The Real Custer

by James S Robbins

  “George sat on his horse out in advance, calmly looking the Indians over,” Thomas Rosser wrote of the scene, “full of suppressed excitement, but also with calculating judgment and strength of purpose in his face . . . I thought him then one of the finest specimens of a soldier I had ever seen.”24 The sudden charge broke the Indian position, and the cavalry pursued them for three miles. Meanwhile, the main column had come up. Stanley ordered artillery fire placed on the ridgeline where the Indians had congregated across the river, “producing a wonderful scampering out of sight,” he wrote.25

  In the engagements on the Yellowstone, the Indians were armed with new, advanced weapons, and had adapted to them with fresh tactics. But Custer’s takeaway was that disciplined and well-organized cavalrymen employing coordinated firepower could hold their own against, and even defeat, superior numbers of Indians. “The Indians were made up of different bands of Sioux, principally Uncpapas,” Custer wrote in his after-action report, “the whole under command of ‘Sitting Bull,’ who participated in the second day’s fight, and who for once has been taught a lesson he will not soon forget.”26 A newspaper reporter who witnessed the battle concurred, saying the fights “will have an excellent moral effect upon them and teach them a lesson of our summary management in case of their hostility.”27 Stanley was more circumspect. “The loss of the Indians in these two affairs was considerable,” he wrote, but “they are not badly enough hurt to be humble.”28

  Reaching Pompey’s Pillar soon after the August 11 battle, the column went north to the Musselshell River, down the valley to the Big Bend, then divided. The 7th Cavalry headed back to Fort Lincoln directly, and Stanley with the rest of the expedition went south, going via the Yellowstone. Custer and his men arrived a day before Stanley, who had taken the steamer Josephine while the rest of his column went overland. The unexpected and early arrival of the 7th Cavalry became a general topic of conversation. “How did he come?” “Marched of course.” “But that isn’t possible.” “Nonsense, nothing is impossible with Custer.” The Bismarck Tribune hailed Custer as “a man in whom sloth took no delight, and as an officer the hero of more rapid marches and harder fights than almost any other noted in history.”29

  The Yellowstone expedition lasted 95 days, made 77 encampments, and covered 935 miles. It surveyed previously unmapped areas and found a number of possible railroad routes. The 7th Cavalry engaged the Indians, and Custer won his battles. He also brought back some bob-tailed cats, porcupines, antelope horns, and petrified wood to send to the Central Park Zoo.

  But on September 18, 1873, a week before the expedition ended, the Cooke and Company investment bank, which had underwritten the Northern Pacific, went bankrupt. Cooke’s firm had gone into enormous debt, and the tight money policy of the Grant administration dried up the bond market, driving away potential investors. The Northern Pacific could not support its obligations, and even Cooke was not too big to fail. His downfall led to other banks, railroads, and businesses going bust, precipitating the Panic of 1873. The economic hard times lasted in the United States for six years, and the main line of the Northern Pacific was not completed until 1883.

  A year later, scout Charley Reynolds attended an Indian war dance, where he learned from “some educated half breeds” that a young warrior named Rain-in-the-Face was bragging that he had killed two civilian members of the Yellowstone expedition with his bare hands. Reynolds got word to Custer, who ordered his brother Tom and a squadron of cavalry to “arrest the red braggart and bring him to Fort Lincoln.”30 Tom found Rain-in-the-Face at the Standing Rock Reservation on December 13, 1874, and took him in, with some difficulty. The warrior was held at the guardhouse at Fort Lincoln until April 1875, when he escaped. Rain-in-the-Face made his way back to his people, vowing to cut out Tom Custer’s heart and eat it.

