recruit had memorized by now: loosen the saddle girth and remove the saddle; have a noncom inspect how wet the horse’s back was to decide if the blanket should be taken off or kept on; clean the saddle, bridle, and other equipment; sponge the horse’s eyes and wisp its head and mane; inspect and clean the hooves and shoes; feed, water, and groom the mount; and finally picket it in the area designated for his company. Only after all this could a trooper see to his own needs. Bed blankets and tent flies had been left behind, save for the officers’, so each man would wrap himself in his saddle blanket and overcoat (using his saddle as a pillow) after eating.22 Each company’s cook began to prepare the typical supper for a soldier in the field: hardtack, bacon, and coffee.23 (Mary Adams, Custer’s personal cook, had been left behind on the Far West. The danger to her of accompanying the General into battle was deemed too great.)

  After his command had settled in after supper, Custer issued a silent officers’ call at his bivouac. Squatting around the General’s small tent shelter, the officers talked in low tones. Custer began. First on his mind was the pack train. Unhappy with its performance, he told Lieutenant Mathey to oversee the 175 mules and the 70 troopers and 6 civilian packers assigned to it. He discussed a few other details, emphasizing caution and vigilance in camp and on the march: the hostile Indians could be anywhere, a surprise attack was always a possibility, and their success depended on remaining undiscovered for as long as possible. Until further orders, there would be no trumpet calls except in emergencies.

  Then Custer’s briefing took an unusual turn.He told the group that he expected to meet at least a thousand hostile fighting men;24 with the extra warriors from the agencies, there might be as many as 1,500, but no more.25 Explaining his refusal of the Gatling gun detachment and the Second Cavalry battalion, he convolutedly reaffirmed his confidence in the Seventh’s ability to defeat any number of Indians they would find. If the hostiles could whip the Seventh, he said, they could defeat a much larger force. (Custer’s logic, of course, was founded on the belief that U.S. cavalrymen could not be beaten by an undisciplined force of Indians, no matter how big, but his knotty justification of the Seventh’s limits opened a door to the notion that failure might be possible.) He intended, he said, to follow the trail until they came upon the Indians, even if it took the regiment to the Indian agencies in Nebraska or on the Missouri River. That could mean being out longer than the time for which they were rationed, so troop officers were advised to husband their rations and the strength of their mules and horses. He also went to great lengths to emphasize his reliance on their judgment, discretion, and loyalty, and he stressed the importance of obeying orders without complaint — especially since some of his actions in the past had been criticized. Benteen, catching a drift, asked him who exactly he was accusing. Custer insisted that none of his remarks had been directed toward him.

  Custer did not tell his subordinates of the grand strategy devised by Terry. His officers, much less the enlisted men, knew little or nothing of the plan to meet the Montana column somewhere near the mouth of the Little Bighorn on the 26th. They were on the trail of the hostiles and ordered to follow them until they were found. That was all they were told26 — though some of the officers had surely gleaned some or all of the plan from fellow officers the evening before.

  Custer ended the conference by soliciting suggestions from any and all officers, even the most junior of Second Lieutenants, then or at any time in the future. This was a request Custer’s subordinates had never heard from him before. They were accustomed to his taciturn style — he usually issued orders tersely, without much explanation, and invited no debate, expecting his directives to be carried out without discussion. Now he seemed to be asking for help. The un-Custer-like tone — unsure, beseeching, even somewhat depressed — made an impression on all present. Whether this attitude was due to a legitimate or imagined slight or to the General’s appreciation of the magnitude of the mission and its potential effect on his career, no one knew.

  After synchronizing their watches — they operated on Chicago time, about an hour and a half later than local time, there being as yet no national system of time zones27 — the group broke up, with the officers scattering to their troops to attend to their duties. Ten of the officers gathered around Lieutenant Edgerly’s shelter tent and sang for about an hour. Lieutenant Calhoun told them that his wife had sent him a large cake, which was with the pack train. The day after the fight, he intended to send a piece around to each officer in the regiment.28

  Lieutenants McIntosh, Godfrey, and Wallace walked back to their bivouac. They were silent for a while, then Wallace said, “Godfrey, I believe General Custer is going to be killed.” The tall, gangly Wallace was known to be somewhat superstitious.

  “Why, Wallace, what makes you think so?” Godfrey asked.

  “Because I have never heard Custer talk in that way before.”

