The Real Custer

by James S Robbins

  55.“2nd Cavalry,” in A History of the Troops Furnished by the State of Iowa to the Volunteer Armies of the Union Which Conquered the Great Southern Rebellion of 1861 (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1866).

  56.Custer’s name was one on a list of about fifty or so confirmed, including his old rival Judson Kilpatrick.

  57.E. Custer, Tenting on the Plains, 72.

  58.M. Quad [Charles Bertrand Lewis], “Army Letter,” 1.

  CHAPTER 20

  1.Elizabeth B. Custer, Tenting on the Plains or General Custer in Kansas and Texas (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1887), 196.

  2.Marguerite Merington, ed., The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950), 162.

  3.E. Custer, Tenting on the Plains, 195.

  4.GAC to EBC, March 18, 1866, in Merington, The Custer Story, 179.

  5.E. Custer, Tenting on the Plains, 195.

  6.Ibid., 198.

  7.EBC to Mrs. Sabin, May 1866, in Merington, The Custer Story, 182.

  8.Ibid., 183.

  9.Data below are from Mark G. Grandstaff, “Preserving the ‘Habits and Usages of War’: William Tecumseh Sherman, Professional Reform, and the U.S. Army Officer Corps, 1865–1881, Revisited,” in Journal of Military History, July 1998, 521–45.

  10.E. Custer, Following the Guidon, 282.

  11.EBC in Arlene Reynolds, ed., The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer: Reconstructed from Her Diaries and Notes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 49.

  12.Quoted in GAC to EBC, March 12, 1866, in Merington, The Custer Story, 177.

  13.Merritt was promoted to command the 5th Cavalry on July 1, 1876.

  14.For Averell’s brevetting to general ranks, see Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States, vol. 14, part 2, 980, 982. Averell was reappointed to the Army by an act of Congress dated August 1, 1888, at the rank of captain. But Averell was by this time independently wealthy and sought the reappointment so he could serve as the assistant inspector general of the Soldier’s Home in Bath, New York, and look after the welfare of the veterans who lived there.

  15.“Letter from General Custer,” Freemont (OH) Journal, March 2, 1866.

  16.House Reports, 39 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 30, Pt. 4, 72–78 (Ser. 1273).

  17.Custer to Andrew Johnson, August 13, 1866.

  18.George A. Custer, “The Philadelphia Convention,” New York Times, August 22, 1866.

  19.The Anderson (SC) Intelligencer, August 30, 1866, 1.

  20.Marshall (MI) Democratic Expounder, August 16, 1866, 1.

  21.Custer letter quoted in Washington (DC) National Republican, August 27, 1866, 2.

  22.Columbia (SC) Daily Phoenix, August 22, 1866, 3.

  23.GAC to J. M. Howard, January 19, 1864, in Gilder Lehrman Collection #GLC09024; and “Maj-Gen Custer on the Punishment of the Rebel Leaders,” New York Times, May 7, 1865, 2.

  24.Detroit Free Press editorial quoted in Hillsdale Standard, September 11, 1866.

  25.Custer, “The Philadelphia Convention.”

  26.Custer letter quoted in Washington (DC) National Republican, August 27, 1866, 2.

  27.Burlington Hawkeye, August 31, 1866.

  28.Dubuque Herald, September 29, 1866.

  29.Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson, with an Introduction by John T. Morse, Jr. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 589.

  30.“A. Johnson at Indianapolis,” Burlington Daily Hawkeye, September 13, 2, and “The President’s Tour,” New York Times, September 14, 1866, 5.

  31.John Y. Simon, ed., Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 16 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 547.

  32.Quoted in Garry Boulard, The Swing around the Circle (iUniverse, 2008), 160.

  33.Toledo Blade, September 26, 1866.

  34.Noted in Burlington Hawkeye, September 4, 1866.

  35.“Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum,” July 30, 1866.

  36.Quoted in Boulard, The Swing Around the Circle, 163.

  37.“Kicked by Political Friends,” Hillsdale Standard, October 9, 1866.

  38.Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 11, 314. Barns was something of a Judas himself. He later made common cause with the Radical Republicans to have himself appointed U.S. pension agent in Detroit.

  39.“The Long Haired Custer,” Dubuque Herald, November 1, 1866.