  PART SIX

  THE FINAL ACT

  Herman Bencke, The Last Battle of Gen. Custer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CUSTER’S GULCH

  “Gold!” In the late summer of 1874, newspapers across the country trumpeted the latest discovery in the Black Hills region of the Dakota Territory. The headline was irresistible. Gold fever gripped the country. A rush was on to the new El Dorado. And the man most responsible for this was George Custer. “The newspaper reports were enough to set the world crazy,” the Bismarck Tribune wrote, “but those of Gen. Custer, confirming all others, settles the question—and seals the doom of the hostile Sioux.”1

  That summer Custer led an expedition into the hitherto unexplored Black Hills. The area had long been the subject of legend for whites and Indians alike. The Sioux considered the hills sacred—as did the Kiowa a hundred years earlier, before the Sioux ran them out. The hills were a good wintering spot, with ample game and firewood. And, said Philip Sheridan, there was “an Indian romance of a mountain of gold.” He had heard this tale in the 1850s from Belgian Jesuit priest Pierre Jean De Smet. De Smet was the first Catholic missionary to visit the area and was instrumental in convincing some of the more warlike bands to attend the 1868 peace conference that ended Red Cloud’s War. De Smet was known to the Indians as “Black Gown” and “The Great Medicine Man,” and for his influence among the Sioux, he was dubbed “Friend of Sitting Bull.”

  The “mountain of gold” De Smet told of was in fact a formation of yellow mica, but that detail was less noted. Few whites had actually been to the Black Hills—exploratory missions in 1859 and 1861 had been turned back—and after the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the area was off-limits to any but the Indians. This inspired speculation and jealousy, the lure of the unknown coupled with resentment of “savages” who didn’t know what to do with the fortune they were supposedly sitting on. Many scoffed that profitable development of the region was barred by “Sioux superstition.” Periodic stories of wildcat prospectors being scalped fueled the belief that the Sioux had something to hide.

  The Fort Laramie Treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation in present-day South Dakota, west of the Missouri River. This included most of the Black Hills except for a portion in Wyoming.2 The treaty set apart the land “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians” and prohibited anyone else except officers of the government on official business to “pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory.”

  The Black Hills were not only sacred but militarily significant. “It is used as sort of a back-room to which they may escape after committing depredations,” Custer said in an interview, “remaining in safety until quiet is again restored.”3 In 1873, Sheridan recommended establishing an Army post nearby, arguing the Indians “would never make war on our settlements as long as we could threaten their families and villages in this remote locality, abounding in game and all that goes to make Indian life comfortable.” The Custer expedition was sent “with this purely military object in view.”4

  In July 1874, Custer led a one-thousand-man expedition to the Black Hills seeking a site on which to build the post. The group included ten companies of the 7th Cavalry, five of which were commanded by George A. Forsyth of Sheridan’s staff; two companies of infantry, commanded by Major L. H. Sanger; and a battery of three Gatling guns and one Rodman cannon, commanded by First Lieutenant Josiah Chance. There were also sixty Santee and Arickaree scouts, among them Bloody Knife and Bear’s Ears, plus naturalists, mapmakers, geologists, prospectors, and one hundred wagons. Fred Grant was along again as an observer, as was Captain William Ludlow, chief engineer of the Department of Dakota. Ludlow was one of the cadets in the “fair fight” Custer had called for the day before graduation in 1861 that led to his arrest.

  The two-month expedition covered 1,200 miles. The column marched west from Fort Lincoln near Bismarck through the northern section of the Black Hills, then swung through Montana and Wyoming, entering the southern part of the hills from the west. Some thought Custer was marching into trouble. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche were raiding in Kansas, and there were rumors of thousands of Sioux braves also on t
he warpath. “The Indian Bureau has fed the Indians all winter and the ponies are fat,” Sherman commented wryly, “so the savage warrior is in fine trim for the acquisition of fresh scalps and plunder.”5

  Some thought Custer’s expedition would spark a general Indian war. “There is no earthly doubt that the Sioux will fight and are preparing for the conflict,” the New York World’s correspondent wrote as the expedition set out.6 “Fighting these red-skins will be no child’s play,” the Chicago Journal opined. “An army will be needed to save the little force now marching up the Missouri River before they enter the last and superstitiously-held rampart of the native American Indian.” The paper believed that “before the summer is past it will not be surprising if we learn of hot work there between Gen. Custer and his 1,000 soldiers and Red Cloud with his 10,000 braves.”7

  Others thought Custer was more than able to handle himself, as he had been on the Yellowstone expedition the previous year. A newspaper reporting on a patrol against the Sioux that spring asserted that Custer’s command “is good for ten times its number, and if he meets them, will probably follow them into their reservations, after giving them a severe thrashing.”8 Custer’s acumen, as well as the three Gatling guns he was taking into the Black Hills, would give the cavalrymen a decided edge.

