A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  Nelson Miles was furious at the heavy loss of life and the reports of indiscriminate killing of women and children at Wounded Knee. He immediately relieved Forsyth from command and ordered an investigation into the affair.21 Nine days after the massacre, a court was convened. Not one enlisted man was called to the stand, and only two civilians (an interpreter and a priest) and two Lakotas (by deposition) were asked to testify. Each officer of the Seventh was asked if his troops had deliberately fired on women and children. To a man, they said that they had enjoined their men against shooting women and children, and they claimed that their men had made every effort to avoid firing on noncombatants. Not one of them had seen any instance of indiscriminate firing, they testified, though some of them hastened to add that it was difficult if not impossible to tell the warriors from the women. No one bothered to point out that the army had previously admitted that fewer than thirty warriors had survived the first assault, making this assertion questionable.22 Some officers mentioned acts of humanity on the part of their troopers.

  Their sworn testimony was contradicted by the carnage on the field — one eyewitness said that “it was a terrible and horrible sight to see women and children lie in groups dead”23 — and by Indian accounts and the reportage of the three newsmen present. “All orders and tactics were abandoned, the object being solely to kill Indians, regardless of age or sex,” wrote one reporter. “The battle was ended only when not a live Indian was in sight.”24 Another told the same story: “It was a war of extermination now with the troopers. . . . There was only one common impulse — to kill wherever an Indian could be seen,” including old men and women, mothers, and small children.25 Some 26 children under the age of thirteen were killed, 4 of them babies with crushed skulls.26 At least 172 Sioux died on the field, more than 60 of them women and children; many others expired from their wounds later. The final toll was most likely 200 or more.27 Burials were delayed by a blizzard that roared through the region on December 31. The next day, the stiff and frozen Minneconjou bodies were gathered and thrown into a mass grave by a contractor and his crew who were paid $2 per body. Many of the warriors were first stripped of their Ghost Shirts and much of their clothing by souvenir hunters.28

  After five days of testimony, the two officers of the court took the Seventh at its word. The January 13 opinion exonerated both Forsyth of any faulty disposition of his troops and the entire regiment of any indiscriminate killing of women and children, the latter “ascribed only to the fault of the Indians themselves and the force of unavoidable and unfortunate circumstances.”29 A report by Captain Frank D. Baldwin of Miles’s staff, charged to investigate the field of battle several days after the massacre, brought to light facts that contradicted Godfrey’s account. Baldwin reported that the dead women and children killed by Godfrey’s men all had distinct powder burns on them, indicating deliberate execution from point-blank range.30 Despite this evidence (which led to a further investigation into the Godfrey incident, in which he was exonerated) and a revised report by the two examining officers that called Forsyth’s deployment of his men into question, no action was taken. Years later, however, President Theodore Roosevelt held up Godfrey’s promotion to General in the belief that he had ordered or failed to prevent the atrocity.31

  Miles’s recommendation that Forsyth be punished were ignored. The army dismissed the matter as unfortunate but ultimately beneficial and complimented the Seventh on its conduct during the battle. The eastern newspaper coverage was one-sided — of all the major dailies, only the New York Herald suggested anything but a regrettable battle with some unavoidable civilian deaths — so there were few voices raised in opposition. To further support the view of an even battle rather than a massacre, the army awarded the Medal of Honor to eighteen men for their actions at Wounded Knee, and Forsyth was promoted to General just a few years later.

  Despite his high-handed ways, Miles continued to work to improve conditions on the Sioux reservations and succeeded to a certain extent. Some monetary compensation was arranged, and improvements were made regarding ration issues. But the old way of life for the Lakotas was gone forever, and they would never again fight the white man, or any of their ancestral Indian enemies, on a field of battle.

