A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  WHEN CRAZY HORSE had decided to return to the reservation, Lame Deer had told him that he and his Minneconjous would not accompany him — they were going to hunt buffalo. The day after Crazy Horse surrendered, Miles hit Lame Deer’s camp of three hundred. After Lame Deer and thirteen other warriors were killed, Miles induced most of the rest to relinquish their arms. Some members of the band escaped into the hills, eventually making their way in to the agencies. With this, all of the hostiles on the northern Great Plains had been rounded up — except for one large group.

  Black Moon had led his fifty-two lodges across the Canadian border in December 1876. Four Horns, Gall, Crow King, and others had followed, until there were 3,000 Lakotas in Canada. In May 1877, after a miserable winter near Fort Peck, the trading post and agency sixty miles south of the border, Sitting Bull and a thousand hungry followers, most of them Hunkpapas with a few Minneconjous and Sans Arcs, joined the exiled Lakotas. Sitting Bull would remain in the Great Mother’s land for four years. Though the Canadian authorities allowed him to stay provided he remained peaceful and treated him with compassion, they refused to grant him his own reserve.

  The first year, buffalo were plentiful. But each summer his people saw fewer of them, and each winter the brutal Canadian blizzards weakened their bodies and their spirits. Various chiefs led their bands south to surrender to U.S. authorities and find a kind of peace on the reservation — Hump in the spring of 1877; Black Moon, Little Knife, Spotted Eagle, Rain in the Face, and Big Road in 1880; Crow King, Gall, and Low Dog in early 1881. In the spring of 1878, bolstered by the arrival of almost 250 lodges of Crazy Horse’s band after their leader’s death, Sitting Bull’s village comprised about 800 lodges and 5,000 people.80 Three years later, only a fraction of that number remained with him. His people were starving. For a man who loved women and little children as much as he did, that was enough to wilt his resolve. Although Sitting Bull had consistently resisted the unconditional surrender terms that would accompany his return to the United States and the Canadians had treated him well, he knew that they wanted him and his people to leave. On July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull led a destitute group of less than 200 followers, mostly old men, women, and children, and 14 gaunt ponies into Fort Buford. The next day, he formally surrendered. “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle,” he said.81

  The Cheyennes’ experience was similar. In late November 1876, after their village on the Powder River was overwhelmed by a force led by Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie, most of them, about nine hundred under Dull Knife and Little Wolf, rode into Camp Robinson to give up.82 And after a harsh winter of nearly constant pursuit by the army, including Miles’s victory in the Wolf Mountains, Two Moon and his band surrendered at Fort Keogh in the spring of 1877. Other Cheyennes journeyed south to join their southern brethren in Oklahoma.

  There were, however, some who had not surrendered. About 250 Sioux remained in Canada, most of them remnants of Inkpaduta’s band.83

  After Custer’s defeat, the wily old Wahpekute and his tattered band traveled with Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapas, eventually turning north toward Canada. Since the great battle he had lost yet another son to the wasichus: Tracking White Earth, one of his two younger twins.84 By September 1876, Inkpaduta and a Lakota chief named Long Dog left the main camp and made their way north to Fort Peck.85 There they attempted to trade booty from the Little Bighorn — including Dr. Lord’s surgical instruments — for food and ammunition.86 Most of the group remained in the Missouri River bottoms below the fort throughout the fall, sometimes begging for supplies.87 Before the end of the year, Inkpaduta led his tiospaye across the border into Canada. Eventually, he returned to the Oak Lake Indian Reserve in Manitoba, where he had lived before riding south to join Sitting Bull. There the instigator of the Spirit Lake Massacre, the scourge of the northern plains for twenty years, took up farming. He died in 1879, the only major Sioux chieftain never to make peace with, never to surrender to, and never to be captured by the United States government.88

  THE INDIANS were not the only ones dispossessed.

