2. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 529. McDougall rendered slight variations on the text of Reno’s response; see Hammer, Custer in ’76, 70. (back to text)
3. McDougall said that seven men were wounded and that some were in blankets, some on horses (Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 534). Reno, in his official report, said that seven were injured (Overfield, The Little Big Horn, 1876, 45). Varnum testified, “When we arrived at the top of the hill I found there were several men wounded there and two or three of them were of my old company, the first sergeant and one or two others” (Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 143). Wallace testified several times that there were five to seven wounded men on the hill at the time (ibid., 28, 38, 53, 58). (back to text)
4. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 81. (back to text)
5. Ibid., 71; Camp IU Notes, Box 2, Folder 10. I have blended the two Camp accounts here. (back to text)
6. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 71. (back to text)
7. Camp IU Notes, 40. (back to text)
8. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 292; Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 95, 179. Hare gave a roundabout account of Reno sending him forward with orders to retreat, but this is the only possible way his testimony at the Reno court of inquiry makes sense: “After I delivered the order to Captain Weir, I returned to the command [Reno, in the rear] and met it coming down stream. When they got to a high hill, the highest point around there, the Indians returned and attacked. Major Reno said that the position would not do to make his fight in, and he selected a point further up on the bluff [the original position], and ordered Weir’s and French’s companies to cover the retreat back to that point [Reno sent Hare, his adjutant, to deliver the orders]. They did so up to a few hundred yards of the line [they did no such thing], when Captain Godfrey’s company was dismounted. I came back with that company.” [When Hare delivered the order to Godfrey, he remained with that troop.] (back to text)
9. Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 190. Edgerly also gave a different account of this scene, which included not Sanders (or Saunders, as Edgerly spelled it) but one of his duty Sergeants, Thomas Harrison. (back to text)
10. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 57; Liddic and Harbaugh, Camp on Custer, 98. Throughout the rest of his life, Edgerly expressed regret that he hadn’t been able to save Charley and later blamed his company commander, Weir. He said that when he had reached Weir on the retreat, he had asked Weir for reinforcements to go back and get Charley, whom he’d promised to save. Edgerly testified at the Reno court of inquiry in 1879 that Weir had said “he was sorry but the orders were to go back on the hill” (Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 446). (back to text)
11. Utley, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 158, 172. (back to text)
12. E. S. Godfrey to Adjutant General, n.d., Godfrey Family Papers, reprinted in O’Neil, Custer Chronicles, vol. 10, 20; E. S. Godfrey, “Cavalry Fire Discipline,” in O’Neil, Custer Conundrums, 12–13; Godfrey, Custer’s Last Battle, 27–28. Some time later, Godfrey revealed to Walter Camp what might have been the real reason he had dismounted his men when falling back from Weir Point. Camp wrote: “He had, upon looking back, seen the man (Vincent Charley) fall off his horse and his company come on but supposed they would want to send a detachment back to get him. He (Godfrey) therefore thought he ought to make a stand to enable D Company to organize to do this” (Camp IU Notes, 444). (back to text)
13. It seems safe to assume that at least this number of Indians composed the first wave of attackers. Though some officers supplied greatly inflated figures — Benteen estimated the number at an impossible 8,000 or 9,000 — Moylan claimed that no less than 900 or 1,000 surrounded the hill at all times (Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 72). (back to text)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: “DEATH WAS ALL AROUND US”
Chapter title: Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 102.
Epigraph: Carroll, “The Battles on the Little Big Horn,” 3.