  40.Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke), Ekkoes from Kentucky (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1888), 100.

  41.“Nasby’s Last,” The (St. Alban’s) Vermont Daily Gazette, November 17, 1866.

  CHAPTER 21

  1.EBC to Rebecca Richmond, December 6, 1866, in “Mrs. General Custer at Fort Riley, 1866,” Minnie Dubbs Millbrook, ed., Kansas Historical Quarterly 40, no. 1, Spring 1974, 63–71.

  2.Quoted in Rutland Daily Globe, April 21, 1876, 2. Maginnis served in the 11th Vermont Infantry regiment in the Civil War and later was a U.S. congressional delegate from the Montana Territory. He never actually fought Indians.

  3.Gibbon in Sarf, 53.

  4.“Gen. George A. Custer,” New York Times, December 31, 1867.

  5.See generally, Edward M. Coffman, “Army Life on the Frontier 1865–1898,” Military Affairs, Winter 1956, 193–201; and Major E. A. Garlington, “The Seventh Regiment of Cavalry: The Army of the United States” in Historical Sketches of Staff and Line with Portraits of Generals-in-Chief, Theo F. Rodenbough and William L. Haskin, eds. (New York: Maynard, Merrill, 1896), 251–52.

  6.“The Regular Army—Wanted, A Man,” Burlington Hawkeye, September 24, 1868.

  7.Elizabeth B. Custer, Tenting on the Plains or General Custer in Kansas and Texas (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1887), 397.

  8.Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 23.

  9.Theodore R. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1868, 298. Interestingly, Davis notes that there was no desertion among the black “Buffalo Soldier” regiments (305).

  10.In Stephen E. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 270.

  11.Pope to Sherman, August 25, 1865.

  12.“Condition of Texas,” New York Times, March 5, 1866.

  13.Albert and Jennie Barnitz, Life in Custer’s Cavalry: Diaries and Letters of Albert and Jennie Barnitz, 1867–1868, Robert M. Utley, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 52–53.

  14.Kenneth M. LaMaster, Forth Leavenworth (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2010), 40.

  15.For a useful narrative on the Fetterman massacre, see S. L. A. Marshall, Cimsoned Prairie (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1972), 48–73.

  16.Pope to Col. T. S. Bowers, June 3, 1865.

  17.G. M. Dodge to Pope, August 2, 1865.

  18.“Reported Massacre by Indians,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, December 27, 1866, 4.

  19.GAC to EBC, May 2, 1867, in Marguerite Merington, ed., The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950), 199.

  20.Anglo American Times, May 18, 1867, 10.

  21.Anglo American Times, May 25, 1867, 5.

  22.Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” 295.

  23.Barnitz and Barnitz, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 34.

  24.GAC to EBC, May 2, 1867, in Merington, The Custer Story, 199.

  25.Bedford (IA) Southwest, May 4, 1867.

  26.GAC to EBC, May 2, 1867, in Merington, The Custer Story, 199.

  27.Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” 298.

  28.Barnitz and Barnitz, Life in Custer’s Cavalry, 44.

  29.Barnitz in Evan S. Connell, Son of a Morning Star: Custer and Little Bighorn (New York: North Point Press, 1984), 168.

  30.Quoted in Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahma Press, 1991), 50.

  31.Barnitz and Barnitz, Life in Custer’s Ca
valry, 51.

  32.Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” 298.

  33.GAC in Merington, The Custer Story, 205.

  34.GAC in ibid., 206.

  35.Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” 301.

  36.W. T. Sherman to John Sherman, in The Sherman Letters, Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 289.

  37.E. Custer, My Life on the Plains, 40.

  38.Account in the Boston Daily Globe, April 15, 1873, p. 4.

  39.Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, July 8, 1867, 1; Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” 303.

  40.New York Tribune, July 01, 1867, 4.

  41.Anglo American Times, July 20, 1867, 7.

  42.St. Cloud Journal, July 18, 1867, 2.

  43.Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, July 24, 1867, 8.

  44.Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, July 22, 1867, 8.

  45.E. Custer, Tenting on the Plains, 699, 702.

  46.Parsons left the service in 1870 to become an Episcopal Minister. He died in 1878 in Memphis during a Yellow Fever epidemic after ministering to the dying and is recognized by the church as one of the “Martyrs of Memphis.”