  MANY OF THE Seventh’s officers present at the Little Bighorn went on to long and successful military careers. Edward Godfrey finally made Brigadier General in 1907, a year and a half after Winfield Edgerly, his handsome Seventh Cavalry comrade and his junior on the army list. Luther Hare, the self-proclaimed “fighting son of a bitch from Texas,” beat them both there: he was appointed Brigadier General of volunteers in 1900 while serving in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He retired from the regular army as a Colonel, as did Charles Varnum and Edward “Bible Thumper” Mathey.

  Most of the regiment’s senior officers did not fare as well. Captains Thomas Weir and Thomas French, of course, died not long after the Little Bighorn. Frederick Benteen’s final years in the army were a disappointment. In 1883 he was promoted to Major in the Ninth Cavalry, one of the army’s two black cavalry regiments — a promotion he had refused in 1866, when he had joined the Seventh. In 1886 he was ordered to oversee the building of a fort in eastern Utah Territory, but he spent more time drinking heavily than making sure the construction went well. (His deteriorating health and accompanying chronic pain may have contributed to his increased alcohol consumption.) After several months, his superiors took notice.32 Benteen was court-martialed in January 1887 on six charges of drunkenness and one count of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” After three weeks, he was found guilty of three counts of drunkenness and the charge of conduct unbecoming. He was sentenced to dismissal from the service. President Grover Cleveland, reminded of Benteen’s long and honorable service, mitigated the sentence to a year’s suspension at half pay. A year later, he reentered active service, but after a few months he obtained a medical discharge for a variety of ailments, all of which were “incident to the service.”33 He officially retired in July 1888.

  Benteen lived another ten years, most of them comfortably in an Atlanta town house. In 1892 he was brevetted a Brigadier General for gallant and meritorious service at the Little Bighorn and Canyon Creek, during the Nez Perce War. Only one officer in the Seventh Cavalry wrote to congratulate him — a much younger man who had joined the regiment after the Little Bighorn.

  Publicly, he avoided interviews and questions about the battle, but privately he gave full vent to his feelings about Custer and his mismanagement of the affair. His dislike for his former commanding officer grew to intense hatred. “When the Colonel was lit,” remembered one frequent visitor to the Benteen home, “(he) never tired of going over his life in the army, and particularly his grudge against Custer. He sure was venomous.”34 “The Savior of the Seventh” died on June 22, 1898, of a stroke. His funeral was held three days later, on June 25 — twenty-two years to the day after his finest hour as a soldier.

  MARCUS RENO’S FALL was even more precipitous. His drinking increased after his wife died in 1874; it became virtually uncontrollable after the Little Bighorn. By the time of his official exoneration in 1879, his life and career were both speedily going downhill. Only a few months after returning to duty from his two-year suspension, ostracized by most of his fellow officers, he began racking up charges of drunkenness and dishonorable behavior. When he made the mistake of peeping into the window of Colonel Sturgis’s quarters one night and frightening his pretty young daughter half to death, his goose was cooked. Sturgis pressed charges, and Reno was found guilty on all counts and dishonorably discharged from the service in April 1880.

  Reno spent most of the remainder of his life in failed attempts at reinstatement. After more than five years of denials, he took a lowly job in the War Department’s Record and Pension Office in Washington, D.C. He had married again in the meantime — an attractive navy widow — but that relationship fizzled in 1887. (She had him arrested on charges of nonpayment of suppor
t a year and a half later.) Rumors spread in Harrisburg that he had attempted to commit suicide, prompting the local newspaper to write that “the Major’s actions are entirely due to drink.”35

  But it was not demon rum that would ultimately claim the Major. Reno had smoked heavily since his days at West Point, and he developed tongue cancer, which soon became quite painful. In March 1889, he entered a Washington, D.C., hospital for an operation on the growth. Nine days after it was removed, he developed pneumonia in both lungs and died within forty-eight hours, on the morning of March 30. As a result of a misunderstanding involving his wife’s family plot, the man who had commanded the initial attack on the great village on the Little Bighorn was buried in an unmarked grave in the nation’s capital.36