1. See Willert, Little Big Horn Diary, 387, for a discussion of what orders were given and to and by whom during the evening of June 25. (back to text)
2. Carroll, The Benteen-Goldin Letters, 171. (back to text)
3. Rector, “Fields of Fire,” 68. (back to text)
4. Reno and a few other officers claimed that there were only two or three spades in the entire command. But Private William Taylor later wrote that each company cook carried one “for the purpose of cutting a trench for his fire” (Taylor, With Custer on the Little Bighorn, 74). Several participants talked about the paucity of shovels, putting the number at two, three, or four. But one trooper wrote: “We had no tools to dig graves with, there being only one spade to each company” (quoted in Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 131). (back to text)
5. Barnard, Ten Years with Custer, 298. (back to text)
6. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 72. (back to text)
7. Godfrey, Field Diary, 14. (back to text)
8. O’Neil, The Gibson-Edgerly Narratives, 13. (back to text)
9. Godfrey to John Neihardt, January 6, 1924, Hagner Collection; Hammer, Custer in ’76, 67. (back to text)
10. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 165. (back to text)
11. Reno lost fifty-three men (give or take a trooper) on June 25 and 26. Thirty-two of those deaths occurred in the valley fight and retreat. Of the remaining twenty-one, nine or ten of them were killed on June 26, leaving about twelve, the number I have used here. Reno, in his official report, claimed that eighteen men were killed and forty-six wounded from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on June 25, a great exaggeration — at least six more deaths and more than double the number of injured. See also Gray, Centennial Campaign, 291–97, for an argument that Reno lost a few more men in the valley fight and a few less on the hill. (back to text)
12. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 125. (back to text)
13. Taylor, With Custer on the Little Bighorn, 52. (back to text)
14. Rickey, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, 291; Wagner, Old Neutriment, 164; Liddic and Harbaugh, Camp on Custer, 161. (back to text)
15. Glease, “The Battle of the Little Big Horn,” 72; Hardorff, Camp, Custer, and the Little Bighorn, 77, 136. Researcher R. G. Cartwright, who knew Charles Windolph very well, wrote this in his copy of Fred Dustin’s The Custer Tragedy, 192: “Windolph said that Gibson played ostrich. Head in hole, rump protruding. The men hoped that some Indian get [sic] on the target” (Cartwright Collection). (back to text)
16. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 356. (back to text)
17. Camp IU Notes, 41. (back to text)
18. Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 404. Virtually every account of the hilltop siege, whether by officer or enlisted man, makes it abundantly clear that Benteen was in charge in almost every way that mattered, though officers still asked Reno’s permission on relatively minor matters. Dr. Porter summed it up when he testified, at the Reno court of inquiry: “I knew Major Reno was the ranking officer, but I thought that Colonel Benteen was the actual commanding officer” (Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 193). (back to text)
19. Libby, The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign, 104, 105. (back to text)
20. This is evident, since they told everyone in their village that those two and Curly were dead. (back to text)
21. Viola, Little Bighorn Remembered, 116–17. (back to text)
22. Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 94. (back to text)
23. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 518–19. (back to text)
24. Graham, The Custer Myth, 322. (back to text)
25. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 143. (back to text)
26. Varnum said that it was a gallon keg; Godfrey said that it was a half-gallon keg. Coughlan to Van de Water, February 22, 1935, Van de Water Papers. (back to text)
27. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 470–71, 505–6. (back to text)
28. Graham, The Custer Myth, 103. Though some Indians mourned the deaths of friends and relatives, there was also much celebrating in the village. See Ibid., 85, 87; Hardorff, Indian Views of the Cus
ter Fight, 54, 79; Hardorff, Cheyenne Memories, 112; and Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 217. (back to text)
29. Barnard, Ten Years with Custer, 299. (back to text)
30. Graham, The Custer Myth, 123; Godfrey to J. A. Shoemaker, March 2, 1926, Roll 4, Elizabeth B. Custer Collection. Godfrey also related this story in other writings and clearly believed it, as did Moylan, who wrote, “If what Colonel Benteen told me at Meade in 1883 was true, and I know of no reason to doubt it, then Reno ought to have been shot” (Moylan to Godfrey, January 17, 1892, quoted in Kuhlman, Legend into History, 130). I have combined Godfrey’s two main versions here. (back to text)