  47.See General Court Martial of General George Armstrong Custer, 1867. Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army), Record Group 153, Publication Number T1103; National Archives, Washington.

  48.“Gen. Hancock and the Indians,” Burlington Weekly Free Press, September 6, 1867, 2.

  49.GAC, September 26, 1867, USMA Special Collections.

  50.“Soldiers have been sentenced to be branded, as well as marked, with D, both for desertion and for drunkenness. The mark has commonly been placed on the hip, but sentences to be branded on the check and on the forehead have been adjudged. Other markings imposed by our courts have been H D for Habitual drunkard, M for mutineer, W for worthlessness, C for cowardice, I for insubordination, R for robbery, T for thief. Sometimes also entire words were required to be marked as ‘Deserter,’ ‘Habitual Drunkard,’ ‘Mutineer,’ or ‘Swindler.’ The branding was done with a hot iron; the marking with India ink or gunpowder, usually pricked into the skin or tattooed.” See Colonel William Winthrop, Military Law and Precedents, 2nd ed. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920), chapter 20, section 6.

  51.“The Defence of Gen. Custer,” New York Times, December 28, 1867, 1.

  52.GAC, September 26, 1867, USMA Special Collections.

  53.EBC to Rebecca Richmond, November 20, 1867, in Merington, The Custer Story, 214.

  CHAPTER 22

  1.GAC, December 2, 1867, USMA Special Collections.

  2.Quoted in Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 105.

  3.Editorial from the Adrian Michigan Times, quoted in the Defiance (OH) Democrat, December 28, 1867.

  4.GAC, December 2, 1867, USMA Special Collections.

  5.See Minnie Dubbs Millbrook, “Rebecca Visits Kansas and the Custers: The Diary of Rebecca Richmond,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, Winter 1976, 366–402.

  6.Ibid.

  7.Harrisonburg Rockingham Register and Advertiser, January 23, 1868, 3.

  8.Trial coverage in “Gen. Custer Accused of Murder,” Fairfield Herald (SC), January 29, 1868, 2.

  9.Harney built a reputation as a fierce Indian fighter in the Second Seminole War and on the Plains. But he was an honest and fair man, and after his death in 1889 the Sioux bestowed on Harney the name “Man-Who-Always-Kept-His-Word.”

  10.“The New Indian War on the Plains,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, August 29, 1868, 4.

  11.Theodore R. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1868, 298.

  12.“Letter from a Female Captive among the Indians,” Fremont (OH) Weekly Journal, January 8, 1869, 1.

  13.Theodore R. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1868, 307.

  14.D. A. Kinsley, Favor the Bold (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967–68), 78.

  15.In some respects it was similar to special operations successfully conducted during the Second Seminole War.

  16.Forsyth’s account of the fight is in his memoir, Thrilling Days in Army Life (New York: Harper Brothers, 1900).

  17.Addison Erwin Sheldon, History and Stories of Nebraska (Chicago: University Publishing, 1914), 135.

  18.Dodge to Pope, August 2, 1865.

  19.Theodore R. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1868, 293–94.

  20.Philip Henry Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, vol. 2 (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1888), 307, 297–98.

  21.W. T. Sherman to Grenville M. Dodge, September 24, 1868, quoted in Robert G. Athearn, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 224.

  22.Robert Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahma Press, 1991), 61.

  23.GAC letter, October 8, [1868], USMA Special Collections.

  24.Sherman to Hazen, September 26, 1868.

  25.Sherman to General W. A. Nichols, October 9, 1868.

  26.Quoted in Vincent Coyler, “Notes among the Indians II,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art, October 1869, 474–81.

  27.Hazen to Sherman, November 22, 1868.

  28.Keim’s account of the events, based on his newspaper dispatches and follow-up research, was first published in 1870. DeBenneville Randolph Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders: A Winter Campaign on the Plains (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1885).

  29.Ibid., 103.

  30.Anglo-American Times, December 5, 1868, 78.

  31.Albert and Jennie Barnitz, Life in Custer’s Cavalry: Diaries and Letters of Albert and Jennie Barnitz, 1867–1868, Robert M. Utley, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 215–16.

