He shifted the dead cigar jammed between his teeth. He could only wait and see. But he would fight it, fight it hard, spend more on lawyers, fight to the finish.
It took over a month before he got word. Colonel Sturgis, commander of the Seventh, had disapproved the charges, citing their obvious bad grace; so had other reviewers up the chain of command, and ultimately the adjutant general’s office concurred in mid-July. Reno was on the mat, but not yet thrown out of the army.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THAT FIERCE SUMMER, MARCUS RENO HAD, AT LAST, A CHANCE TO study the furious reports and wild accusations that had fired up the national press in the months following the Little Bighorn battle. He had seen some of it, even at remote Fort Abercrombie, sent him by his brother or sister, or the Rosses in Harrisburg. But now he had the chance to review it all, and he set about it with vigor and rage, because so little of it had anything to do with reality.
There was, first of all, the incredible array of material published in the New York Herald, that most remarkable paper that managed to cover everything important in the whole world. When the Far West had reached Bismarck, after the battle, some fifty thousand words had been wired to the Herald over twenty-four hours, at an awesome cost of three thousand dollars, or so it was said.
Eighteen seventy-six was an election year, and partisan papers were quick to blame Republican President Grant, and the corrupt Indian Bureau, for the disaster, or Democrat George Armstrong Custer, for recklessly attacking a village that was far too large for his command to handle.
Reno gratefully collected the clippings assiduously gathered by his in-laws, headed for the newspapers to read dispatches and exchange papers, got what he could from libraries, caught up with every issue of the Army and Navy Journal where furious rhetorical wars about the battle were being waged in issue after issue. But the Herald was the greatest source. Its reporter, O’Kelly, had assiduously interviewed everyone who would sit still.
Reno pulled off his soaked shirt in the furnace heat of the hotel room, lit up a green-leafed Baltimore cigar, laid out the clippings, and set to work. The scope of coverage and controversy flabbergasted him; out in Dakota, isolated from the passion of the nation, he had little idea of the furor that gripped the nation on its hundredth birthday. The blamers were busy from the start: someone had to take the blame, and at first it was General Terry.
Terry’s confidential report to Generals Sherman and Sheridan, stolen by an adept reporter and promptly published, reached the public before the official report did, and caused an uproar. While the discreet general had publicly and officially avoided blaming Custer, his private report to his superiors concluded that Custer had violated orders and acted rashly.
But for those who saw the lieutenant colonel as a victim, there were other villains, namely President Ulysses Grant, Marcus Reno, and Frederick Benteen. There was no shortage of those who enjoyed parceling out blame, and officers of every stripe, even former Confederates, were quick to come to conclusions.
Some unnamed officers at the headquarters of the Military Division of the Missouri thought that the disaster was “brought on by that foolish pride which so often results in the defeat of men.” And that Custer, with a blind desire to win the glory for himself, had rushed forward, and that Custer was violating orders and even if he had won, he might well have been court-martialed.
The reporters did not neglect Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, either. The Herald quoted President Grant as saying, “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself that was wholly unnecessary—wholly unnecessary.”
The New York Times reported that Sherman and Sheridan believed that Custer had been “rashly imprudent to attack such a large number of Indians.”
Much to Reno’s surprise, he found sharp criticism of Custer issuing from Colonel Sturgis, commander of the Seventh, who had been on detached duty. There had been some friction between Custer and Sturgis, largely because Custer wanted to run the regiment as his own. But now Sturgis’s son lay among the dead, and Sturgis opined publicly that Custer was a brave man but also a very selfish one, insanely ambitious of glory. He was, moreover, tyrannical and had no regard for the soldiers under him; that he had made his attack recklessly, much earlier than he had been supposed to, and with men and horses exhausted from forced marches.
Reb General McCausland, on the other hand, who had fought against Custer in the Shenandoah Valley, rushed to Custer’s defense, saying he would have attacked exactly as Custer had, and that’s what cavalry is for—the charge.