  RENO’S ACCUSER, FREDERICK Whittaker, died six weeks later. After the Reno court of inquiry, he had returned to his home in Mount Vernon and continued to write — dime novels, articles and stories for various publications, songs, and at least one musical comedy — often collaborating with his younger brother, Octave, a musician.37 With three daughters and a lovely wife, Whittaker seemed to have every reason to be happy. But he became increasingly irascible, and his passionate advocacy of movements such as spiritualism and Volapük (an invented universal language that quickly faded) eventually gained him a reputation, at least among some townspeople, as something of a crank.38

  On May 13, 1889, Whittaker spent the morning in town, then returned to his house at 11:00 a.m. He greeted his wife and ascended the staircase to his room. His wife heard a shot and ran up the stairs to find her husband near death. Apparently, his walking stick had become entangled in the banister seconds after he had pulled his .38-caliber revolver out of his pocket to put it down, causing him to shoot himself in the head. He expired thirty minutes later. Though the coroner quickly held an inquest, which determined the shooting to be accidental, rumors of suicide — perhaps prompted by an unpleasant business transaction and despondency — gained some legitimacy in the newspapers.39

  The New York Sun added an ironic twist in its story. After the Civil War, the reporter mistakenly wrote, Whittaker “subsequently enlisted under General Custer, and took part in the battle in which Custer was killed.”40 The English-born cavalryman would have been pleased at this posthumous claim of service at the Little Bighorn under the officer he so admired.

  JOHN BURKMAN, CUSTER’S striker and most loyal soldier, never got over the death of his idol — and the fact that he did not die with him. He obtained a disability discharge in 1879, worked for some years as a teamster, and eventually retired to Billings, Montana, sixty miles from the battlefield. He subsisted on a pension of $6 a month for almost thirty years, working odd jobs to make ends meet and living alone in a small shack. He never married. Forty-nine years after the battle, he shot himself to death. He was buried in the national cemetery at the battlefield, a stone’s throw from what had become known as Last Stand Hill and the mass grave of the troopers who had died with Custer.

  THOUGH ELIZABETH CUSTER traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, she never visited the valley of the Little Bighorn. After fifty-seven years of ceaselessly burnishing her husband’s legacy, she died in 1933, four days short of her ninety-first birthday, in her Park Avenue apartment in New York. A few years earlier, she had told a writer that her greatest disappointment was the absence of “a son to bear his honored name.”41 She was laid to rest beside her husband at West Point. Her grave, in the shadow of his obelisk, is marked by a simple gravestone with the words “Elizabeth Bacon, wife of George Armstrong Custer.”

  THE BATTLEFIELD WAS designated a national cemetery in 1879, partly to protect the graves of the hundreds of Seventh Cavalry troopers buried there. The site was officially named the Custer Battlefield National Monument in 1946 and, after much heated debate between traditionalists and Indian rights activists, was renamed the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991. As the nation’s outlying regions became laced with roads and railroad tracks, it was an increasingly popular tourist destination, particularly around the anniversary of the battle, June 25, and the week preceding. On the tenth anniversary of the battle, several white survivors, mostly officers, made the journey for a brief reunion. In the years that followed, that reunion became a tradition that blossomed into a weeklong celebration involving 40,000 people in 1926, when veterans of both sides met to set aside their hostilities and to affirm their friendship. Today nearly 400,000 people visit the remote battlefield annually.

  Over the years, visitors and employees have reported supernatural occurrences at the battlefield, from ghostly visits by Indian warriors and cavalry troopers to unexplained voices, cold spots, and other spectral phenomena. Some have postulated that the dead rise up occasionally to fight the battle over and over. The area’s Crow Indians, watching park rangers lock the gates at night, gave them the name “ghost herders.”

