A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  As the command made its way upstream, the body of newspaperman Mark Kellogg was found near the river, about three-quarters of a mile away from Custer. Save for a missing scalp and ear, he was untouched, probably dying so far from the main action and so early in the battle that he was forgotten and undiscovered when the mutilation and plunder began.47

  The uneven ground made progress slow, and hard on the wounded. After dark the march became even more difficult. About midnight the command went into camp, having made only four miles or so. Most of the next day was spent fashioning a better method of carrying the wounded. Horse and mule litters built of lodgepoles were finally devised and worked fine. Early in the morning of the 30th, the steamer was sighted.

  The men on the Far West already had an idea of the calamity. Three days earlier, about eleven o’clock in the morning of the 27th, the young Crow scout Curly had appeared on the shore near the boat, wearing a red Sioux blanket.48 After boarding the steamer, he “gave way to the most violent demonstrations of grief.”49 The men around him looked on uncomprehendingly, for there was no interpreter aboard, nor anyone who could speak Crow. Someone thought to give him a pencil, and he dropped flat on the deck and began drawing a crude map — a small circle surrounded by a larger one. Between the two, he began making many small dots and repeating “Sioux! Sioux!” in a voice full of despair. When he had almost filled the space with dots, he began filling in the smaller circle with other dots, saying, “Absaroka! Absaroka!” Captain Grant Marsh had heard another Crow Indian refer to soldiers with that word (although it was much better known as the Crows’ name for their people), and when Curly leaped to his feet and began imitating someone getting shot, it gradually became clear to his audience what he meant.50 One skeptical officer thought to send Curly back to Custer with a dispatch bearing the location of the Far West. No amount of persuasion could convince the young Crow, and he refused to leave the boat. It was not until two scouts from Terry rode up in the evening of the next day that the news was confirmed.

  Marsh and his crew prepared the vessel for the wounded, clearing space for a hospital and spreading eighteen inches of fresh grass on the deck, then covering that with a tarpaulin to create a massive mattress. A place was found for another passenger in the stern, between the rudders. Comanche was escorted aboard by Korn and several Seventh troopers, who were regarding him with reverence. As Korn led Keogh’s mount across the gangplank, tears coursed down his cheeks and he said, “This is all that is left of Custer.” The regiment’s veterinarian surgeon, who had remained on board, extracted the several bullets and arrowheads and dressed the horse’s wounds.51

  Just after dawn, General Terry asked Marsh to report to his cabin. Terry told Marsh to use all his skill and caution to take the injured men — “the most precious cargo a boat ever carried” — down the several dangerous rivers to Fort Lincoln.

  “Every soldier here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder,” Terry concluded. “A sad and terrible blunder.”52

  Marsh gave the order to cast off lines, then began to maneuver down the shallow river, frequently bouncing against the shore or the multitude of small islands and sandbars. For much of its distance, the Bighorn was little wider than a creek. About fifty miles downstream, it coursed into the much larger Yellowstone. There they tied up on the north side of the river, at Gibbon’s base camp, to off-load supplies and army scout Muggins Taylor, who would ride west 175 miles to Fort Ellis to spread the news.

  Terry and his troops arrived two days later, in the evening of July 2. The job of ferrying them across the river was finished the next morning, and the Far West started downriver. The badly injured White Swan was left with his Crow tribesmen, and fourteen of the injured men had recovered sufficiently to remain at the camp, leaving thirty-nine badly wounded troopers aboard. (One Corporal had died the previous night and was buried ashore.) Seven hundred miles away, down the Yellowstone to the Missouri, and down that river, lay Bismarck and Fort Lincoln. Marsh’s orders were to reach them in the shortest possible time.

