The Real Custer

by James S Robbins

  Custer reported to Sheridan, who dressed him down for getting involved with politics at the expense of his duties. Custer sent two contrite telegrams to Sherman but was simply told to report to Fort Lincoln, where he would remain while the expedition went forward. On May 5, Grant recommended command of the 7th Cavalry during the expedition be given to Major Marcus Reno. “The Army,” Sherman said, “possesses hundreds of officers who are as competent for the command of any expedition as General Custer.”50

  Custer’s removal from the Sioux campaign was widely commented on. “Everybody that has any acquaintance with [Custer] will admit that a little ‘set down’ will do him no harm,” the Baltimore American opined. “Gen. Grant is very unlike Custer in his method of doing things, but he knows how to administer an effective ‘snub’ in a quiet way.”51

  But the anti-Grant papers were less measured. “The removal of General Custer from his command by the President is a scandalous performance,” the Indiana Democrat groused. Custer’s testimony “was displeasing to the extortionate post traders in whose interest the President has been working; and Custer is removed to deter other officers from telling what they knew.”52

  Custer went to see General Terry in St. Paul for one final try. According to Colonel Robert Hughes, Terry’s brother-in-law, Custer begged Terry on his knees for help. Terry was sympathetic; he liked Custer and respected his experience in operations against the Indians. Terry, a graduate of Yale Law School, helped Custer draft a persuasive appeal to Grant,

  “I appeal to you as a soldier to spare me the humiliation of seeing my regiment march to meet the enemy and I not share its dangers,” he wrote.53 Sheridan made his case, saying Custer’s early return from suspension in 1868 had worked out well. And Terry cleared up the matter of the disputed corn shipment, saying there was no record of Custer’s complaint because he had never passed it along to the War Department and instead authorized delivery himself.

  On May 8, Grant relented. He allowed Custer to lead the 7th Cavalry on the campaign, but Terry remained in overall command of the mission. The Democratic press pounced. “General Custer goes in disgrace, being permitted to fight only under punishment,” observed the New York Herald. “This last bit of news shows weakness and apology on the part of the President, but it does not wipe out the stain with which he has covered himself.”54 But the pro-Grant press pushed back, particularly noting the fickleness of papers that used to hold Custer in low regard. “No officer in the United States army has received more abuse from the democratic newspapers than the brilliant and dashing Custer,” the Baltimore American noted. “But now that the president has found it necessary to give him a gentle reminder that there are courtesies due to superior officers, which the bravest of the brave are not at liberty to neglect, these caustic critics have suddenly discovered that Custer is the most accomplished officer in the United States army [and] that he is the greatest Indian fighter on the continent.”55

  Some papers had it right. “Gen. Custer, although he is a very garrulous man, and talks too much for his own good, is a gallant officer, whose past record ought to have spared him the humiliation from which he has so narrowly escaped,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It should prove a warning to him, however, of the danger of being such a swift and willing witness in partisan investigations, especially when it eventuates that he has nothing to say of any value.”56

  Custer was elated. He again was given a chance to salvage his career and reputation and find redemption on the battlefield. After Custer learned of Grant’s decision, he ran into Captain William Ludlow and told him excitedly that once the campaign was under way he would “cut loose” at the first opportunity.57 He planned to go out among the Indians and find a battle he would be remembered for.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “DON’T BE GREEDY”

  Early on May 17, 1876, the 7th Cavalry set off from their camp near Fort Lincoln with close to 1,000 men, 1,700 animals, and 200 wagons, in a column stretching two miles. Mists lay low in the cool, early-morning darkness, and the cavalrymen had the illusion of “riding in the sky.”1

  The command passed the fort to cheers from the whites and wailing from the resident Indians, their traditional sendoff to warriors. The band struck up “Garryowen”; Tom Custer waved his hand toward the column and called to someone at the fort, “A single company of that can lick the whole Sioux nation!” He was perhaps unknowingly paraphrasing Fetterman’s boast before he and his command were wiped out.2

  George Custer was his usual flamboyant self, wearing his frontier garb, his hair cropped short. Reporter Mark Kellogg wrote: “Gen. George A. Custer, dressed in a dashing suit of buckskin, is prominent everywhere. Here, there, flitting to and fro. In his quick eager way, taking in everything connected with his command, as well as generally, with the keen, incisive manner for which he is so well known. The General is full of perfect readiness for a fray with the hostile red devils, and woe to the body of scalp-lifters that comes within reach of himself and brave companions in arms.”

