Custer

by Larry McMurtry

  SHERMAN AT TREATY OF FORT LARAMIE WITH RED CLOUD.

  The white leaders need not have worried about attendance at Fort Laramie. The Indians came by the thousands, riding their best horses and all their finery, in the way of bear claws and eagle feathers.

  The whites were not a retiring people: the Indians soon realized that these scoundrels wanted it all, the buffalo, the grasslands, the minerals; and they particularly wanted to achieve safe passage along the Platte, for which they were willing to pay the Indians a modest annuity.

  How well the Indians understood this offer is hard to say. They knew it was money, of some sort, but would the whites keep their word? The Indians displayed themselves grandly, so grandly that the more intelligent of the whites probably realized that the plains Indians were a problem that was not going to go away anytime soon.

  A generational divide began to display itself among these tribal peoples: the older warriors wanted to get paid, the younger warriors wanted to fight. Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief whom Custer would kill, said many times what while he loved peace he could not control his young men, who had been trained from birth in a warrior culture: they would fight, no matter what. They were scornful of ambushes, although they held one well when they destroyed Fetterman in 1868.

  Custer would have understood this instinctively, which is not to suggest that he made any special study of the tribes he engaged. He was trained in a warrior society himself.

  What the young men of the plains tribes wanted was to continue fighting, as their fathers had fought. Not for them were trips to Washington and New York. Leave that to Red Cloud and Spotted Tail.

  What they wanted was to attack a wagon train and kill all the whites in it, just as their fathers had done.

  WHILE THE CIVIL WAR HELD the nation’s attention, the Indian problem was mostly put on hold. Custer demonstrated his brilliance as a cavalry officer while white-Indian relations, in most places, were coming to a boil. One of these places was Minnesota, where a well-established immigrant route west from the Mississippi was functioning well. But, in 1862, the Santee Sioux, under Little Crow, promptly unestablished this popular route, the reason for the war being that the Sioux were being starved by crooked contractors. These contractors were supposed to give the Sioux corn but withheld the corn until they could pocket their own stipends. One contractor named Myrick said that if the Sioux were hungry they could eat grass or their own excrement: when the Sioux killed Mr. Myrick they stuffed his mouth with grass.

  It took the army a while to put down this rebellion, by which time immigration on that stretch of the Mississippi had been much reduced.

  Little Crow had been against the uprising, but he was not needed. The army eventually subdued the Sioux and, mindful of public outrage, built gallows enough to hang three hundred men; and would have had not President Lincoln carefully reviewed the files and reduced the number to be hanged to thirty-three.

  What the Indians had to face, in the 1860s and 1870s, was that the whites were not going to back off. Many more whites were killed in messy ways and yet the wagon trains kept coming.

  One of the whites who was in the business of protecting the immigrants was George Armstrong Custer. But he worked for a nation suffering from considerable war weariness. Thousands of shattered families had their lives to put back together. Mothers didn’t want to send their sons into yet more battles—and who could blame them?

  To the surprise and disgust of the soldiers who had actually fought Indians and had seen what they did to captives, a Peace Party began to form, some of whose members had some political clout. President Grant, in his heart, probably sided with the soldiers, but he had more problems to deal with than he could readily handle. He appointed a decent secretary of the interior, J. D. Cox, and left many of these problems to him.

  The Peace Party itself was made up of a miscellaneous collection of do-gooders: Quakers, former abolitionists, reformers of every stamp. The nation was divided into zones, each group controlling a zone. The Quakers got the agency in Indian Territory—what we now call Oklahoma—where they quickly learned that if there is one thing the Indians particularly despise it is farming. The influential Sioux warrior Young Man Afraid of His Horses angrily reckoned that he might learn to farm if he had one hundred years—and what, in the meantime, were his people to eat?

  WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN.

  Probably the bitterest opponent of the Peace Policy was the shrewd and brilliant William Tecumseh Sherman, a frank and outspoken exterminationist. In his view the Indians had to go, and the sooner the better. When Grant put him over the Division of the Mississippi (the West) Grant had the power to effect some change; what he didn’t have, yet, was money. He simply didn’t have the muscle to overpower the Sioux and Cheyenne.

  Sherman, probably the smartest man in Grant’s government, placed his ultimate hopes on the railroads. Once the Northern Pacific was pushed through—a task Custer aided by guarding one of the surveying crews—the buffalo would soon be hunted out and the Indians with them: the tribal peoples would either accept reservation life, or die.

  Custer, I think, mostly agreed with Grant. In his autobiography he writes scornfully of the Peace Party—in particular he condemns the foolish practice of giving the Indians rifles. At the Medicine Lodge parley in 1867 the Indians were given Lancaster rifles, heavy guns which were useful in killing buffalo. The people who were giving the Indians these guns were not the soldiers in the field. Political pressure was soon applied, and dispensing guns to the Indians soon ceased, although they continued to secure many through various trades.

  CHIEF GALL.