  On board, with Captain Edward Smith, Terry’s adjutant, was a bagful of letters from members of the expedition and a telegram to General Sheridan. On June 27, Terry had written two telegrams to Chicago in which he had related the results of the battle in factual, nonjudgmental terms. Muggins Taylor had taken them west with him. When Terry arrived at the supply camp on the Yellowstone on July 2, he wrote another telegram to Sheridan. The tone of this report was different. It began: “I think I owe it to myself to put you more fully in possession of the late operations.” In the lengthy missive that followed, Terry went to great lengths to point out Custer’s negligence and outright insubordination. The former lawyer used skillfully chosen language to suggest a different plan than that actually agreed upon — one in which Gibbon “would be able to cooperate with him [Custer] in attacking any Indians that might be found on that stream.” The movements proposed for Gibbon’s column “were carried out to the letter,” he wrote, “and had the attack been deferred until it was up I cannot doubt that we should have been successful.” He went on to list Custer’s mistakes: his decision to veer from the proposed route, his refusal to scout Tullock’s Creek.

  I do not tell you this to cast any reflection upon Custer. For whatever errors he may have commited [sic] he has paid the penalty and you cannot regret his loss more than I do, but I feel our plan must have been successful had it been carried out, and I desire you to know the facts. . . .

  I send in another dispatch a copy of my written orders to Custer, but these were supplemented by the distinct understanding that Gibbon could get to the Little Big Horn before the evening of the 26th.53

  The age-old process of assigning and evading blame had officially begun.

  IV

  AFTERMATH

  EIGHTEEN

  “All the World Has Gone”

  Long Hair has never returned,

  So his woman is crying, crying.

  Looking over here, she cries.

  LAKOTA KILL SONG

  Another trooper died soon after the Far West left the base camp on July 3. The next day, Captain Grant Marsh docked at the supply depot at the mouth of the Powder River — where 150 troopers without mounts, band members, and other Seventh Cavalry members had remained — and the body was taken ashore to be buried. Marsh delivered the news of the disaster — intimations of it had been passed on by Varnum’s Arikara scouts, who had already rendezvoused there, per Custer’s instructions — and relayed Terry’s orders to move the depot to the new camp upstream. At Fort Buford, where the Yellowstone flowed into the broader Missouri, they put off a wounded Arikara scout, Goose, and took on wood. They made one more stop for wood at Fort Stevenson, then continued on a straight run down the Missouri to Bismarck. The boat’s flag was lowered to half-mast, and black streamers adorned the pilothouse.1

  At 11:00 p.m. on July 5, Marsh docked his boat at the Bismarck landing. He had made an astonishing 710 miles in 54 hours — a time never bettered before or since by any steamer anywhere on the Missouri or its tributaries. The paddle wheeler’s constant whistle woke the town, and the news of its arrival and of the dark fate of the men of the Seventh quickly spread. Soon Bismarck’s citizens were on the streets, and groups of men remained out and about until daylight discussing the disaster.2

  Clement Lounsberry, the editor of the Bismarck Tribune, and a telegraph operator named J. M. Carnahan were quickly found and awakened. Captain Marsh, Dr. Porter, and others from the boat went with them to the telegraph office near the Northern Pacific freight office. The single wire was split at Fargo and was not available until morning; they spent the night sorting out Captain Smith’s suitcase full of relevant field messages, newspaper dispatches, and Terry’s official reports, which Lounsberry used to write his story. When the wire opened up in the morning, Carnahan began sending as fast as his fingers could tap.3 Eventually, Lounsberry’s article was transmitted — a complete account of 15,000 words, the last message of t
he day sent by the weary operator twenty-two hours after he had begun.4 It cost the receiving party, James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, $3,000, but that was a small price to pay for one of the biggest scoops in American newspaper history. (The Herald posthumously anointed Mark Kellogg their “special correspondent.” Some time later, Bennett sent $2,000 to the dead newspaperman’s two daughters.)5

  Somehow, Lounsberry also found time to compose a story on the battle for his own Bismarck Tribune. The single-sheet extra came out the next morning. The oversized single-word headline, followed by ten subheads, read: MASSACRED.

