31. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 310; Merington, The Custer Story, 245. (back to text)
32. Merington, The Custer Story, 290. (back to text)
33. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 308. (back to text)
34. Ibid., 297. (back to text)
35. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War, 193. (back to text)
36. Hart, “Custer’s First Stand,” 28. (back to text)
37. Chicago Daily Tribune, April 19, 1876. (back to text)
38. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 161. (back to text)
39. Merington, The Custer Story, 293. (back to text)
40. Ibid., 289. (back to text)
41. Brown and Willard, The Black Hills Trails, 133. (back to text)
42. Whittaker, A Complete Life of General George A. Custer, 554. (back to text)
43. Big Horn Yellowstone Journal (Spring 1994), 5; O’Neil, GarryOwen Tidbits, vol. 8, 25. (back to text)
44. Bulkley, “As a Classmate Saw Custer.” (back to text)
45. Whittaker, A Complete Life of General George A. Custer, 554. (back to text)
46. Rives, “Grant, Babcock, and the Whiskey Ring.” (back to text)
47. Nichols, In Custer’s Shadow, 61. (back to text)
48. Gray, Centennial Campaign, 87. (back to text)
49. New York Times, May 1, 1876. Sherman wrote a lengthy letter of explanation to Grant on May 5 after Grant sent him a copy of the newspaper story and demanded an explanation. Sherman denied the quote and then wrote, “I believe the Army possesses hundreds who are competent for such an expedition” (Sherman to Grant, May 4, 1876, Van de Water Papers). (back to text)
50. Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 136. (back to text)
51. Whittaker, A Complete Life of General George A. Custer, 559. (back to text)
52. Ibid., 560. (back to text)
53. Noyes, “Captain Robert P. Hughes and the Case Against Custer,” 7–8. Though one of the officers present with Ludlow the next morning, George Ruggles, wrote a letter that supported Ludlow’s claim, with some disparities between the two accounts (ibid.), questions arise. As one of Custer’s officers would later point out, why would Custer reveal such a plan to a member of Terry’s staff who was also a close friend of the General’s? Further, despite Custer and Ludlow’s friendship, the two had publicly disagreed on at least one important subject — the fate of the Black Hills. Custer supported opening them up; Ludlow did not. Ludlow also may have had another reason to besmirch Custer’s reputation. In the fall of 1874, soon after the Black Hills Expedition, the two had squabbled over a relatively minor matter involving the expedition’s official photographer, William Illingworth, and which of the two had arranged and paid for his services. Ludlow had taken the St. Paul photographer to court for not handing over the prints and negatives, but Custer’s telegraphed testimony that Illingworth had discharged his obligations to Custer, who had handled the arrangements, had vindicated him (Custer to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, November 26, 1874, Fort Lincoln, Telegrams Sent, 1873–1878, National Archives; and Ludlow to Custer, November 28, 1874, Merington Papers). Clearly, the two were far from close friends at the time. William H. Wood, a surveyor with the Black Hills Expedition, wrote, “I think Ludlow had a small opinion of Custer” (William Wood, “Reminiscences of the Black Hills Expedition,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, vol. 4, 177). Finally, Ludlow later revealed that he hadn’t told his superior, Terry, of Custer’s brag, though he had the opportunity and claimed to have told several other officers (including George Ruggles) the morning after Terry and Custer had left. (back to text)
54. Carroll, A Very Real Salmagundi, 51. (back to text)
CHAPTER SIX: “SUBMITT TO UNCL SAM OR KILL THE 7 HORS”
Chapter title: Sergeant William Cashan to “Cousin Marey,” May 6, 1876, in Pohanka, “Letters of the Seventh Cavalry.”
Epigraph: W. A. Croffutt, “Our Skeleton Army,” West Point Tic Tacs, 106.