  Godfrey returned to his troop to brief his Sergeants, then walked to the herd to check on their security. At the bivouac of the India
n scouts, he saw Mitch Boyer, Bloody Knife, and some other Indians talking, some of it in sign language. He stood watching for several minutes, until Boyer turned to him.

  “Have you ever fought against these Sioux?” the half-breed guide asked.

  “Yes,” said Godfrey.

  “Well, how many do you expect to find?”

  “It is said we may find between one thousand and fifteen hundred.”

  “Well, do you think we can whip that many?”

  “Oh yes,” said Godfrey. “I guess so.”

  Boyer turned to the Indians and interpreted the conversation. Then he said, with a great deal of conviction, “Well, I can tell you we are going to have a damn big fight.”29

  Before he turned in, Charley Reynolds pulled out the small leather notebook a friend had given him three days before leaving Fort Lincoln. Though he could hardly bear down on the pencil because of his painful infection, he slowly wrote a few details of the day’s march, then ended with this: “The Indians seemed to be traveling leisurely along. Last camp found was probably 12 days old.”30 It would be the last entry Reynolds would make.

  THE NEXT DAY was warm and sunny. The column headed out at 5:00 a.m. up the quarter-mile-wide Rosebud Valley. The Crows rode ahead, the Arikaras on the flanks. Benteen had been assigned with three companies to follow up the pack train and assist its movement and to guard against a rear attack. But every time the column crossed the Rosebud, the untrained pack mules balked — and the stream was traversed several times that day.

  A few hours’ march brought them to a deserted village site. Custer was in the advance and called a halt. He summoned Varnum, overseeing his Indian scouts, and said, “Here’s where Reno made the mistake of his life. He had six troops of cavalry and rations enough for a number of days. He’d have made a name for himself if he’d pushed on after them.”31

  They came upon the remains of two more large campsites in the next twelve miles. At each, the pony droppings, lodge circles, and lodgepole trails were examined in an attempt to determine the size of the village and how recently it had been there. Many wickiups were still present. (Though they were likely shelters for single warriors from the agencies, some of the Seventh’s officers thought they were built for dogs.) At one point near the great bend of the river, George Herendeen showed Custer the place where he and 149 other Bozeman men prospecting and exploring up the Rosebud in the spring of 1874 had fought off five hundred or six hundred Sioux warriors.32 This was further proof to the Seventh’s commander that a well-organized force of whites would emerge victorious in a battle with three or four times as many Indians. After all, if a group of 150 civilians could accomplish so much, what was a disciplined army regiment four times its size capable of?

  After a long, hot day’s march, the command had made about thirty-three miles before going into camp at 4:30 p.m. along a plain on the east side of the Rosebud. Once again, the last of the pack mules got into camp near sunset, even though a halt had been called earlier specifically to allow them to catch up.

  Even more deserted camps were seen the next day, the 24th, another warm and clear day. The column was barely under way when Custer called Herendeen over to him. Custer told Herendeen that he thought it was time to send the frontiersman with Charley Reynolds to the head of Tullock’s Creek — the valley that Terry had wanted Custer to scout. But Herendeen told him it was too early and called to Mitch Boyer for confirmation.

  “Yes, further up on the Rosebud we come opposite a gap, and there we could cut across and strike Tullock’s in about fifteen minutes’ ride,” said the guide.

  “All right,” said Custer. “I could wait.”33

  Later that morning, in a large deserted camp, the scouts found a white man’s scalp hanging from the center pole of a Sun Dance lodge frame. The Arikaras examined the remains of the camp carefully and interpreted many signs there to mean that the Lakotas knew the enemy was coming and that they would triumph in battle. The Lakota medicine, they decided, was strong.34 At one point, while Custer was inspecting the area, his color Sergeant stuck the staff of his battle flag in the ground. When it fell down and pointed to the rear, the superstitious Lieutenant Wallace remarked that it boded ill for the General.35

  After a half hour at the Sun Dance camp, they rode on, in two parallel columns to reduce the thick, choking dust clouds stirred up by the horses. At one o’clock, a halt was called, and Custer summoned his chief of scouts. Varnum’s contingent had begun to discover signs of fresher trails that branched off the main one, and Custer wanted no trail overlooked. Herendeen and then Godfrey had just reported that a large path had gone up a branch stream leaving the valley about ten miles back. Varnum protested; besides the Arikaras and Crows, he had the half-breeds Billy Jackson and Billy Cross and interpreter Fred Gerard assisting, and he was confident of their thoroughness. His scouts could not have missed a trail. But Custer directed the weary lieutenant to take some Arikaras and investigate. He also assigned the young Second Lieutenant from Godfrey’s K Troop, Luther Hare, to assist Varnum with the scouts. Hare, a tall Texan recently graduated from the Point, was well liked by his men, and he came from a long line of soldiers; his father had fought for the Confederacy. Varnum left some Arikaras with Hare, grabbed a fresh horse, and headed downstream. During his absence, the command rested and ate dinner.