  The threats grew as the expedition moved deeper into Indian territory. In August, Hunkpapa chief and war leader Four Horns, Sitting Bull’s uncle, reportedly took to the field with thousands of braves, saying there was “no excuse for any of the Indians to remain at peace with the treacherous whites,” and he would “intercept Custer if he lost half the braves of the nation.”9 Custer’s scout, Bloody Knife, spoke to four Sioux braves who said “the whole Sioux Nation” was awaiting them. As the expedition drew to a close, there was rumor of a major battle with four thousand Sioux in which Custer lost forty men.

  But in fact there was no war, no battle, and not even many shots fired in anger. The only deaths were two privates, one by disease and the other by accident. Custer’s only face-to-face Indian encounter was when he and some scouts discovered the small village of Hunkpapa leader One Stab and boldly entered it, professing peace. Custer and the chief smoked a pipe, and all seemed well. But later One Stab tried to steal a rifle from one of Custer’s scouts, and presently he and his village vanished.10

  Another Sioux leader named Two Bears stampeded some government mules and sent word that Custer was “an old woman.”11 But Custer and a few men quickly rounded up the mules, and Two Bears took no further action. “The Sioux complain that they had other business cut out for the summer, an expedition of their own against the Crows,” one paper archly reported, “and as they cannot attend to Custer’s raid and the Crows at the same time, they proposed that the General should postpone his movement till next season.”12

  For the most part the Black Hills expedition was enjoyable, passing through beautiful country in agreeable weather. The rugged landscape was magnificent, but the whites were not as impressed with the Sioux holy sites. When an Indian guide named “Goose” brought Custer to a sacred Sioux cave—a hole a few feet deep in the side of a sandstone cliff—Custer countered that in the East there was “a cave that went 11 miles under the Earth, through which streams ran, and where the fish were blind.” Goose responded with “a long and loud laugh of incredulity.”13

  The hunting was excellent, the best Custer had ever seen. He and Ludlow killed a grizzly, taking half a dozen shots to fell the eight-hundred-pound beast. “On receiving the final shot he cocked himself up on his hind legs,” a reporter wrote, “and showing his huge teeth, grinned defiance; but like all who fight Custer, he was compelled to surrender.” The reporter said the bear looked so fearsome he would “rather see old Sitting Bull” than another like it.14 In addition to his kills, George brought back alive two badgers, four owls, an eagle, and a young jack rabbit for the Central Park Zoo.

  The most important thing they brought back, however, was gold. Members of the expedition found small deposits at several locations. Custer sent a dispatch from the field noting the discovery but added that further study was needed. Yet even a hint of confirmation of the gold legends was enough for the newspapers.

  “GOLD IN THE GRASS ROOTS AND IN EVERY PANFUL OF EARTH BELOW,” screamed the Bismarck Tribune on August 26. “Anybody Can Find It—No Former Experience Required.” The fact that miners would likely load up on supplies passing through Bismarck on their way to the alleged goldfields leant an aspect of civic duty to the Tribune’s cheerleading. But other papers quickly picked up the story of riches for the taking, which most people either already believed, or wanted to.

  Colorful anecdotes spread that fueled the gold fever. A story circulated that a squaw came into Fort Lincoln with a gold nugget the size of a hen’s egg, which she had simply picked up in the hills. A satirical piece attributed a tale to Chief Spotted Tail that goats grazing on Black Hills grass dropped dead from lumps of gold in their bellies. Hunkpapa senior chief Running Antelope reportedly faced off with Custer about the expedition, complaining that when white men saw how rich the land and its mineral wealth were, they would want to take it—which was true whether or not gold was actually there.