  After Libbie Custer had steeled herself to assist in breaking the news to the other widows of Fort Lincoln, she had helped minister to the wounded at the post hospital. Despite an amputation or two, all of the men would recover.89 Then she had returned to her house and slipped into despondency. She had lost not only her husband but several in-laws and many friends — three of the five companies stationed at the fort had been almost completely annihilated with the General. She shared her grief with Maggie Calhoun, whose losses were, if such things can be measured, even worse — a husband, three brothers, and a nephew. And while the wives of the enlisted men, as laundresses, had some rights in the army’s eyes, officers’ wives did not. Whatever sympathy might be felt for them personally, officially there was none. The deaths of their husbands ended their military status, and they were required to leave their residences as soon as possible; other officers and their families would be arriving soon to take their place. Friends worried for Maggie’s mental state.

  As General Miles made his way up the Missouri to reinforce Terry with his Fifth Infantry, he stopped at the fort to pay his respects to Libbie. He had admired Custer, and he and his wife had enjoyed the Custers’ company whenever possible. He found her in bad shape. “Mrs. Custer is not strong,” he wrote to his wife, “and I would not be surprised if she did not improve. She seemed so depressed and in such disrepair.”90 During religious services one Sunday at the Custer quarters (the post had no chapel or chaplain), Libbie fainted; it took almost an hour to revive her.91 Her brother-in-law David Reed arrived at Lincoln on July 13 to provide emotional support and help his sisters-in-law and daughter Emma with their leave-taking. Dick Roberts, Annie Yates’s brother and the young tentmate of Autie Reed who had stayed behind at the Powder River depot, also lent assistance. Along with her personal items, Libbie took only her bedroom set and a few other pieces of furniture with her. (After Libbie left Lincoln, eight officers moved into the Custers’ quarters, some of them sleeping on the drawing room floor in their field bedding.)92 The Northern Pacific, mindful of the work done on its part by Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, provided the women transport (other railroads along the way followed suit), and on July 30 they boarded a special car in Bismarck and headed east. The progress of the party, which included Libbie, Maggie Calhoun, Emma Reed, Nettie Smith, and Annie Yates and her three small children, was reported in the newspapers, and sympathetic crowds met them at the stations where they stopped. In Fargo, a reporter watching Libbie enter a hotel noticed that she had “so little strength left that she could scarcely reach the top of the stairway.”93 In Chicago, the widows were graciously received by Potter Palmer, the hotelier, whose resplendent Palmer House, on the corner of State and Monroe, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan, had been rebuilt bigger and better than ever after the great fire of 1871. (It was proudly billed as the world’s first fireproof hotel.) During their wait between trains, he allowed them the use of his private rooms, where they found an abundance of flowers sent by well-wishers.94

  Libbie and the others — all but Nettie Smith, who had continued on to upstate New York to her parents’ home — finally arrived in Monroe on August 4. They found the small town almost completely draped in black95 and ready to welcome them with open arms.

  The day the news of the debacle had reached Monroe, its leading citizens had been reluctant to deliver the news of the deaths of the four Custer men to Emmanuel and Maria Custer. A fifteen-year-old boy named James Barry was sent, and when he finally made Emmanuel understand that this message was not one of the many false reports of similar disasters he had received over the years, the old man’s grief was such that he literally tore his hair out by the roots.96 The mayor announced a public meeting that evening, and businesses closed early. As the news spread to every part of town, “all the bells began to toll — church bells, fire bells, every bell in town.”97

  By the time Li
bbie returned to Monroe, she had probably already decided on her life’s mission — to restore the luster to her Autie’s damaged reputation. She had become aware of the severe criticisms of her husband in the press — disobedience, rashness, selfishness — and had been shocked by them. But if she had ever had any qualms, newspaper stories such as O’Kelly’s and talks with Weir and other officers had bolstered her opinion of her husband’s innocence. Custer was not at fault for the disaster; therefore someone else must be. And Libbie had no doubts as to who the prime candidates were. Within a very short while, she would join forces with a man who shared her unstinting adulation of the General and would prove just as determined as she.

  NINETEEN

  The Lost Captain

  Sapphire skies and seas cerulean,

  Whiskered pirates fierce, Herculean,

  Isles of coral;

  Colored consorts of the pirates —

  Practices, a Christian eye rates

  Most immoral!