Reno chomped on dead cigars, relit them from the gas lamp, twisted them out in dirty ashtrays, and blotted up the violent opinion seething through the press nonstop.
He grunted. Men who weren’t there shouldn’t be second-guessing. Those armchair generals had no idea how many Indians there were, how determined they were, and how Custer had divided his command in a way that allowed it to be destroyed in pieces.
There were reasons aplenty for the disaster. The Herald thundered that the death of Custer could be laid to Grant’s peace policy, “which feeds, clothes and takes care of their noncombatant force while men are killing our troops—that is what killed Custer.” And what is more, “that nest of thieves, the Indian Bureau, with its thieving agents and favorites as Indian traders, and its mock humanity and pretense of piety—that is what killed Custer.”
That amused Reno.
After devouring the clippings, the magazine articles, and the letters crowding the columns of the Army and Navy Journal, Reno turned to the book he knew would excoriate him.
It was hot in Harrisburg, and not much air cleansed heat from his room. Smoke from his cigars had penetrated the draperies and coverlet, but he didn’t mind. He could not think or read or relax without a cigar between his lips, dead or alive.
Frederick Whittaker, of Mount Vernon, New York, was a novelist, itself the most dubious of bastard professions, given to lies and fantasies, made-up worlds disconnected from reality. He had regularly pumped out florid romances, the dime-novel variety, but something about the Custer massacre had shot passion through him, and he had hastily penned a paean to his hero, with the help of Custer’s widow. Much of it was merely Custer’s own journalism reprinted in haste so that Whittaker might rush into print ahead of the rest and thus capitalize on the disaster.
Reno was curious about the man who had criticized him so sharply, and through old Pennsylvania militia connections he soon had Whittaker’s military record. The man who called himself a captain had in fact aspired to a law career, but had enlisted when the war broke out as a private in the Sixth New York Cavalry. He rose to become a second lieutenant of Company A, New York Provisional Cavalry. He had not been breveted captain, though he called himself one in the sensational press.
He had, apparently, once met Custer in the editorial offices of Galaxy, a magazine for which both men wrote, and formed a friendship then and there. From then on, Custer could do no wrong in Whittaker’s view; he possessed no fault, no failing, no weakness of character. And that is what Major Reno found when he lay abed in his drawers, puffing on Havanas, sweat collecting in his armpits, reading idolatry.
Whittaker’s book, A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer, was published in New York just about the time Reno was arriving at Fort Abercrombie and unwittingly getting himself into grave trouble with Emily in the space of four days.
Whittaker’s depiction of the battle relied on dubious and contradictory newspaper reports, not official records, and at times Reno scarcely recognized the fight he was in. It was noteworthy that none of the surviving officers had offered any comment, not even Reno’s adversary Tom Weir, who had befriended Whittaker and had thought Reno’s conduct in the fight was timid. Where were Wallace, Benteen, French, Hare, Godfrey, McDougall? Entirely absent. Not even Weir.
Reno grunted, arose, poured some Pennsylvania rye into a tumbler, added a splash, and shot it down his parched throat.
Had Custer disobeyed Ge
neral Terry’s orders? Of course not. The orders were entirely permissive, granting Custer the liberty to conduct his campaign as he saw fit. Reno had seen those orders. They did give Custer latitude, enabling him to use his judgment as circumstances arose. But they also contemplated a coordinated pincer assault on the village, with Custer closing on one side and Gibbon on the other.
It was too hot in his hotel room to read, but Reno wanted to see what the son of a bitch was saying, so he sipped rye, lipped his cigar, sweated, and read.
It all boiled down to a few accusations: Reno had failed to comply with his orders to attack, and Benteen had deliberately disobeyed his orders to rush to help; they had languished on the hilltop instead of relieving Custer, and between them, they permitted Custer and his command to perish. It was the simpleminded explanation of an amateur strategist who had an agenda, the canonization of his hero, Custer.