  Custer, who rarely saw an Indian who wouldn’t have liked to kill him, heaped much scorn on the Peace Party for their unrealistic views.

  His wife, Libbie, also didn’t like Indians, though some years after her husband’s death she was introducted to the undeniably impressive Sioux leader Gall, a much wounded survivor of the Little Bighorn. Libbie was stunned, and testified willingly to Gall’s superb bearing and ability.

  IN THE FALL OF 1864, an event occurred which outraged all the plains Indians and a goodly number of whites too.

  This was the Sand Creek Massace, an attack on a peaceful Cheyenne village in southern Colorado led by the mad preacher John Chivington. The attack was made on the village of Black Kettle, probably the leading peace Indian of his day, who frantically waved an American flag as his people were being slaughtered.

  JOHN M. CHIVINGTON.

  THE ONLY CHILD SAVED FROM THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE.

  Chivington was at that time based in Denver, a city that had more reason than most to worry about outrages and depredations from the red men, due to the fact that east of town was an open prairie stretching several hundreds of miles. Any whites who crossed it—and many did, particularly after gold was discovered in Colorado—were vulnerable to attack, on a plain where there was virtually no cover to be had.

  There were many attacks. The young men of the plains tribes liked nothing better than to set fire to a wagon train or kill a few gold rushers. Black Kettle was not the only chief who could not control his young men—he was just one of the few to admit it.

  Chivington wouldn’t have spared that village, no matter how peaceful it was. He wanted nothing more than to kill Indians—to wade in gore, as he bluntly put it. He raised perhaps one thousand men and launched his raid at dawn on November 29, 1864. Considering the size of the force that came down on them, it is surprising that any Indians survived, but a few did, escaping along Sand Creek.

  THE SAND CREEK TELEGRAM.

  Some of the military men who rode with the raiders were not happy to find that they were being asked to take part in a slaughter of historic proportions. One young officer, Lieutenant Silas Soule, refused to fight and testified against Chivington at the inquiry that the brutality of the action made necessary. Lieutenant Soule was later murdered while walking on a summer’s night with his bride. Passions ran high on both sides, and, for that matter, sti
ll do. I have been to Sand Creek and find it, like several other massacre sites, a haunting place.

  Black Kettle’s wife received nine wounds at Sand Creek, but Black Kettle carried her to Fort Lyon and she lived, only to be finished off by Custer on the Washita. Sand Creek was very brutal; on a stage in Denver, Chivington exhibited one hundred Cheyenne scalps, and some pudenda, to wild cheers.

  It was then twelve years to the Little Bighorn. Elizabeth was now trying to adjust to army life, with its many vexations. She was not a complainer, despite living in Kansas and North Dakota, two of the bleakest places in the West. About the worst aggravation she would admit to was that one of her husband’s stag hounds wanted to be her lapdog, which did not make for a very good fit.

  THIS STAG HOUND WAS BUT one of the many critters that Elizabeth Custer had to put up with. Custer loved animals and they loved him. At one point he even had a pet antelope. He liked big rangy dogs, dogs that could keep up with him as he loped around the plains on a hunt. As a budding general, Custer had quickly adapted himself to living high, a lifestyle he found hard to give up once his rank dropped back to where it had been. He was a captain for a while, and then, in Kansas, a lieutenant colonel.

  This is when he began to consider being a mercenary in Mexico. Quite a few bored veterans of the Civil War took this route. The United States had handily whipped Mexico in the war of 1846–48, and afterward gained a huge amount of territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, with the Gadsden Purchase coming a little later.

  In Custer’s time the fear was that Mexico was falling under French influence—this was because of the foolish, doomed, sad emperorship of young Maximilian, brother to the Hapsburg Franz Joseph. The real ruler of Mexico was the flintlike Benito Juárez, who tightened the screws on Maximilian whenever he saw fit. The final screw, the young man’s execution, came in 1867.

  It seems doubtful that Ulysses Grant lost much sleep over Mexico—no action was taken nor threats issued: the only consequence, for our story, is that Custer got sent to Texas, as described. The complete indifference that Custer displayed on that strange journey—indifference to the suffering of his troops—was to reappear in spades at the Little Bighorn. He did not consider that an eighty-three-mile forced march might put his weary troops at a disadvantage when they finally had to face what had frequently been described to him as a huge mass of Indians. The battle plan in his own head was all that mattered to him, and by the time he sensed his folly it was too late.

  CUSTER WITH HIS DOG.

  IN 1867, WHEN THE GOVERNMENT had to think seriously about the Indian problem, there were two broad propulations to be reckoned with before white settlement would be safe. These populations, like the buffalo herds they depended upon, were roughly divided between a northern group and a southern. The north belonged to the Sioux, the northern Cheyenne, the Blackfeet, among others, whereas to the south were the southern Cheyenne, the Comanche-Kiowa, and various smaller tribes such as the Kickapoo.

