A Terrible Glory
Page 46
Epigraph: William T. Sherman to John Sherman, September 25, 1868, quoted in Thorndike, The Sherman Letters, 289.
1. Quoted in Urwin, Custer Victorious, 268. (back to text)
2. Wing, History of Monroe County, Michigan, 318. (back to text)
3. Unless otherwise noted, this account of Custer’s upbringing is primarily based on Whittaker, A Complete Life of General George A. Custer; Ronsheim, The Life of General Custer; Merington, The Custer Story; Monaghan, Custer; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin; and Wert, Custer. (back to text)
4. Cincinnati Commercial story, reprinted in Big Horn Yellowstone Journal (Spring 1994, 3). (back to text)
5. Wing, 318. (back to text)
6. Wallace, Custer’s Ohio Boyhood, 20. (back to text)
7. Bulkley, “As a Classmate Saw Custer.” (back to text)
8. Quoted in Wert, 29. (back to text)
9. Wert, 34. This disease sometimes led to sterility, which might explain why Armstrong and Libbie had no children despite an active sex life. A classmate, Tully McCrea, also testified to his amorous inclinations; see Crary, Dear Belle, 214–15. (back to text)
10. Merington, The Custer Story, 9. (back to text)
11. Quoted in Wert, 30. (back to text)
12. Aimore, “U.S. Military Academy Civil War Sources and Statistics.” Also, in the letter referenced in note 14 below, Custer claimed that “thirty-seven resigned during the last week. My roommate who is a southerner and a secessionist intends to resign next Monday.” Custer no doubt was referring to all of the Point’s classes, not just his. (back to text)
13. Wert, 39. (back to text)
14. Custer to Lydia Ann Reed, April 27, 1861, cited in O’Neil, My Dear Sister, 14. (back to text)
15. Joseph Fought, quoted in Merington, The Custer Story, 58. (back to text)
16. Wert, 80, Gregory J. W. Urwin, “Custer: The Civil War Years,” in Hutton, The Custer Reader, 15. (back to text)
17. Jacob Greene, quoted in Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 392. (back to text)
18. Monaghan, 113, 116, 122. As Monaghan points out, one of Custer’s friends later said that Custer never purposely exaggerated; he just saw things bigger than other people. (back to text)
19. Custer’s letters to his family and friends around this time are suffused with contentment and satisfaction with the job of soldiering. Merington, The Custer Story, 53–54. (back to text)
20. Fought, quoted ibid., 60. (back to text)
21. There seems to be some disagreement on whether Kilpatrick ordered Custer’s command to charge or Custer decided himself. Gregory Urwin, in his thorough Custer Victorious, blames Custer for the decision and calls it the only incident during the war of true recklessness on his part. Both Jeffrey D. Wert in Custer and Edward G. Longacre in Custer and His Wolverines fault Kilpatrick for ordering Custer forward (though Longacre cites as his only source Wert). Wert’s impeccably researched biography gives the nod to this version. (back to text)
22. Merington, The Custer Story, 62. (back to text)
23. Pleasanton, quoted in Urwin, Custer Victorious, 278. (back to text)
24. Wert, 201. (back to text)
25. S. L. Gracey, quoted in Wert, 174. (back to text)
26. Urwin, Custer Victorious, 191. (back to text)
27. Landis, “Custer at Lacey Spring,” 57, 68. (back to text)
28. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 33. (back to text)
29. George A. Custer to Elizabeth B. Custer, April 11, 1865, quoted in Merington, The Custer Story, 162. (back to text)
30. Wengert, The Custer Despatches, 145. (back to text)
31. For an accurate and balanced account of Custer’s discipline measures, see Barnett, Touched by Fire, 65–75. (back to text)
32. Whittaker, A Complete Life of General George A. Custer, 344; Custer to President Andrew Johnson, August 11 and 13, 1866, Box 4, Folder 10, Kuhlman Collection. (back to text)
33. See Carroll, Camp Talk, for letters confirming Benteen’s randiness. (back to text)
34. Benteen to General U. S. Grant, August 20, 1866, in Catalogue: The Personal Collection of Dale C. Anderson, 62, 63. (back to text)
35. R. G. Cartwright, a good friend of H Company’s Sergeant Charles Windolph after he retired in Lead, South Dakota, wrote the following in his copy of Graham’s The Custer Myth, p. 201 (Cartwright Collection): “Mrs. Custer states that Benteen was drunk, tangled with his saber, fell down, saluted while prone and was ordered to his quarters. Instead went to Officer’s Club or canteen where he stated he: ‘Didn’t think he was going to like that pink whiskered S.O.B.’” While Libbie Custer in one of her books did write of a newly assigned officer whose introduction to her husband was identical to this, she also stated that the officer was soon transferred. But the alleged quote likely came from Windolph, who served under Benteen for several years, and sounds very much like a Benteenism. (back to text)