1. This description of Armstrong and Libbie’s parting, as well as the relationship between Custer and Burkman, comes primarily from Glendolin Damon Wagner, Old Neutriment, the recollections of Private John Burkman as recorded by his friend I. D. “Bud” O’Donnell and written in book form by Wagner, who transformed O’Donnell’s notes into a first-person memoir in Burkman’s colloquial speech. I have taken the liberty to eliminate the occasional dialectalism where it was almost surely added by Wagner. (back to text)
2. Barnard, I Go with Custer, 110. (back to text)
3. Camp IU Notes, 582. (back to text)
4. Taylor, Frontier and Indian Life, 291–92. (back to text)
5. Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier, 32. (back to text)
6. Libby, The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign, 168. (back to text)
7. Willert, Little Big Horn Diary, 3. (back to text)
8. Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 244. (back to text)
9. New York Herald, July 11, 1876, in Wengert, The Custer Despatches, 51. This story was very likely written by Bismarck Tribune publisher Clement Lounsberry, who would have known of Gerard’s newspaper experience. (back to text)
10. Custer to Alfred Terry, September 22, 1875, Fort Lincoln, Telegrams Sent, 1875, National Archives. (back to text)
11. De Trobriand, Military Life in Dakota, 312. (back to text)
12. Information on Gerard (whose name is often spelled “Girard,” but who signed his name “Gerard”) is chiefly derived from Walter M. Camp’s “Another of Custer’s Band Answers the Last Roll Call,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, March 9, 1913, and Bismarck Tribune, June 29, 1891. (back to text)
13. Chicago Daily Tribune, February 23, 1879. (back to text)
14. Ben Ash interview, Hagner Collection. (back to text)
15. Dunn, Massacres of the Mountains, 51. (back to text)
16. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 73–74; Inter-Ocean, January 20, 1879. (back to text)
17. Vestal, New Sources of Indian History, 339; Camp IU Notes, 712. (back to text)
18. “Report of Persons Hired and Articles Employed and Hired at Expedition in the Field,” Cartwright Collection. Boston Custer had also been employed as a guide on the Black Hills Expedition of 1874. (back to text)
19. Bismarck Tribune, July 19, 1876. Custer has often been criticized for taking a reporter after Sherman expressly told Terry to “advise Custer to be prudent, not to take along any newspaper men, who always make mischief” (Overfield, The Little Big Horn, 1876). But Lounsberry pointed out in one of his earliest stories about the campaign that “we are prepared to prove by General Terry himself, of whom the writer obtained for Kellogg permission to go.” Lounsberry later claimed that Custer had asked him to go and he had planned to until a family medical problem had prevented him, at which point he had hired Kellogg to take his place. Author Sandy Barnard makes a strong case for this being revisionist history and an instance of spotlight snatching in I Go with Custer, chap. 6. (back to text)
20. Luce, “The Diary and Letters of Dr. James M. DeWolf,” 36, 38. Some of these doctors would later be assigned to detached duty. (back to text)
21. Barrett, quoted in Hutton, The Custer Reader, 110. (back to text)
22. Chandler, Of Garryowen in Glory, 425–27. (back to text)
23. MacNeil, “Raw Recruits and Veterans,” 7. (back to text)
24. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 311; Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 387. (back to text)
25. Rickey, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, 106; also Marquis, Custer, Cavalry and Crows, 14, wherein a fresh cavalry enlistee writes, “We had some elementary drilling.” (back to text)
26. Coffman, The Old Army, 336. In addition, the long, hard winters of the northern plains discouraged most training. A shavetail lieutenant who joined the Seventh Cavalry in the summer of 1876, after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, wrote: “It was not long before the cold and snow stopped all outdoor work. There was no riding hall or hall of any kind, and the barracks were so small and overcrowded th
at, during the winter, beyond the officers and noncommissioned officers school, there was little or no military instruction” (Carroll, The Lieutenant E. A. Garlington Narrative, 26). (back to text)
27. General Order No. 83, September 23, 1875, AGO, War Department General Orders, 1875, National Archives: “This number to be divided between the carbine and revolver at the discretion of the commanding officer. No greater allowance can be authorized on account of the insufficiency of the appropriations for the manufacture of metallic ammunition.” (back to text)
28. Barry Johnson, “George Herendeen: The Life of a Montana Scout,” in Johnson and Taunton, More Sidelights of the Sioux Wars, 9. (back to text)