  Two hours after midnight, Marsh returned to his boat and cast off for Fort Lincoln, across the river four miles downstream.6 After he docked there, the wounded and one more trooper who had expired the previous afternoon7 were helped off and carried on stretchers up the hill to the hospital. Captain Smith walked over to Officers Row to deliver the dispatch and further news of the catastrophe to the post’s commanding officer, Captain William McCaskey. The Captain briefed his stunned subordinates and asked the post surgeon, Dr. J. V. D. Middleton, and his adjutant, Lieutenant C. L. Gurley, to accompany him to the Custer quarters next door. It was just before 7:00 a.m.

  SINCE THEIR HUSBANDS’ departure seven weeks earlier, Libbie Custer and the officers’ wives at Fort Lincoln had passed the time worrying, supporting one another, and surviving the occasional false alarm of an Indian attack. But when word had come ten days earlier8 that a large Indian force had checked Crook at the Rosebud and that he had been forced to retreat from the plan of operations, they began to be filled with dread. Arikara scouts had been sent west to Terry with the news, but everyone knew the trip would take a week or more. The women went to great lengths to bolster one another’s spirits, gathering at the Custer home on Sunday, June 25, to sing hymns. Then, a few days later, there had been rumors and whispers among the friendly Indians at the fort of a great battle. Foreboding filled the air.

  In the early hours of July 6, there was a knock at the back door of the Custer house, then footsteps that awoke Libbie. She put on a dressing gown and met Maria Adams, her housemaid, at her bedroom door. (Maria’s sister Mary had accompanied the expedition as the General’s cook and had just returned on the Far West.)9 It was Lieutenant Gurley who had knocked, and he asked that Libbie, Maggie Calhoun, and Emma Reed come to the parlor. As Gurley walked down the hall to the front door to let Captain McCaskey and the doctor in, Libbie called out to him, asking the reason for such an early visit. He gave no answer.

  In the parlor, the three men waited until all three women had gathered. McCaskey had been left in charge of Fort Lincoln when the Dakota column had left in May. He had served throughout the Civil War and seen action in twenty-eight engagements. He would retire a Major General in 1907, after commanding troops in two of the major battles of the Spanish-American War. But the hardest duty he would ever perform involved these three young women of the Custer family.10 McCaskey told them the news about the expedition, and they wept with inconsolable grief.

  In the slight chill of a Dakota summer’s dawn, Libbie asked for a shoulder wrap, then walked outside with the men to help with the painful task of telling the many other widows that their husbands would not return.11 She felt it her duty. The Far West’s whistle had awakened many in the fort, and men, women, and children were now running down to the dock for news of their loved ones.12

  As McCaskey left the house, an uncomprehending Maggie Calhoun ran after him, crying out. She had lost three brothers, a nephew, and her husband. There was no consolation in the answer to her question: “Is there no message for me?”13

  THE NEW YORK HERALD correspondent had found William Sherman at the Transcontinental, one of the two large temporary hotels erected near the entrance to the Centennial Exhibition. The sixth of July was a hot day in Philadelphia, and the commanding General of the army sat in an easy chair sans boots and coat, fanning himself by a window.

  They were speaking of Custer and the stories that were starting to make their way east from their origin 2,000 miles away in the territories. Sherman had not received official news of a battle, let alone a disaster, and was skeptical.

  “It seems almost too terrible to be entirely true,” he said. “It must be exaggerated. I cannot believe that Custer and his command would be swept away. I don’t think there were enough Indians there to do it like that.”

  He went on to give the newspaperman the latest official information, which for the most part consisted of Terry’s dispatch of June 21, in which he had outlined the plan of action. There had been no word since then — at least nothing through military channels.

  There had, Sherman knew, been a few unofficial stories. When Muggins Taylor had headed north to the Yellowstone and then west to civilization, or what passed for it in Montana Territory — Fort Ellis and nearby Bozeman — he had barely eluded Sioux pursuers before chancing on the Far West at the mouth of the Little Bighorn. Taylor had remained on board for three days, until June 31, when he had embarked on a marathon ride west.14 When he had reached Bozeman on July 3, the story of Custer’s defeat — or at least its rough outline — had been relayed to other settlements. That same day in Bozeman, and the next day in Helena, the local papers had issued special editions containing the general facts of the battle. These stories had been quickly telegraphed east, and the Associated Press had subsequently distributed a version to the papers along the eastern seaboard.15

  The War Department in Washington and Sheridan’s headquarters in Chicago had expressed skepticism over the initial reports. Sherman and Sheridan, both in Philadelphia for the Centennial’s Fourth of July festivities, had individually dismissed them also.