Reno was tired of being the scapegoat, but thought there was no reason to respond to a dime novelist with a sensational account of the battle. Benteen already had, in a caustic letter published in the Army and Navy Journal. In any case, it was plain that the novelist was simply stirring up trouble in order to sell books. That was an old game, and Reno dismissed it. Best to keep his counsel and let the Whittaker controversy die down.
There were more important things to do. He was now close to Washington, D.C., close to the War Department, and he intended to wield whatever influence he could in person. Some interviews, some private luncheons, a little time spent sipping with some of those in the seat of power, and maybe he would find his suspension reversed. All he wanted was to resume his command and career, salvage his honor, and get on with life.
He would spend the next months making contacts in Washington, and maybe it would all bear fruit. But that was not to be: Frederick Whittaker, incensed that Marcus Reno had not been summarily drummed out of the service for cowardice, was making new plans.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE MONTHS OF HIS SUSPENSION DRIFTED SLOWLY BY. HE FELT EVEN more melancholic than he usually did. He saw little of his Ross and Haldeman relatives. His brother-in-law Andrew Ross lived in York township, while Bertie Orth, Mary Hannah’s younger sister, lived in Pittsburgh. And none of the Rosses and Haldemans were inclined to invite the disgraced major to their hearths or share his society. But Harrisburg was the only place he could call home, and there was his acquaintance Lyman Gilbert, who handled the estate.
So he camped in his hotel room, solitary, lonely, and moody. It wasn’t a home but another bivouac; not a hearth or a haven or a place filled with relatives, for he was a bird of passage, alighting there only to fly again soon.
Sometimes he ventured to the Harrisburg Cemetery and the Ross family plot, where a freshly cut stone marked the grave of Mary Hannah, and there he came alive in his pain, the tearing sensation of loss awakening slumbering feeling. How short had been his sojourn with her, but how sweet. She had been so lively, bright of eye; her unusual education had polished her, made her glow at dinner tables and in all sorts of company.
He remembered her touch and her kiss, and her playfulness. He remembered her sighs, and the tears that rose whenever he went off to war. He remembered the humor with which she tackled dreary billets in miserable frontier posts; the magical way she gathered officers wives to her and made their frontier life a cotillion. It took only a vase of freshly gathered prairie wildflowers for her to turn the billet into a home.
Now he stared at the sunken earth, hollowed over her, as if her small frame could not support the soil above, and the loss that stole through him was keener and deeper than ever before.
He had no one to talk to in Harrisburg, so he talked to her.
“I’m here because of Captain Bell’s wife,” he said. “You would have been amused by Emily Bell. She thinks all men are bent upon ruining her. I was blind to her mean little ways and what they could do to me. I confess I was lonely; she drew me, until she stung. I’m sorry, Mary Hannah. I’m so sorry. Here I am, in exile, waiting out a two-year imprisonment in this place.”
He entrained for Washington frequently, and looked up old Civil War comrades, men who had fought and bled and struggled at his side, but his presence put them in an awkward position; they were the honorable officers; he was the dishonored and suspended major. He did, at least, lunch a time or two with editors of the Army and Navy journal and gave them a true account of the struggle out in distant Montana Territory.
The controversy never ceased.
When a year of his sentence had elapsed in the spring of 1878, he wrote President Hayes seeking clemency. He had not meant to insult the reputation Mrs. Bell, he explained; what he had said was private, for one person, and he had never imagined it would slip into public circulation. The suspension of his pay was a heavy burden; he was responsible for the upbringing of his son, and needed his salary. He would like to return to duty.
The president responded swiftly, and sent word through Secretary of War George McCrary:
“Sir, I am directed by the president to inform you that the question of a further modification of your sentence has been considered by him and he feels constrained to decline to reopen the case or change his order therein. I am obliged to inform you that the president’s decision in this matter is final.”
Reno settled back to whiling away his suspension, living a life marked by restless prowling of bistros. What could a man without honor do? What hearths and salons and drawing rooms would be open to such a man?