  The trail would turn out to be a detour that rejoined the main route a short while later. But while Varnum was gone, Custer sent the Crow scouts far ahead to investigate. They returned at four o’clock to report a fresh Indian campsite about twelve miles ahead, at the forks of the Rosebud where a creek joined the stream from the divide to the west. All signs indicated that the massive Indian camp was no more than thirty miles away.

  The march was resumed at five o’clock, Varnum taking the left front and Hare the right. The command rode through the remains of several more large campsites. Some of the fires were still smoldering,36 and the entire width of the valley was scarred from the thousands of trailing lodgepoles dragged along by the Indians. There were a great many of them not far ahead.

  Herendeen rode up to Custer, for the best route to Tullock’s Creek was coming up on the right. “General, here is where I leave you to go to the other command,” he said. Custer knew the deal: this was the agreed-upon juncture from which Terry was expecting Herendeen to return with the latest intelligence. (Herendeen also wanted to collect his $200.) But Custer just stared at him before looking away. The frontiersman said nothing and after a while fell back to the main column.37

  At 7:45 p.m., the Seventh bivouacked on the grassy west side of the Rosebud, two miles below the forks, after marching twenty-eight miles that day. Custer chose a spot particularly pleasant — a level plateau between the stream and a sheer bluff, surrounded by rosebushes in full bloom. Men, horses, and mules were weary, for the troopers had been almost constantly in the saddle and on the march for fifteen hours, in sapping heat and choking dust. After the horses were unsaddled, fed, and rubbed down, most of the men ate a meager supper and began spreading their blankets.38

  Custer still hadn’t grasped the meaning of the diverging trails the command had thus far encountered. The scouts knew and discussed it over supper: these paths were not diverging, but converging. The fresh side trails represented agency Indians finally joining the large camp. But Custer, along with virtually every other soldier on the expedition from Terry on down, seemed too obsessed with the hostiles scattering to conceive of anything else.

  The General had again sent the Crow scouts ahead, and at nine o’clock they rode into camp with momentous news: The trail turned west off the Rosebud along the other creek and crossed the divide toward the valley of the Little Bighorn. The trail was fresh enough to indicate that the hostiles were nearby and on the lower part of that stream, not farther up as Terry had supposed.

  Terry’s instructions had been clear, at least in one part of his orders: if the trail was found to turn away from the Rosebud, he wanted Custer to proceed southward to the h
eadwaters of the Tongue before turning west to the Little Bighorn to descend that stream. But the Indians were so close that detection of the Seventh was now much more likely. If the hostiles had not already discovered the column’s presence — the scouts had found several signs of Sioux, from distant signal fires to fresh horse tracks and footprints — hunting or scouting parties or other agency bands probably would. A mounted six-hundred-man force was hard to hide in this country, dust clouds or not. Besides, if Custer continued south toward the headwaters of the Tongue, at least another thirty miles, and then headed west and north, he would not reach the village until the 27th, or even later. Terry had hoped to be in the valley of the Little Bighorn on the 26th. What if the Indians were on the lower reaches of the river? And who knew where they would be by then? No, there was only one way the Seventh could be there on time.

  Custer had already disobeyed one of Terry’s directives by not scouting the upper reaches of nearby Tullock’s Creek or bothering to send Herendeen down it to Gibbon’s column. His next act of disobedience would be more significant. Terry’s orders had dictated that Custer “should conform to them unless you shall see sufficient reason for departing from them” — and here was the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to surprise a large village of hostiles, the object of the entire campaign. Ridicule had been heaped on commanders who had allowed Indians to escape, and some had been court-martialed — Reynolds on Powder River being only the most recent example. The hostile camp was likely a day’s march away. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry would follow their trail.