  Sherman, Sheridan, and various other generals realized that, for a time, the war-weary, impoverished army simply was not up to whipping the northern tribes, so, barely, maybe, they could prevail against the southern tribes. The northern tribes had a number of good leaders and were determined to put up a stiff resistance to anyone who cared to take them on.

  That their resistance was stronger then the army’s push was demonstrated once gold was discovered in Montana. To protect what came to be called the Bozeman Trail the army foolishly put three forts in the very heart of Sioux territory: they put them up, but soon found that they could not defend them properly from the thrusts of the outraged Sioux. The racist Captain Fetterman, who believed, like Custer, that he could whip all the Indians that were, rode into a Sioux-Cheyenne ambush and found that, in fact, he couldn’t whip all the Indians that were.

  Councils flourished in this period. The Oglala leader Red Cloud, who sometimes kept the negotiators waiting a week or two while he hunted buffalo or otherwise amused himself, informed the government that those forts had to go, and in fact they went—this was in 1868, and was probably the high-water mark for Native American diplomacy. Red Cloud backed the army off, as no one else quite did. The Bozeman Trail remained not safe for miners, but miners came anyway and many of them paid with their lives.

  Briefly beaten in the north, the War Department decided to push Kansas as a place they might successfully protect. Railroad workers were busy extending the Kansas Pacific Railroad. They needed to be fed, which is what Buffalo Bill Cody did—and they needed to be protected from raids, which is what, in theory, the army did.

  Custer was among the protecting forces. He parked Libbie at Fort Riley, the safest fort, and then proceeded into the great flatness with three hundred men and a band. The latter was thought to improve morale—which, considering the difficulties of the mission, proved a heavy task.

  A large—too large—expedition was set loose at about this same time. This was the expedition led by General Winfield Scott Hancock, whose name became a byword for military futility. Thousands of men, loaded down with masses of equipment, really had no chance of catching up with the small, fleet bands of Indians, who easily rode circles around the soldiers. Mobility time and again defeated massive force. General Hancock only bothered the few Indians clumsy enough to stay in range; often the Indians they did locate were not the ones who had completed a raid.

  RED CLOUD.

  The difficulty of distinguishing guilty Indians from innocent Indians was stated succinctly in a letter from General Sherman to President Grant:

  We cannot discriminate—all look alike and to get the rascals we are forced to include all.

  An inability to separate the good from the bad perplexed the army from the first. A famous remark: “The only good Indian I ever saw was a dead Indian,” has been attributed to both Sheridan and Sherman. Whichever said it, both probably believed it. Sherman is supposed to have said it to an Indian beggar at the train station in Salt Lake City.

  In Kansas, General Hancock didn’t close with very many Indians, and neither, for a time, did Custer. The latter was in the clutter and muddle of a miserable trip, which saw his men desert in droves. Evan Connell’s figure is five hundred from 1867, and this from Custer’s star unit, the 7th Cavalry. That so many chose the desperate remedy of desertion, even in the Kansas flatness where they could be lost, shows how miserable army life could be for those who were not generals.

  LITTLE WOLF.

  DULL KNIFE.

  SPOTTED TAIL.

  SITTING BULL.

  RED DOG, LITTLE WOUND, RED CLOUD, AMERICAN HORSE, AND RED SHIRT.

  BIG CROW WITH THE GUN HE USED IN THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN.

  ONE BULL WARRIOR.

  WHILE HANCOCK MAINLY DITHERED, CUSTER marched his troops to exhaustion in pursuit of very elusive foes. He clearly knew that the Hancock expedition was a colossal wash. He did his duty for a while, and then reformulated his duty, left his command, and went in search of his wife.

  Libbie Custer had been rather gently raised; she must have been shocked by the coarseness of the frontier. Her books were written many years after the events they describe, and maintained throughout a tolerant and almost bouyant tone.

  CUSTER AND LIBBIE AT MEALTIME ON BIG CREEK, KANSAS, 1869.

  Custer, when he started his search, didn’t know where Libbie was. He sent a message urging her to come to him—but then realized that if she obeyed she would be putting herself in considerable danger of capture and the fate worse than death.

  While searching he wrote her frequent and lengthy letters, in one of which he pointed out that he was not a monk, a fact Libbie probably knew by then.

  Custer apparently rode away from his command with an unfurrowed brow—at least that was the opinion of those who watched him leave—which did not happen until he had enjoyed a good lunch, creature comforts being his natural right. His casual departure from his command was of a piece with his casual executio
n of guerrillas and deserters.

  He found Libbie at Fort Riley and was annoyed, a little later, when the army court-martialed him on eight counts, the most serious charge being abandonment of his command.

  He was found guilty on all eight counts and was sentenced to a year’s removal from the army without pay. In his autobiography he skirts the court-martial. He went home to Monroe, where he tried his hand at writing articles.

  A mere two months passed before General Sheridan began to lobby for Custer’s return. Little Phil soon got his way and the Custers moved back to Kansas.