He saw little of his son; the Orths seemed almost to shield Robert Ross Reno from his father, and the boy was a stranger, or rather, Reno was a stranger to his boy. Here was a lad in his teens, and the whole time Marcus Reno had spent with his son could well be numbered in months, and most of those when the boy was but a child. Maybe someday, someday, Marcus Reno and Robert Ross Reno would discover the bond that joined them.
Often he relived his times of war. Sometimes the War of the Rebellion preoccupied him, especially those months when he was General Torbert’s chief of staff, riding everywhere, always in harm’s way, seeing the blood and scream of battle in his mind’s eye, hearing the whisper of shot, the muted roar of distant cannon, and the rattle of a cavalry charge.
But most often when his mind wandered from the confines of his cloistered hotel room, it was to the wilderness of the far west, where the Seventh Regiment of Cavalry rode into the largest Indian village ever known on the continent. He remembered it all so clearly: the sluggish horse under him, the weary horses of his brave hundred and twelve, horses that had been punished by long marches for days, and could scarcely carry men to war.
He remembered that swift chaotic flow of red men around his two flanks, their bodies barely visible through the dust raised by Indian ponies, ghostly multitudes running, dodging, sliding through river brush, even as his weary horses cantered forward. He remembered the occasional snap of their rifles not from ahead, but from the flank. He remembered the way the scouts, who had been detailed to drive off the village horse herd, had fallen back on the left, retreating before the fury of the Sioux.
He lived it all again, as he smoked his panatelas and sipped his Monongahela rye, and he always came to the same conclusion: he would do exactly what he did; he had chosen the only course; had he not retreated to the woods, his command would have been engulfed; had he not broken out and crossed the river and headed for the bluffs, his command would have been slaughtered.
He daydreamed of refighting it all, in some fantasy world in which he could permit his harshest critics to ride beside him, see what he saw, draw their own conclusions. He wanted the ones who weren’t there—the ones whose views were shaped in drawing rooms and parlors—to see, to know, to feel, to experience, every shred of the violence that swept through that command. He wanted to grin at them when they beseeched him to retreat to the bluffs. He wanted to smile when they headed out to find Custer’s command, and were driven back. He wanted to put Whittaker on a cavalry mount and let him command th
e battalion, lead it into that swarm of Indians, and let him see.
But it was idle to dream, to relive the past. He scolded himself for it, as if he had been doing something embarrassing and unmanly.
The entire controversy concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn had simmered down and vanished from public consciousness. The press had other stories to pursue. Whittaker’s idolatrous book about Custer at last flagged and died in the bookstalls. And maybe Reno should have taken that as a warning.
As spring surrendered to summer in 1878, things suddenly changed. There in the Harrisburg papers were dispatches from Washington about … himself. Whittaker, it seemed, had been busy all the while, scheming to throw Marcus Reno out of the service, or to “purge” it, in his words, of a coward. Whittaker had penned an impassioned letter to the Wyoming Territorial delegate to congress, one W. W. Corlett, asking that Congress itself investigate the battle of the Little Bighorn, and especially the conduct of Major Reno and Captain Benteen, with a view to cleansing the service of miscreants.
There, indeed, in the Harrisburg press, was the letter, a lengthy accusation aimed at himself, Major Marcus Reno, United States Army. He knew what the contents would be even before he settled down to read this amazing story. But first he relit a dead stogy he had stubbed out, and pumped blue smoke into the hotel room until a perfect aromatic haze surrounded him. Then he fired the gas lamp, settled into the sticky chair in that humid room, and read:
“Having been called upon to prepare the biography of the late brevet Major General George A. Custer, U.S.A., a great amount of evidence, oral and written, came into my hands tending to prove that the sacrifice of his life and the lives of his immediate command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was useless, and owing to the cowardice of his subordinates. I desire, therefore, to call your attention, and that of Congress, through you, to the necessity of ordering an official investigation by a committee of your honorable body into the conduct of United States troops engaged in the Battle of the Little Bighorn …”
An Obituary for Major Reno Page 18