31. New York Evening Post, February 20, 1897. Colonel William Graham, in The Custer Myth, 337, and others have attempted to explain this suggestion of Reno’s as just another option among many discussed. Graham wrote: “I do not for a minute believe . . . that Reno made a bald ‘proposal’ to abandon his wounded which Benteen at once ‘indignantly rejected.’ ” But this is exactly what Benteen claimed several times to several different people, in no uncertain terms. See also Steven Wright, “Edward Settle Godfrey and the Custer Myth,” 6th Annual Symposium, 11. (back to text)
32. Barnard, Ten Years with Custer, 299. (back to text)
33. Brady, 404. (back to text)
34. Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 180. (back to text)
35. Graham, The Custer Myth, 182. (back to text)
36. Carroll, The Sunshine Magazine Articles, 13. (back to text)
37. Ibid., 136. (back to text)
38. Ibid., 67. (back to text)
39. Coughlan, Varnum, 17. (back to text)
40. Binder 1, p. 81, Cartwright Collection; Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 78. Windolph lived until 1950 and gave many other slightly different versions of this scene. (back to text)
41. Price, Sage of the Hills, 70. (back to text)
42. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 114. (back to text)
43. Godfrey, Field Diary, 17; Liddic, I Buried Custer, 18; Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 344. Both Godfrey and Private Thomas Coleman claimed that Reno led the charge, and Edgerly testified that “he was in advance all the time.” (back to text)
44. Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 152; Godfrey, Field Diary, 17. (back to text)
45. Graham, The Custer Myth, 145; Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 164–65. (back to text)
46. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 57. See also ibid., 81, where Gibson is quoted as saying that Benteen’s charge (the first) was about 9:00 a.m. (back to text)
47. Hardorff, Camp, Custer, and the Little Bighorn, 179. (back to text)
48. Ibid., 78; Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 104–5; Brininstool, Troopers with Custer, 57. (back to text)
49. Though several accounts exist of this occurrence and Madden’s request, they may be apocryphal. Private Dan Newell later wrote, “I saw and heard the whole performance and that just wasn’t what Mike said, but I don’t want to spoil a good story.” Carroll, The Sunshine Magazine Articles, 14. (back to text)
50. Liddic and Harbaugh, Camp on Custer, 110. See Liddic, Vanishing Victory, 170–71, for a discussion of whites and/or half-breeds in the Sioux camp. (back to text)
51. Hardorff, Camp, Custer, and the Little Bighorn, 83. (back to text)
52. Private George Glease later wrote: “We only had 15 rounds of ammunition left per man.” Glease, 72. (back to text)
53. Liddic, I Buried Custer, 19. (back to text)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE RESCUE
Epigraph: Coleman, quoted in Liddic, I Buried Custer, 123–24.
1. Lieutenant Alfred B. Johnson to General R. W. Johnson, reprinted in St. Paul Pioneer Press and Tribune, July 22, 1876. Both Alfred Johnson and Lieutenant Charles Roe stated that they had been rationed for six days. Other accounts claim eight days. See Bradley, The March of the Montana Column, 147. (back to text)
2. Some historians downplay Custer’s agreement to send Herendeen to the Montana column and explain away his decision not to do so. Custer may have had legitimate reasons — at least in his own mind — to keep Herendeen with him, but Terry clearly expected Herendeen’s arrival, as is clear from the accounts of many of his subordinates. Lieutenant Edward J. McClernand: “General Terry doubtless expected and had every reason to expect, that Custer, as his successor in command, would spare no effort to communicate with him. He seemed surprised and mystified by the fact that no report had been received, and was unmistakably anxious” (McClernand, “With the Indian and the Buffalo in Montana,” 24). Lieutenant C. A. Woodruff: “While Terry, with Gibbon’s command, was camped at Tullock’s Creek, Saturday night and Sunday morning, June 24th and 25th, he was looking for a message from Custer very anxiously, so I was told at the time” (quoted in Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 382). An anonymous “special correspondent” — clearly an officer with Gibbon’s command — wrote on July 3, at the camp at the mouth of the Bighorn, about the night of June 26: “Night had come, and the promised scout from Custer had not reported, although we were far in advance of our position” (New York Daily Tribune, July 14, 1876). See also Roe, Custer’s Last Battle, 4. Though after the battle there was undoubtedly avoidance of blame concerning certain areas of the campaign, this does not seem to be one of them. However, when all was said and done, Herendeen’s appearance likely would not have changed much, given any possible scenario. (back to text)
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