  Custer added to the rising mania when the expedition returned. He said in an interview that press reports of the gold finds “are not exaggerated in the least; the prospects are even better than represented.” He added that “the scientific gentlemen are satisfied that far richer discoveries will be made on further exploration. The miners also agree with this view of the case.”15

  But the “scientific gentlemen” were more circumspect. The expedition’s chief geologist, Newton H. Winchell, was skeptical about the gold finds, and he and another geologist named Donaldson “assert that Custer does not know of his own knowledge that any color of gold was found in the Black Hills.”16 Fred Grant concurred with the skeptics. The reasoned consensus was that there was probably some gold in the area, but not enough to justify the hysteria. “And so after all that has been said about the Black Hills by Custer and his ‘merrie’ men, there is no gold there,” the Hamilton Examiner concluded. “Prof. Winchell of Minnesota has knocked the wind out of that bag of gas.”17

  A story went around that the gold that was discovered had been planted. The previous year there had been a fraudulent gold find near Sioux City, and an 1872 diamond hoax in Wyoming had swindled investors out of over $500,000.18 Conspiracy theorists pointed to the beleaguered Northern Pacific Railroad, alleging it was trying to raise the value of its land grant to get out of bankruptcy. According to one paper, “The question with those who are instigating the movement into the Black Hills is not, ‘Is there gold out there?’ It is, ‘Can we get a rush of men through our cities, over our railroads, and a rush of money in our pockets?’”19 An anonymous writer who claimed to have been on the expedition cautioned people not to think there was gold enough to pay for the trouble of going there. “Of course the people already in the d—d country would like to induce as many more victims to come as possible;—ditto the railroad people.” The writer alleged that “somehow or another, Gen. Custer seems to be in the ring interested in ‘bulling’ that country—I suppose from interested motives, of which I know nothing.”20

  Custer bridled at such personal attacks. The fact of gold in the Black Hills, he said, was “as certain as the law of gravity.”21 General Forsythe agreed with his assessment, saying the area was as rich as Colorado or Montana. The Bismarck Tribune lionized him: “All men not dead to the necessities of the hour, to the progress of the age, welcome the discoveries of Gen. Custer, and hail him, and the noble officers who have supported him as benefactors.”22 In the same edition, the paper offered a “magnificent Chromo-lithograph of this popular cavalry commander” with every two-dollar yearly subscription.

  Sheridan wrote a widely reprinted communiqué to Sherman saying that while he suspected there might be some gold in the area, it was not in great quantities. He feared that gold fever in the Black Hills woul
d lead inevitably to conflict as trespassers encountered young warriors seeking to protect their lands. “Many of the persons now crazy to go [to] the Black Hills never think of how they are to exist after they get there, or how they could return in case of failure,” he wrote.23 Sheridan deployed troops at key transit points to try to interdict prospectors and enforce Sioux rights under the 1868 treaty. “Not until the treaty rights of the Indians are extinguished by Congress,” the Boston Globe noted sarcastically, “can the impatient gold-seekers enter into the happy valley discovered by Custer, except at their own peril.”24 The paper called the Custer expedition “entirely uncalled for and useless, beside being in direct contravention of treaty stipulations.”25

  The debate over whether gold existed, and in what amounts, was overcome by circumstances. Gold fever had taken hold as the Panic of 1873 deepened into a depression. “The country is now restless and full of men out of employment who will not be curbed,” the Bismarck Tribune noted, “men who are infatuated with the idea of sudden wealth, and who will stake life, home and all they hold dear to reach this new Eldorado.”26

  “In vain have the cool-headed warned the adventurous youth of the land not to snap at the gilded bait,” one newspaper observed. “A tale of gold has always been a potent spell and centuries of bitter experience have not been sufficient to teach people that hunting the yellow sham does not pay.”27 Miners and speculators flooded into the Black Hills, and outfitters founded a town that they named after Custer. There was also a Custer Peak, Custer Gap, and Custer Crossing, and gold was being sought in a valley called Custer’s Gulch.28 The military could not stop the influx, and the Bismarck Tribune said it “would require a larger army than it would take to guard the Rio Grande, were every Mexican determined to supply himself with American stock.”29