  The campaign was very much a family affair; Tom was there, of course, and brother-in-law James Calhoun. Along for the adventure was Custer’s eighteen-year-old nephew, Armstrong “Autie” Reed, listed officially as a herder but really just out for the summer with his uncle. Boston Custer was there too, as a “guide.” Nevin Custer said that they had “gone back with [George] after his last visit home, just to see the country and be along with him as leader of the expedition.”

  Libbie accompanied the column for a day before riding back to the fort, and the couple had an emotional leave-taking. In light of later events, some took this as a premonition, but it was not unusual for them. While he was in Washington, George showed some of Libbie’s love-laden letters to a woman who said, “Your sweetheart sent them. Never your wife.”

  “Both are one,” George replied.

  “What?” she said. “How long have you been married?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “And haven’t gotten over that?”

  “No,” George said. “And never shall.”3

  The Sioux campaign was relaunched with an almost identical plan to the one partially implemented weeks earlier.4 Again it was a three-pronged operation. Crook was to move north from Fort Fetterman with 1,350 men, the largest of the three columns. Gibbon with five hundred men from the 2nd Cavalry and 7th Infantry would move east down the Yellowstone River from Fort Ellis, and Terry would move west from Fort Lincoln with over nine hundred men, predominately the 7th Cavalry, under Custer, and including a small unit with three Gatling guns. Supply points were set along the Yellowstone where the steamers Far West and Josephine would periodically meet them. Libbie declined an invitation to accompany the ships to meet the column.

  While the campaign plan was little changed, the facts on the ground had been in flux since Secretary Chandler’s December 1875 ultimatum. It was no longer winter, and all the relative advantages the Army enjoyed in the colder months were lost. With the approach of summer, and the accompanying warmer weather, abundant grass, and better hunting, there were significantly more Indians in the area of operations. Besides, four months had passed since the January deadline to return to the reservations, with no dire consequences. If the Indians ever took Sheridan’s threats seriously, they didn’t now.

  Meanwhile, the rationale for the campaign had been overcome by events. The Black Hills were not turning out to be the El Dorado that rumors and reporters had promised. Around the time Crook and Gibbon launched the first, failed Sioux expedition, a prospector named George Drake wrote to the Kansas City Times, “Tell the people in the States that the people who have a means of making a living had better remain there.”5 A reporter from the Times spoke to miners in the area, and while opinions on the prospects ranged from enthusiasm to disgust, most concluded there was not gold enough to justify the rush. He called this a “secret [that] has been jealously and closely guarded by those interested in mining claims and town property in Custer.”6 With interest w
aning, land values in Custer City had collapsed; lots that had sold for five hundred dollars dropped to two dollars. “As far as mining went,” a reporter concluded, “Custer City was a delusion.”7

  James A. Tomlinson wrote to friends in Chicago, “I wish I was home. The Black Hills is a fraud of the first water. Be kind enough to advise any and all my friends to keep out of this corridor of hell, as nothing has really been found here to warrant them coming. There is more suffering than gold here. Oh God! how cold and hungry I am.”8 The New York Times reported that “the only lively business in the region is that of whiskey selling.” The paper alleged that there was a “systematic attempt to mislead” and the entire story of gold was a “monstrous delusion.” Miners were grossing an average fifty-five dollars per month, and “men who are willing to live on starvation diet in the wilderness, and in daily terror of death by violence, for that income, are crazy.”9 The Times called the notion of gold in the Black Hills “the champion swindle of the Centennial year.”10