29. Lieutenant Edward Maguire, in his 1876 report, quoted in Fay, Military Engagements, 30. (back to text)
30. Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 176. Sergeant John Ryan later wrote: “We had a lot of recruits in that regiment and some of those men never fired a shot mounted up to this battle and some of them was never on a cavalry horse” (Ryan to W. A. Falconer, April 15, 1922, Elizabeth B. Custer Collection). (back to text)
31. Merington, The Custer Story, 239. (back to text)
32. Marquis, Custer, Cavalry and Crows, 16, 14. (back to text)
33. Quoted in Langellier et al., Myles Keogh, 121. (back to text)
34. Mangum, “The George C. Brown Story,” 10. (back to text)
35. Nichols, Men with Custer, 12. (back to text)
36. Ibid., 105. (back to text)
37. Barnard, Ten Years with Custer, 273. (back to text)
38. Ibid., 260–66. (back to text)
39. W. S. Edgerly to Louis Hein, August 19, 1921, Louis Hein Collection. (back to text)
40. Fred Dustin, quoted in Dixon, “The Sordid Side of the Seventh Cavalry,” 12. (back to text)
41. New York Daily Tribune, July 13, 1876. (back to text)
42. Cecil, “Lt. Crittenden: Striving for the Soldier’s Life,” 32. (back to text)
43. Hunt and Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 53. The authors clearly added material and heavily rewrote Windolph’s account, so any researcher must be careful in assessing the accuracy of any statements in this book. (back to text)
44. De Trobriand, 62. (back to text)
45. Marquis, “Indian Warrior Ways,” 41–43; Hassrick, The Sioux, 96–97. (back to text)
46. Morris, “Custer Made a Good Decision,” 6. (back to text)
47. Hammer transcript, Camp IU Notes, 114, 441, 632; Grinnell Papers, Field Notebook 332, 92. Braided Locks, who was in the fight, told Grinnell that there “may have been 400 or 500 Sioux and about 40 Cheyenne” (ibid., 93). Young Little Wolf told Grinnell that “there were many Sioux perhaps 500 or 600 . . . and about 40 or 50 Cheyenne” (ibid.). (back to text)
48. Greene, “The Hayfield Fight.” (back to text)
49. Information on these fights was derived from Andrist, The Long Death; Utley, Frontier Regulars; and Potomac Westerners, Great Western Indian Fights. (back to text)
50. Pohanka, “Letters of the Seventh Cavalry.” (back to text)
51. Nichols, Men with Custer, 56. (back to text)
52. Ibid., 154. (back to text)
53. Ibid., 9. (back to text)
54. Langellier et al., 97. (back to text)
55. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 150. (back to text)
56. Barnett, “Powder River.” (back to text)
57. Vestal, Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux, 179; Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 187. See also chap. 3, note 28, for a discussion of the size of the camp. (back to text)
58. Carroll, The Eleanor Hinman Interviews, 38. (back to text)
59. Camp IU Notes, 280. (back to text)
60. A reporter who accompanied Reynolds, Robert Strayhorn, claimed in a newspaper story written soon after the battle that “General Crook had especially impressed upon the minds of the officers the importance of saving” the large amounts of dried meat in the village, and “had instructed the officer in command to save all that could be carried off” (Greene, Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 14, 18). It was later claimed that Crook had planned on feeding his men with these stores (ibid., xvii). If true, it seems, at least in the comfort of retrospect, to have been quite a risky assumption — to plan, under subfreezing conditions, on provisioning hundreds of troops with food found in the enemy camp. (back to text)
61. Ibid., 279, 419. See also Hutchins, The Army and Navy Journal, 19. (back to text)
62. Thaddeus Stanton, “A Review of the Reynolds Campaign,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890, vol. 4, 234. (back to text)
63. Finerty, Warpath and Bivouac, 24. (back to text)
64. Secretary of War J. D. Cameron declared that “these columns were as strong as could be maintained in that inhospitable region or that could be spared from other pressing necessities” — a clear indication of just how important this police action was considered. Hutchins, The Army and Navy Journal, 34. (back to text)
65. Bourke, 296. (back to text)
66. Finerty, 68. (back to text)
67. Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 393. (back to text)