  These, and other tales entrancing

  Guide the summer hours, enhancing

  Joys of living;

  Stories that will chill and fright one —

  Tales that hypnotize, delight one,

  Pleasure giving.

  Whittaker, thou rare raconteur. . . .

  AL. W. CROWELL

  Captain Frederick Whittaker, songwriter, poet, editor, and dime novelist extraordinaire, had fought gallantly in the Civil War. He had joined the Union army as a Private and been brevetted an officer by war’s end. But he was no Captain.

  Whittaker was born in London in 1838 to a successful solicitor and his wife. Young Fred’s father, Henry, made the mistake of cosigning some financial papers for a nobleman, Lord Kensington; when his client defaulted, Henry fled England with his family to avoid debtors prison, first roaming through Europe and finally sailing for America in 1850. Two years later, he published a successful law reference volume that went into several editions. The Whittakers eventually settled in Brooklyn in 1858, where Henry built up a good law practice.1

  Fred was eleven when the family arrived in America, and his early schooling was limited to six months. His older brother, Henry, was also a lawyer by this time, and Fred’s father obtained a position for Fred as office boy in a New York law firm. The discipline didn’t take, and by the eve of the Civil War, young Whittaker was working in an architect’s office. A vision defect put an end to that career path, and when war broke out, he enlisted in the Sixth New York Cavalry. He served to the end, achieving the rank of Second Lieutenant after he was shot through the lung in the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864.2

  After the war, Whittaker pursued his true dream, one inherited perhaps from his father — writing. After working as a book salesman and schoolteacher, he began placing stories, songs, and poems in various publications. In 1870, with money inherited from English relatives, he bought a two-story cottage in Mount Vernon, Westchester County, just north of the Bronx. He also married a lovely schoolteacher named Elizabeth. A year later, he wrote the first of more than eighty dime novels, most of them for Beadle and Adams, the industry leader, and achieved a dubious fame as one of the best practitioners of that populist (and hugely popular) art, primarily stirring stories of adventure and romance in the old-fashioned sense aimed at boys of all ages.3 He also began writing for the independent and influential Army and Navy Journal, penning a cogent analysis informed by his personal experiences titled “Volunteer Cavalry: The Lessons of a Decade.” On the strength of that and other articles, he became an assistant editor at the weekly. As he continued to churn out dime novels such as The Death’s Head Rangers and The Corsair Prince, his flair for romance began to extend to his own life, with The Lost Captain soon transmuting into the lost Captaincy. Whittaker was no longer content with the lieutenancy the army had given him at war’s end. He adopted the self-conferred brevet rank of Captain, probably for the added prestige. No one, it seems, thought to question it.4

  Though he had served in the same cavalry division of the Army of the Potomac as Custer had, Whittaker had met the man only once — in the spring of 1876, when Custer had visited the offices of Sheldon and Company, publisher of Custer’s book My Life on the Plains and also the Galaxy magazine, where a series of Custer’s war memoirs was then appearing. The meeting made an impression. Soon after the news of Custer’s death reached the East, Whittaker wrote a fulsome eulogy for the fallen cavalryman, which the Galaxy published in September — the same month that the Army and Navy Journal ran his reverential poem “Custer’s Last Charge.” The article, though flagrantly admiring, did ascribe “impetuosity,” “rashness,” and “vanity” to the General, in addition to forced marches to his final battle. But the chief reason for the tragedy, Whittaker claimed, lay in the superior numbers of the enemy.5

  Sheldon and Company was clearly impressed with the article, for at the end of July, the company announced that it would soon issue a biography of Custer. It would be a lavish, subscription-only volume, for which agents were being canvassed,6 and

  the proceeds of which, after paying expenses, will be devoted to the benefit of Mrs. Custer. The work will be entrusted to Bvt. Capt. Frederick Whittaker, lately of the staff of the Journal. With a view to render this history as complete as possible, this gentleman requests that all who can furnish any information, personal anecdotes, etc., concerning Gen. Custer at any time in his career, will send the same to him, care of Sheldon and Co., 8 Murray Street, New York, promising to acknowledge the same with thanks, and use them in the memoir.7