  Some blamed Custer, accusing him of boosterism at best, and at worst collusion in fraud. But there was no evidence he ever profited personally from the gold rush, and the Bismarck Tribune mounted a vociferous and exaggerated defense. If Custer was guilty, the paper said, he was “guilty of causing at least fifty thousand people to get rich out of the ground the noble red man has no use for” and “opening the richest and most extensive gold fields the world ever knew.”11 It was an improbable claim, but history bore it out. In September 1874, Custer said that he was “satisfied that a rich mining region will be found in the northeastern portion of the Hills.”12 A year and a half later, four miners discovered the Homestake deposit fifty-six miles north of Custer City. Homestake became the largest and deepest gold mine in North America, and by the time it closed in 2002 it had produced over 2.7 million pounds of gold.

  The Sioux expedition went forward regardless of the changing circumstances. Terry moved west on May 17; Crook set off from Fort Fetterman on May 29; and Gibbon’s column, which had set off in April, was already camped along the Yellowstone.

  The campaign attracted a lot of press attention. Sherman had sent word to Terry to “advise Custer to be prudent, and not to take along any newspapermen who always work mischief.”13 But Terry disobeyed Sherman’s guidance and granted permission for a reporter from the Bismarck Tribune to come along. Mark Kellogg, a Tribune reporter and Associated Press stringer, went in place of editor Clement Lounsberry, who was nursing his ailing wife. Kellogg’s reports were also carried in the New York Herald, where Custer had arranged to send his own anonymous reports. As one paper unkindly put it, “Gen. Custer is troubled with a personal vanity which makes him overly anxious to see his name in the papers.”14

  Terry’s column moved west in search of the foe, said to be nearby and in large numbers. The country got progressively more difficult as they proceeded. Rains slowed the advance, muddy tracks hampering the wagons. Custer personally led some scouts, but they found only old Indian camps. Private Peter Thompson of C Company said that Custer’s rushing ahead of the column “would have seemed strange to us had it not been almost a daily occurrence. It seemed that the man was so full of nervous energy that it was impossible for him to move along patiently.” Custer’s thoroughbred mounts outpaced the government-issued horses, and he also had his dogs along “for hunting purposes and many a chase he and his brother had when on this march.”15

  Boston Custer wrote to his mother that George, Tom, and he, with Lieutenant William Cooke, Second Lieutenant Winfield Scott Edgerly, and some soldiers and Indian guides, raced ahead of the column to the Powder River on June 7, seeking a passable route over the badlands, with sharp cliffs, sagebrush, and cactus. They were, he claimed, “the first white men to visit the river at this place.” They got so far out in advance they had to stop, but the column caught up that night. Boston hoped the campaign would be a success, “and if Armstrong could have his way I think it would be,” but other officers with limited experience and “having an exalted opinion of themselves, feel that their advice would be valuable in the field.”16

  Days passed with no signs of the enemy. “All stories about large bodies of Indians being here are the merest bosh,” Custer wrote.17 But as long as the Indians did not want to be found, the lumbering column would never find them. And elsewhere they were making their presence known.

  On June 16 Crook’s column reached the headwaters of the Rosebud River. He received a message from Sitting Bull via Crazy Horse saying, “Come so far, but no farther; cross the river at your peril.”18 Crook crossed, and the next day battle was joined. Crazy Horse struck first. The Indians mounted a series of massed frontal attacks on Crook’s men, a rarity on the Plains, and wholly unlike the tactics of the Apaches Crook was used to fighting, who conducted ambushes with small bands.

  “Come on Dakotas,” Crazy Horse said, leading his warriors into the fray, “it’s a good day to die!” But there was bravery evidenced on both sides, and when Colonel “Fighting Guy” Henry of the 3rd Cavalry was shot through both cheeks and partially blinded, he shrugged off the wound saying, “It’s nothing. For this are we soldiers.”19

  They fought across the valley for six hours until, as one Indian participant put it, “we got tired and we were hungry, so we went home.” Crook had suffered only fifty casualties and held the battlefield. He could have given chase, or resumed his march north down the Rosebud. But he had expended much of his ammunition, and rather than waiting for his train to come to him, he pulled back fifty miles to Goose Creek where his wagons were waiting. There, inexplicably, Crook sat until August.