36. Edward Luce to Charles Kuhlman, January 16, 1939, Box 1, Kuhlman Collection. See also the section titled “A Matter of Drink” in Langellier et al., Myles Keogh, 128–29. (back to text)
37. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 102–3. (back to text)
38. Ibid., 98. (back to text)
39. For more on alcohol in the Old Army, see Barnett, Touched by Fire, 78–79. (back to text)
40. Even the military-heavy peace commission convened later in the year concluded, after two days of testimony, that the campaign had been unnecessary and disastrous and that it had been “organized and conducted on the basis of false information. Preceding the expedition there had been no major Indian disturbances in Kansas, but in the wake of Hancock’s campaign a general uprising occurred.” Mattingly, “The Great Plains Peace Commission of 1867,” 30. (back to text)
41. Merington, The Custer Story, 205. In January of that year, a group of forty men had deserted together in a single day, and in a two-week period in July, 156 men deserted from six companies of the Seventh. (back to text)
42. Halaas and Masich, Halfbreed, 222. Edmund Guerrier was the guide; he later admitted that he discouraged Custer from pursuing a hot trail and then led the column in the wrong direction, since he had friends in the Cheyenne camp. (back to text)
43. The officer was Captain Robert M. West, who disliked Custer intensely. Charges quoted in Wert, 262–63. (back to text)
44. Ibid., 261; Leckie, 97–103. (back to text)
45. G. A. Custer Court-Martial, 154, 152. (back to text)
46. Kennedy, On the Plains with Custer and Hancock, 128. (back to text)
47. Libbie Custer to Rebecca Richmond, September 1867, quoted in Merington, The Custer Story, 212. (back to text)
48. Monaghan, 303. (back to text)
49. Wert, 264; Minnie D. Millbrook, “The West Breaks In General Custer,” in Hutton, The Custer Reader, 148. (back to text)
50. Sandy Barnard, “Custer & Elliott: Comrades in Controversy,” 14th Annual Symposium, 19–20. (back to text)
51. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 258: “The appointment came about because the application of December 1865, despite repeated follow-ups, kept getting lost among all the paper in Washington. Finally, in March 1867, after most of the vacancies in the postwar army had been filled, the powerful wartime governor of Indiana, Oliver P. Morton, called in person on Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to urge Elliott’s candidacy. Queried by the Secretary, the Adjutant General reported that two vacancies existed for which the young man might qualify: Captain, 9th Cavalry, and Major, 7th Cavalry. The Secretary at once issued an appointment to the latter post. Only then did Elliott appear before the Hunter examining board, which routinely confirmed the Secretary’s appointment.” (back to text)
52. Greene, Washita, 61. (back to text)
53. Sherman, quoted in Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 229. (back to text)
54. Butterfield and Butterfield, Important Custer, Indian War and Western Memorabilia, April 4, 1995, in San Francisco, 30. (back to text)
55. Merington, The Custer Story, 217. (back to text)
56. Cozzens, Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, vol. 3, 250; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 176. (back to text)
57. Nepotism was rampant in the postwar army. Wesley Merritt used his influence to gain a commission for his brother and then win him a transfer to Merritt’s regiment, according to John W. Merritt, their father: “Charley our seventh son and baby . . . is 24 years old. . . . In September President Grant appointed him through the influence of his brother Wesley for examination as Lieutenant in the regular army. He was examined by a board of officers, passed satisfactorily and was commissioned as 2d Lieut in the 9th Cavalry, his brother’s regiment in Texas.” John W. Merritt to his niece Josephine, November 22, 1873, Box 3G470, Folder 3, Brininstool Collection. (back to text)
58. Greene, Washita, 79. (back to text)
59. Ricker, The Settler and Soldier Interviews, 290. (back to text)
60. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 54. (back to text)
61. Sheridan’s orders are quoted in Wert, 271–72. The information on the Washita battle is chiefly derived from Wert; Godfrey, “Some Reminiscences”; Monaghan, Custer; and Custer, My Life on the Plains. (back to text)
62. Foley, “Walter Camp,” 23. Other accounts mention as many as 150 warriors. (back to text)
63. Ibid., 19–20; Ben Clark interview, Camp IU Notes, Box 2, Folder 3: “The trail of warriors we had been following split from it [another party of Indians] near Black Kettle’s village and entered the village. When we charged on the village Custer’s battalion followed this trail right into the village.” (back to text)