68. Libby, 58. The mistaken belief that Custer was planning to run for President has its roots in the account of an Arikara named Red Star, whose story is highly questionable. Red Star stated that “there was a rumor of a call to meet Custer at Fort Lincoln, the regular headquarters, but he is not certain of such a meeting.” Red Star wasn’t there but related what he had heard — that Custer had told the Arikaras that any kind of victory over the Sioux “would make him President, Great Father.” Later, on the march west, Red Star claimed that Custer had told the scouts, through Gerard the interpreter, “When we return . . . I shall go back to Washington. . . . I shall remain at Washington and be the Great Father.” There is no other evidence of any presidential aspirations on Custer’s part. Indeed, nowhere in the voluminous correspondence between Custer and his wife, Libbie, with whom he shared so many of his dreams, hopes, and concerns, is there any mention of it, and in one of her last letters to him, written only a few weeks before the Democratic convention, she discussed the various presidential candidates and even said, “The radicals have selected such a good man the Democrats stand no show” (Libbie Custer to George A. Custer, June 21, 1876, in O’Neil, GarryOwen Tidbits, vol. 8, 33). See also Craig Repass’s Custer for President? (back to text)
69. This description of the Dakota column’s departure is based on Custer, Boots and Saddles, 216–18; Bates, Custer’s Indian Battles, 28; Godfrey, Custer’s Last Battle, 5; Hunt and Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 53; Graham, The Custer Myth, 239; Willert, Little Big Horn Diary, 3–4; and Heski, “It Started with a Parade.” (back to text)
70. Almost every history of the campaign fails to include Custer’s niece accompanying the column to Heart River. But many years later, she wrote, “My aunts and I went one day’s march with them in company of the paymaster; then, the men having been paid at a safe distance from temptation, we returned in the ambulance that had taken us on this little trip” (Buecker, “Frederic S. Calhoun,” 22). (back to text)
71. Libby, 59, 139. (back to text)
72. Custer, Boots and Saddles, 217. (back to text)
73. Ibid., 218. (back to text)
CHAPTER SEVEN: “THE HIDE AND SEEK FOR SITTING BULL”
Chapter title: Editorial, New York Herald, June 27, 1876.
Epigraph: Gibbon, quoted in Koury, Gibbon on the Sioux Campaign of 1876, 64.
1. Custer had directed his subordinates to follow the same orders regarding campaign preparation as he had instituted in the spring of 1874, just before the Black Hills Expedition. See RG 393, Part V, General Orders and Circulars 1876, Fort Rice, General Order No. 40, May 19, 1874, National Archives. (back to text)
2. Fort Lincoln 1876, Circular No. 21, National Archives. (back to text)
3. Fort Lincoln 1876, Circular No. 45, National Archives. (back to text)
4. Bates, Custer’s Indian Battles, 28. Sergeant Fer
dinand Culbertson testified that the new recruits “could not have received much instruction except what Maj. Reno gave them in the spring, which would be about a month’s or six week’s [sic] steady drill” (Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 311). (back to text)
5. Carroll, The Benteen-Goldin Letters, 209. (back to text)
6. Hunt and Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 50. (back to text)
7. Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 232. (back to text)
8. This discussion of Reno and his experiences is largely based on information in Ron Nichols’s excellently researched In Custer’s Shadow. (back to text)
9. Steinbach, The Long March, 50, 52. (back to text)
10. War of the Rebellion, 1st ser., 50: 13, 15. (back to text)
11. Barnard, Ten Years with Custer, 287; Langellier et al., Myles Keogh, 154, 225; Charles Scott to his sister, April 23, 1876, quoted in O’Neil, GarryOwen Tidbits, vol. 8, 25. The troopers normally were paid every two months, but Scott and other soldiers claimed that they hadn’t been paid in four months. (back to text)
12. Terry to Sheridan, letter, May 15, 1876, quoted in Gray, Centennial Campaign, 89. (back to text)
13. Terry to Sheridan, telegram, May 16, 1876, quoted in Gray, Centennial Campaign, 90. (back to text)
14. Evans, Custer’s Last Fight, 110. (back to text)
15. Stewart, “I Rode with Custer,” 18. (back to text)
16. Nichols, Men with Custer, 93, 154. (back to text)
17. Terry to his sisters, May 30, 1876, Terry Family Collection. (back to text)
18. Bradley, The March of the Montana Column, 126. (back to text)
19. Ibid., 158. (back to text)
20. DeBarthe, The Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, 116. (back to text)
21. Gray, Centennial Campaign, 120. (back to text)
22. Vestal, Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux, 186. (back to text)
23. Charles Eastman, “The Indian Version of Custer’s Last Battle,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, vol. 4, 303. In the July 22, 1876, issue of Army and Navy Journal, it was reported, “If the estimate of experienced officers who could see the whole field from higher ground further back is to be considered, there were upwards of 700 warriors.” White Bull claimed years later that there were 1,000 Indians, of whom 300 had guns (Box 105, Folder 24, p. 45, Campbell Collection). (back to text)
A Terrible Glory Page 48