  Crook felt he had won the battle on the Rosebud, and perhaps he did by most measures. But he squandered his victory by not continuing north toward the other two converging columns. From the Indians’ perspective, Crook won nothing. The whites approached; they were warned to stop; they kept on coming; there was a fight; then the whites went back the way they came. If anything, Crazy Horse could be justified in assuming the victory had been all on his side.

  Crook also made no move to communicate directly with Terry or Gibbon to inform them of the Rosebud battle, or his unilateral decision to bow out of the campaign. This significant lapse in judgment compromised the entire expedition. His column represented about half the strength of the overall force, and Terry and Gibbon assumed Crook was still in the field and maneuvering according to plan. If a detached war party of Sioux and Cheyenne could push back Crook’s men, the entire band of warriors from the combined nations could easily deal with the others—especially a flying column under Custer.

  Libbie wrote to George of news reports of a “small skirmish” between Crook and the Indians. “They call it a fight,” she wrote. “The Indians were very bold. They don’t seem afraid of anything.” But Custer did not receive the letter. Terry complained that he heard nothing from Crook and “if I could hear I would be able to form plans for the future more intelligently.”20 But by then Crook was out of action, waiting for reinforcements, and hunting and fishing in the Bighorn Mountains.21 He sent word of the Rosebud battle to Sheridan in Chicago, but the dispatch did not reach Terry until a week after the battle at Little Bighorn. S. L. A. Marshall concluded, “The whole operation proceeded as if, instead of hunting Indians, the Army was seeking a memorable catastrophe.”22

  Once Terry’s force reached the Powder River, they headed downstream to the supply point on the Yellowstone to find Gibbon. They still had not located the Indians. Crow scouts believed that the band would be found in the “big bend” of the Little Bighorn, then 120 miles distant. To try to get some grasp of where the enemy was, and perhaps where Crook had gotten to, Terry sent a scouting expedition up the Powder River under Major Marcus Reno on June 10.

  Reno was a taciturn officer whom the Arikara scouts called Man With Dark Face. He entered West Point with the Class of 1855, but due to a series of washouts and reinstatements graduated two years late.23 Like Custer, he was often caught breaking the rules, and over his six
years he racked up 1,031 demerits, far outpacing Autie’s 726. But Reno had six years to work on his total against Custer’s four, and he averaged 171.8 per year versus George’s 181.5.

  Reno served in the Civil War as the commander of the 12th Pennsylvania Cavalry and rose to the rank of brevet brigadier general. He was one of three majors in the 7th Cavalry, and the only one present on the campaign. He had never fought in an Indian battle and never before served directly under Custer, since this was the first time all the companies of the regiment had gone on campaign. And Reno had definitely gotten off on the wrong foot with his commander. Weeks earlier when Custer was fighting for his command and career, Reno had lobbied to be named commander in his stead, and Grant concurred.

  Reno scouted about sixty miles up the Powder River, then turned west. He found evidence of an encampment near the Tongue River, and even clearer signs along the Rosebud. Meanwhile, the rest of the command marched to the mouth of the Tongue River to meet the Far West, then proceeded to the Rosebud, linking up with Reno along the way on the nineteenth. His scout had gone farther and taken longer than expected, and Terry chastised him for exceeding his orders. But Reno brought back valuable information. He had run across the remains of huge campsites with evidence of around four hundred campfires, and a trail leading toward the Little Bighorn valley. Reno estimated around eight hundred enemy, though Terry assumed the number was closer to prior reports of 1,500. Custer, who had opposed the scout from the beginning, criticized Reno’s “failure to follow up the trails [which] has imperiled our plans by giving the village an intimation of our presence.”24