  After the tourists have gone, the ridges and ravines overlooking the river below are still and eerie. Today, if one stands there alone as the wind sighs through the buffalo grass, it is not hard to believe that the spirits of the men who died there — Lakotas, Cheyennes, Crows, Arikaras, troopers, officers, citizens, scouts — perform their own ghost dance: clasping hands in a circle, moving ever to the right, praying for a chance to walk the earth again in a brotherhood that reaches past race and religion and greed.

  Illustration

  George Armstrong Custer, “the Boy General of the Golden Lock.”

  Libbie Bacon Custer: intelligent, beautiful, and besotted with the Boy General.

  President Ulysses S. Grant, whose wrath Custer incurred when he testifi ed before a House committee about corruption in the Grant administration.

  Commanding General of the Army William T. Sherman.

  Gen. Philip Sheridan, Custer’s mentor.

  Maj. Marcus Reno, Custer’s second-incommand on the expedition.

  Capt. Frederick Benteen chafed at serving under Custer, whom he despised.

  Gen. Alfred Terry, commander of the expedition, would have preferred remaining in his comfortable offi ce in St. Paul.

  The sole newspaperman with the expedition, Mark Kellogg: “I go with Custer and will be at the death.” (Courtesy Sandy Barnard)

  The four Crow scouts who rode with Custer’s battalion (left to right): White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, Curly, Goes Ahead.

  Mitch Boyer, the halfbreed scout mentored by Jim Bridger, knew the Powder River country like the back of his hand.

  Capt. Tom Custer, wearing his two Medals of Honor.

  Boston, the youngest Custer brother, hired as a scout for no apparent reason.

  Just turned eighteen, Harry Armstrong “Autie” Reed rode with his three uncles to see the last big Indian battle.

  Frederic Gerard, Arikara interpreter, knew Sitting Bull only too well.

  Unflappable scout George Herendeen had fought the Sioux two years before.

  Custer’s favorite Indian scout, the Arikara Bloody Knife, had a personal score to settle with the Lakota Sioux.

  “Lonesome” Charley Reynolds, the soft-spoken scout and legendary hunter — and scion of a well-to-do family in the East.

  Pvt. John Burkman, Custer’s striker, with the general’s two favorite mounts, Dandy and Vic (for Victory).

  Lt. Charles Varnum was in charge of Custer’s Indian scouts, who called him “Peaked Face.”

  Lt. George Wallace, the regiment’s engineering offi cer. Custer’s last-minute decision saved his life.

  Lt. Luther Hare, the self-proclaimed “fighting son of a bitch from Texas.”

  Dr. Henry Porter, the only one of the three surgeons to survive, performed heroically on the hill.

  Lt. Edward Godfrey: his skillfully directed rearguard retreat of Company K probably saved the rest of the regiment.

  Lt. Donald McIntosh, the halfbreed officer who commanded Company C.

  The “Adonis of the Seventh,” Lt. James Calhoun married Custer’s younger sister, Mar
garet.

  Capt. Thomas Weir, a part of the “Custer clan” despite a rumored romance with Libbie.

  Capt. George Yates commanded Company F, known as the Band Box Troop for its sharp appearance.

  Lt. Algernon Smith commanded Company E, the Gray Horse Troop.

  Lt. William Cooke, Custer’s adjutant and close friend; the tall Canadian known for his elegant dundreary whiskers was the regiment’s fastest runner.

  Capt. Myles Keogh, Irish soldier of fortune and commander of Company I.

  Lt. James Sturgis, son of the regiment’s actual commander, Col. Samuel Sturgis, who was on detached service.

  Pvt. John Martin, the trumpeter who was sent to the rear with Custer’s last message.

  Sitting Bull, spiritual leader of the Plains Indians, had been a renowned warrior in his prime.

  Gall, the powerfully built Hunkpapa warrior who lost two wives and three children in the battle.

  Spotted Eagle, Sans Arc war chief.

  Low Dog, Oglala war chief.

  Crow King, Hunkpapa war chief.