  Subscription sales represented an aggressive and potentially more profitable bookselling method that had recently been embraced by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), whose book The Gilded Age was the first subscription novel. Subscription books were unavailable in bookstores and were instead sold in advance by thousands of traveling canvassers — book agents, as Whittaker had briefly been before turning to writing — who worked door-to-door calling on homes and businesses in large cities and tiny hamlets throughout the country. Subscription books were sold for two or more times the going rate for a comparable trade book (a book intended for the general public and sold in bookstores) and were usually larger, thicker, and filled with woodcuts and steel engravings to justify the price.8

  Whittaker took a leave of absence from the Army and Navy Journal and quickly began contacting potential sources. One of his first letters was to Libbie Custer, still in Monroe settling her husband’s affairs and caring for his aged parents, Emmanuel and Maria Custer. Libbie soon realized the positive effect such a book could have on Armstrong’s sullied reputation, and she agreed to assist him after they met.9 She lent him personal letters and put him in touch with several Monroe citizens, whom he contacted during a visit there. Annie Yates was enlisted in the cause and gave Whittaker original material of her own to use. Lydia Ann Reed, the General’s beloved half sister, lent Whittaker descriptive passages from Custer’s letters to her.10

  Using James O’Kelly’s September 21 story in the New York Herald as a guide, Whittaker also queried several of the Seventh Cavalry’s officers and others attached to Gibbon’s column. Lieutenant John Carland, the Sixth Infantry officer from Fort Lincoln who had remained on the Far West during the battle, responded to the writer’s inquiries about his good friend Custer.11 One of Reno’s subalterns showed Whittaker’s letter to the Major, prompting Reno to write to Whittaker with a defense of his actions in the battle, buttressing his version with the claim that he had nineteen years’ Indian-fighting experience under his belt.12 From this new material derived from these and other participants, and influenced by a certain persuasive widow, Whittaker’s perception of the battle changed significantly.13

  Though armed with Libbie’s approval, Whittaker received no answers to his letters sent to Captain Thomas Weir. It was not until late November, after the book was finished, that Whittaker finally tracked him down and found out why. Weir had arrived in New York City in October to begin his two-year detail at the Cavalry Recr
uiting Rendezvous in the Burton Mansion on Hudson Street and rented an apartment just down the street. Battle fatigue, the traumatic loss of so many close friends, the method of their destruction, the slander of Custer’s good name — any or all of these had increased his dissipation. When Whittaker met him, Weir was not in good shape. He was rapidly destroying himself with alcohol and spent most of his days in a state of depression and nervous exhaustion, holed up in his room when not at his office. He had not replied to Whittaker because he believed that any information from him would be perceived as personally biased, due to his public clash with Reno, and thus would hurt the cause.14 Even so, he had provided a few other newspapermen sworn to secrecy15 with a good deal of information about the battle — and more important, a more jaundiced view of certain individuals’ actions. Weir told Whittaker about his altercation with Reno on the bluffs, among other things, which only O’Kelly had hinted at in print previously.16 Whittaker badgered Weir to sign an affidavit of the facts of the battle, which Weir steadfastly refused to do, though he gave Whittaker the names of Edgerly and Varnum as two officers whose testimony would corroborate his.17 The writer soon wore out his welcome, though Whittaker told Libbie, “I feel no doubt that he will speak out when the fight begins.”18

  Whittaker somehow finished the massive manuscript by mid-November, and A Complete Life of General George A. Custer was published a few weeks later at the steep price of $4.25 — double the price of most new hardbacks. Its official publication date was December 9, just in time for the gift-giving season. Captain Thomas Weir died the same day, of what his doctor officially listed as “congestion of the brain,” with a secondary cause of “intemperance.” On October 15, in his final letter to Libbie Custer, he had told her that he considered it his life’s duty to vindicate the reputations of his friends who had perished in the battle. He had concluded with a promise to go to Monroe to see Libbie, Annie Yates, and Maggie Calhoun: “I know if we were all of us alone in the parlor, at night, the curtains all down and everybody else asleep, one or the other of you would make me tell you everything I know.”19 He never did.