  Now, as Sherman explained to the Herald correspondent how an official dispatch would wend its way east from Fort Ellis, there was a knock at the door. It was a telegram from Sheridan at the downtown Continental Hotel, and it read:16

  Custer had a fight with Indians and was killed. Terry’s detailed report has not been received. I will send you Terry’s dispatch which is confidential. Terry with the wounded are at the mouth of the Big horn all right.17

  There could be no more denying it. Apparently, the story was true.

  THE OFFICIAL CONFIRMATION of the disaster hit the Centennial — and the rest of the country — like a thunderbolt. As the young nation celebrated its one hundredth birthday and the many technological advances made during its brief existence, the news that its best-known Indian fighter and 262 of his men, troopers of the glorious “Fighting Seventh,” had been annihilated by a small tribe of savages one step away from the Stone Age was greeted with grief, outrage, and even disbelief by some. Not since Lincoln’s assassination eleven years earlier had such a shocking story gripped the country.

  In the next few days, as more was learned through accounts both official and unofficial, a more detailed picture emerged — clearer, perhaps, but in several ways inaccurate.

  Terry’s first official report, affixing no blame for the defeat, inexplicably sat on a desk in the Bozeman telegraph office for days, then was finally mailed to Chicago and made public on July 9. His second dispatch, of July 2, which blamed Custer for failing to adhere to Terry’s “plan,” was received on July 6 by Sherman, who read it and handed it to a courier for delivery to the Secretary of War in Washington. However, the courier happened to be a journalist, and most of the confidential report was quickly reprinted in newspapers throughout the country the next day.18 Other reports of the battle — official dispatches and personal accounts and letters from officers of the expedition, such as Reno’s official report, which included a listing of Custer’s fatal mistakes — supported Terry’s grand strategy. Custer was quickly painted as the scapegoat — a brave one, but foolish. The consensus was that a rash, glory-hunting Custer, smarting under Grant’s opprobrium, had pushed his men and horses on exhausting forced marches — “he marched day and night without rest,” reported one newspaper19 — and attacked the village before Gibbon’s column had a ch
ance to reach the site in time to participate in a combined, and planned, strike. The facts of the matter — that the village’s exact location was unknown, thus precluding any coordinated attack by two widely separated columns in a virtually uncharted region, and that the actual plan from the start had called for Custer to find and attack an unknown number of Indians, with the Montana column to act as a blocking force, if possible — were lost in the frenzy of lurid headlines splashed across the nation’s newspapers. Prebattle reports and stories that discussed the selection of Custer’s regiment as the attacking force gave way to the army’s new company line.

  The general opinion among army officers echoed the newspapers: Custer had been “rashly imprudent,” and his defeat brought about by “foolish pride.”20 Sheridan issued a near-noncommittal public statement in which he termed the loss of Custer and his men “an unnecessary sacrifice, due to misapprehension and a superabundance of courage.”21 He initially accepted Terry’s version of events, writing Sherman on July 7 that “Terry’s column was sufficiently strong to have handled the Indians, if Custer had waited for the junction.”22 (Both men would later alter their opinions and temper their remarks after learning more of the facts.)23 President Grant gave no official response to the disaster and would not speak publicly of it until two months later, but when he did, he blamed Custer for the debacle. In a newspaper interview, Grant concluded, “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary — wholly unnecessary”24 — an uncharitable and unsurprising utterance, given his treatment of Custer in May. Grant also mentioned that Custer had marched his weary men eighty-three miles in twenty-four hours, a grievous exaggeration, but one that would only contribute to the perception of Custer’s rashness and glory seeking.