  32.Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders, 113

  33.Meder to Godfrey, November 27, 1927, Godfrey Papers, USMA Special Collections.

  34.Custer AAR to Sheridan, November 28, 1868.

  35.Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, vol. 2, 315.

  36.See Vincent Colyer, “Shall the Red-Men be Exterminated?” Putnam’s Magazine, September 1869, 372.

  37.Frank W. Blackmar. ed., Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History, Embracing Events, Institutions, Industries, Counties, Cities, Towns, Prominent Persons, etc., vol. 2 (Chicago: Standard Pub., 1912), 177.

  38.Elliott in Evan S. Connell, Son of a Morning Star: Custer and Little Bighorn (New York: North Point Press, 1984), 195.

  39.Letter by Frederick Benteen to William J. De Gresse, December 22, 1868, reprinted in the New York Times, February 14, 1869, originally appearing (unsigned) in the St. Louis Democrat.

  40.“Indian Relics,” New York Times, June 13, 1869.

  41.Letter by Frederick Benteen to William J. De Gresse, December 22, 1868, reprinted in the New York Times February 14, 1869, originally appearing (unsigned) in the St. Louis Democrat.

  42.Meder to Godfrey, November 27, 1927, Godfrey Papers, USMA Special Collections.

  43.Letter by Frederick Benteen to William J. De Gresse, December 22, 1868, reprinted in the New York Times, February 14, 1869, originally appearing (unsigned) in the St. Louis Democrat.

  44.“Indian Treatment of Whites,” Vermont Daily Transcript, January 9, 1869, 2.

  45.Memphis Daily Appeal, January 4, 1869, 1.

  46.“The End of the Indian War and ‘Ring,’” New York Times, December 22, 1868, 6; and “Sheridan’s Winter Campaign,” New York Times, December 4, 1868, 4.

  47.Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, vol. 2, 318.

  48.Anglo American Times, February 13, 1869, 14.

  49.“The Indians. Col. Wyncoop’s Letter Resigning His Agency,” New York Times, December 19, 1868, 3. Note that Wynkoop believed that any excesses on the campaign would be committed by Indian scouts and militia units, not by U.S. Army troops.r />
  50.Anglo American Times, February 13, 1869, 14.

  51.Nelson Appleton Miles, Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles (Chicago: Werner, 1896), 150.

  52.Quoted in the Anglo American Times, April 26, 1873, 10.

  53.Sheridan denied saying this, though witnesses claim he did. But Sheridan did not originate the expression. In May 1868, on the floor of Congress, Montana delegate James M. Cavanaugh said, “I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian—and I have seen thousands—except when I have seen a dead Indian.” The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session, Fortieth Congress (Washington: Office of the Congressional Globe, 1868), 2638. See also Ohio Statesman, June 4, 1868, 1.

  54.GAC to EBC, January 1869, in Marguerite Merington, ed., The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950), 224.

  55.Newport Daily News, March 18, 1869.

  56.New York Times, March 21, 1869.

  57.See March 21, 1869, dispatch in the Grand Traverse Herald, April 15, 1869.

  58.Galveston Flakes Daily Bulletin, April 8, 1869, 1.

  59.My Life on the Plains, 241.

  60.Custer’s report in the Galveston Flakes Daily Bulletin, April 8, 1869, 1.

  61.See report in “Official Report of General Custer’s Late Campaign—Rescue of the Two Female Captives,” New York Herald, April 3, 1869, 3. A detailed though dramatized account of these events is in Charles J. Brill, Conquest of the Southern Plains (Oklahoma City: Golden Saga Publishers, 1938), chapters 10 and 11.

  CHAPTER 23

  1.George Armstrong Custer, My Life on the Plains. Or, Personal Experiences with Indians (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1874), 20.

  2.Anglo-American Times, July 23, 1870, 11.

  3.Custer, My Life on the Plains, 37–39.

  4.Quoted in Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 122.

  5.EBC to GAC, July 1873, in Marguerite Merington, ed., The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950), 250.

  6.Godfrey to Roe, February 28, 1918, Godfrey papers, USMA Special Collections. Godfrey continued, “I feel indignant over such lies and I’ve got to explode a little to get it out of my system, and this time you are the goat!”