64. Barnitz to W. M. Camp, November 18, 1910, Camp BYU Collection. (back to text)
65. Ben Clark interview, Camp IU Notes, Box 2, Folder 3. (back to text)
66. Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 186. Ibid., 379: “Killed some squaws in creek” (account of Dennis Lynch). Ben Clark interview, Camp IU Notes, Box 2, Folder 3: “During the heaviest fighting about twenty men, women and children took refuge behind the bank of the river in the bend. When a lull came they were discovered. They refused to surrender and all were killed.” (back to text)
67. Camp IU Notes, 825. (back to text)
68. Godfrey, “Some Reminiscences,” 493. (back to text)
69. Ben Clark interview, Camp IU Notes, Box 2, Folder 3: “In the afternoon 1,200 or 1,500 warriors massed.” (back to text)
70. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 257–58, and Godfrey, in his article in Winners of the West, June 30, 1929, both claimed that a detail under the command of Captain Edward Myers rode two miles downriver in search of Elliott. Both Lieutenant Edward Mathey (Carroll, General Custer and the Battle of the Washita, 42) and Sergeant John Ryan (Ryan to W. A. Falconer, April 15, 1922, Elizabeth B. Custer Collection) also asserted that a search had been made. (“You claim that Custer never looked after Major Elliott’s party that was killed in that battle,” wrote Ryan, “but I say that he did and the parties that went in search were driven back.”) Finally, another Seventh Cavalry officer, Lieutenant Edward Mathey, also claimed later that “having fruitlessly searched for the Major, it was rightly concluded that he and his party had been attacked and killed, and Custer prepared for his return march” (Cozzens, Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, vol. 3, 363), though Mathey was with the pack train, which was miles in the rear at that time. In Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 149–50, DeB. Randolph Keim says twice in one convoluted sentence that no attempt was made. Keim was a newspaper correspondent who was back at Camp Supply with Sheridan and presumably heard Custer and his officers describe the battle. (back to text)
71. Godfrey, “Some Reminiscences,” 499. (back to text)
72. Greene, Washita, 104. (back to text)
73. Black Kettle himself had admitted only a week earlier that he couldn’t control some of his young warriors, and another chief in the village, Little Rock, had admitted the same thing a few months earlier (ibid., 53, 107). Additionally, Sheridan, in his official reports, told of items found in the camp that implicated Black Kettle’s warriors in the Kansas depredations: “The mail on his person [an expressman had been killed and mutilated between Forts Dodge and Larned] was found in Black Kettle’s camp . . . also photographs and other articles taken from the houses on the Saline and Solomon,” though Custer mentioned none in his detailed report of items found in the camp and destroyed. If anyone else saw this evidence, they never wrote about it (Carroll, General Custer and the Battle of the Washita, 53; Greene, Washita, 186–87). Stanley Vestal, in Warpath and Council Fire, 150, claims that “the very day Black Kettle got back to his camp on the Washita, two Cheyenne war parties, led by Black Shield and Crow Neck, came in from Kansas, where they had been committing depredations, and the whole camp prepared for a big scalp dance.” Vestal talked to many Indians in researching his books, but he occasionally fictionalized his material and is unreliable. His original interview notes are valuable though somewhat indecipherable. Half-breed scout Edmund Guerrier, in an affidavit, said that young men from the bands of Black Kettle and Little Rock had participated in the massacre on the Solomon and Saline rivers in August 1868 and that one of the two leaders in the party, Man Who Breaks the Marrow Bones, belonged to Black Kettle’s band (Carroll, General Custer and the Battle of the Washita, 243). Additionally, Trails the Enemy said, “The Cheyenne were having a great dance in honor of the returning war parties” (Hardorff, Washita Memories, 346). Finally, according to Sheridan, one of the female captives, Black Kettle’s sister Mahwissa, confirmed that war parties had raided and inflicted depredations upon white settlements, returning with scalps (Carroll, General Custer and the Battle of the Washita, 53; Custer, My Life on the Plains, 266, 251). However, these are all ex post facto justifications. The Indians had a legal right to be where they were. But to Sheridan and his superiors, these Indians — or some of them — had broken the terms of the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge when they had attacked, killed, raped, and plundered along the Saline and Solomon rivers and deserved punishment. Sadly, Black Kettle had only recently returned from Fort Cobb, eighty miles down the Washita, where he had asked Colonel William B. Hazen for permission to join other peaceful tribes there. Hazen, fearful of another Sand Creek Massacre if Sheridan’s troops should find the Cheyennes there, had turned him away, telling him to make peace with Sheridan. Black Kettle would never get that chance (Greene, Washita, 104). (back to text)
74. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 241. (back to text)
75. Greene, Washita, 136–37. See also Smith, “Custer Didn’t Do It.” (back to text)
76. See Hardorff, Washita Memories, 173, for the account of an anonymous correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune — likely a Seventh Cavalry officer — who wrote, “A few of the squaws took part in the fight, using pistols”; and ibid., 339–40, where Captain George Yates described a Cheyenne woman firing a pistol. See also Carroll, General Custer and the Battle of the Washita, 38, and Greene, Washita, 126. For two excellent discussions of the massacre vs. battle controversy, see Greene, Washita, chap. 9, “Controversies,” and Hardorff, Washita Memories, 29–31. For a good discussion of the Indian casualty figures, see Smith, “Custer Didn’t Do It,” and Hardorff, Washita Memories, 403. Scout Ben Clark later estimated the Cheyenne loss at seventy-five warriors and fully as many women and children killed (New York Sun, May 14, 1899), though the many Cheyenne estimates averaged less than 20 warriors, 16 women, and 10 children killed (Hardorff, Washita Memories, appendix 6). This seems more reasonable than Custer’s figure, particularly in light of Godfrey’s explanation years later of how it was arrived at. He told researcher Walter Camp: “On second night Custer interrogated the officers as to what Indians they had seen dead in the village and it was from these reports that the official report of the Indians killed was made up. The dead bodies on the field were not counted as a whole, while troops there, but guessed at later, as explained” (Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 185). In other words, this was a typical case of the inflated body count so common in U.S. Army reports. (back to text)
; 77. Greene, Washita, 120. (back to text)
78. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 244. See also Ben Clark’s account in the New York Sun, May 14, 1899, and D. L. Spotts’s account in Box 3G470, Folder 6, Brininstool Collection. In a letter from D. L. Spotts to E. A. Brininstool, Spotts, an enlisted man with the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, which was part of the main strike force, wrote: “The orders were not to harm the women and children and many of them escaped, others staid [sic] in the tents thinking it was safer than venturing outside.” In Sheridan’s Troopers on the Border, 117, Keim, a reporter who remained at Camp Supply, wrote: “A number of squaws also participated in the fight, and were seen fighting with all the energy and precision of warriors. . . . The women and children took up arms.” Keim doubtless garnered this information from members of the Seventh upon their return to Camp Supply. However, Captain Barnitz said that he and his company rode through a “band” of women running, many with infants on their backs and leading children by the hand, and that he and his men did not fire (Camp IU Notes, 541). By contrast, Lieutenant Godfrey told researcher William Camp that when they charged through the village the men “fired through tepees and took no care to prevent hitting women” (Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 186) and also “that in charging through the village one of his Sergeants (Claire) killed a squaw” (Camp IU Notes, 445); Private Dennis Lynch told Walter Camp that the troopers “killed some squaws in creek” (Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 379); and Clark, in Hunt, “The Subjugation of Black Kettle,” 106–7, is quoted as saying, “About twenty men, women and children took refuge in this place [a bend of the river], and hid from sight during the heaviest fighting. When a lull came, they were discovered, and on their refusal to surrender, were all killed.” That Custer was capable of cold-bloodedness when it came to nonwarriors among the enemy is evinced by his order to Captain Myles Keogh in May 1867: “You will without regard to age, sex or condition kill all Indians you may encounter, belonging to Sioux or Cheyennes, except [if] you are convinced they belong to certain bands of friendly (?) Indians, reported as being on the headwaters of the Republican. . . . it is not proposed to burden your command with prisoners” (Langellier et al., Myles Keogh, 108). (back to text)