Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (25 page)

Fully aware that he was outnumbered, Custer waited for nightfall and then ordered his troops to burn the village to the ground, destroy the herd of horses, and withdraw—without waiting for Major Elliott and his men to return or sending out scouts to find him. Many of his men considered leaving troops behind on the battlefield an unpardonable sin, among them Elliott’s close friend, H Company captain Frederick Benteen. Custer claimed that he had ordered the withdrawal to prevent additional casualties and that he was confident that Elliott would return on his own.

Elliott and all his men seemed to have disappeared. Two weeks after the battle, Custer returned to the river with a large force, and, as he described, “We suddenly came upon the stark, stiff, naked and horribly mutilated bodies of our dead comrades…. Undoubtedly numbered more than one hundred to one, Elliott dismounted his men, tied their horses together and prepared to sell their lives as dearly as possible…. The bodies of Elliott and his band … were found lying within a circle not exceeding twenty yards.” Major Elliott’s force had been wiped out, apparently in a single charge.

Although it would have been impossible for Custer to know it, as he bent over the bodies of his men, he was looking at his own future.

Despite this loss, the media celebrated the battle of Washita as the first major victory of
this frustrating campaign, helping to at least partially restore Custer’s tarnished reputation. He became known as a great Indian fighter. And his innovative strategy of taking hostages to prevent Indian counterattacks was replicated successfully by other commanders. At the battle of North Fork three years later, the 284 men of Colonel Ranald Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry defeated 500 Comanche warriors by taking 130 women and children to shield their withdrawal and used those hostages to force the tribe to return to the reservation and release its white prisoners.

But there were rumblings of dissent. As the public learned the details of the attack on a peaceful tribe, some insisted that it was a massacre of innocents rather than a great victory. Then
The New York Times
published an anonymous letter accusing Custer of abandoning Elliott’s men in the field. The irate Custer responded by meeting with his officers and demanding to know who had written it, threatening to horsewhip that person. However, when Captain Benteen stepped forward and admitted it was his work, Custer backed off, although clearly from that point forward there was bitterness between the two officers.

To protect himself from further criticism, Custer surrounded himself with family members, close friends, and proven supporters, including his brother Tom—a two-time Medal of Honor winner—his brother Boston, and his brother-in-law James Calhoun.

Soldiers are prone to dehumanize the enemy during wartime, but Custer’s feelings about the Indians were ambivalent. On one hand, he wrote that hunting buffalo was as exciting as hunting Indians. On the other, he showed great sympathy for the tribes in his book, even suggesting that if he had been treated as unfairly as the government had dealt with the Indians, he might have rebelled, too. Earlier in his life he had learned sign language to teach deaf children and had also studied Spanish at West Point, which made him one of the few officers able to communicate with the Plains Indians in the sign-language Spanish that the tribes used. And finally, there are accounts that he had a long-term relationship with an Indian woman named Spring Grass, who had been taken as a hostage at the Washita River. She was “an exceedingly comely squaw,” he wrote, “possessing a bright cheery face [and] a countenance beaming with intelligence.” According to Captain Benteen, Custer shared his tent with her both in camp and during his campaigns, when she served as a translator. Spring Grass eventually bore two children, although rumors hinted strongly that their father was Tom Custer, because George Custer suffered from gonorrhea contracted during his time at West Point.

The army’s inability to gain control over all the tribes eventually led to a change in strategy. Rather than capturing the Indians, the army would destroy their source of food—the Plains buffalo. The government planned to starve the Indians onto reservations. Unlike the Indians,
buffalo were a very easy target. It is estimated that more than four and a half million buffalo were killed by 1872.

The ambitious George Custer clearly understood the value of publicity, often allowing reporters to ride with his troops. This portrait seems to illustrate the no-nonsense attitude that caused him to reject a cautious approach when his scouts discovered the encampment at Little Bighorn.

Colonel Custer remained a valuable public-relations tool for the government during this period. When Grand Duke Alexis of Russia wanted to tour the West and see wild Indians, for example, Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody were assigned to make all the arrangements. To ensure the grand duke’s safety, Custer supposedly recruited some reservation Indians to “attack” the train, with all the requisite whooping and hollering. Before this event began, these Indians were given a considerable amount of beer; so much beer, in fact, that those show Indians got carried away and seemed to actually be attacking the train. Alexis was so convinced the attack was real that he had to be restrained from shooting at them.

To an ambitious man like Custer, who lived for the battle—and for the acclaim that came with victory—these assignments must have been terribly boring. But Custer’s Luck held once again—and he managed to turn a mundane task into career gold: The military was needed to protect the men who were building America’s railroads as they expanded into Indian lands. In 1873, the Northern Pacific approached the Black Hills, the sacred lands promised to the Sioux forever in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868. That expansion came to an unexpected halt when the company went bankrupt, taking with it numerous other businesses and precipitating the Panic of 1873, the worst economic crisis in the early history of America. Unemployment skyrocketed and the government became desperate to find new sources of revenue. For several years, there had been rumors of vast gold deposits in the Black Hills—exactly what was needed to restore the failing economy. On July 2, 1874, Custer led a thousand troops out of Fort Rice on the Missouri River into the Black Hills to protect the surveyors searching for gold.

Naturally, accompanying this expedition were eager young newspapermen from New York and Philadelphia anxious to report the news of a new American gold rush—and to bestow the proper credit on the stalwart Colonel Custer, who was leading the way into the future.

On July 27, the first strike was reported on French Creek. In what can accurately be described as a masterstroke of public relations, somehow George Custer, a military officer who had never touched a shovel, managed to receive at least partial credit for the gold strike. Within days, the
Bismarck Tribune
reported, “Gold in the Grass Roots and in Every Panful of Earth Below: Anybody Can Find It—No Former Experience Necessary.”

For Custer, the timing seemed perfect: Within months, his colorful autobiography,
My Life on the Plains,
was published. This supposedly true tale of the adventures of a fighting man on the frontier sold well and was met with critical acclaim, going a long way toward restoring his image. Only those who were with him during those times knew the truth, and the increasingly bitter Benteen suggested the book might more accurately be titled
My Lie on the Plains.

Within a year, more than fifteen thousand miners raced west to the Black Hills to find their fortunes. Initially, the government attempted to lease or even buy this land from the Sioux, but the tribe rejected every offer. There was no price for sacred land. Fighting for the last part of their traditional lands that they still held, bands of Sioux warriors began attacking prospectors. The government ordered the Sioux to return to their reservation within sixty days, warning that if they resisted, force would be brought against them. When the Indians refused, General Sheridan ordered three battalions—one of them Custer’s Seventh Cavalry—to find and surround the Indian camps and round them up—or wipe them out.

For the Indian fighter George Custer, this was an opportunity to get back in the saddle and ride to what he must have believed would be the greatest victory of his career. He was so confident, that when he was offered additional troops and two Gatling guns—essentially machine guns and the most fearsome weapon on the Plains—he turned them down, believing those weapons weren’t needed and would only slow down his advance. The possibility that his mostly inexperienced and undertrained troops might be outnumbered did not shake him; the Plains Indians had never defeated a force the size of his Seventh Cavalry.

Custer simply did not appreciate the determination of the tribes camped on the banks of the Little Bighorn River. This was not only a battle for their sacred land, but their last chance to protect their way of life. Freedom to roam the plains was being taken from them. They weren’t fighting for something; they were fighting for everything. Sitting Bull was their great chief, which meant he was in charge of the civil affairs, including all negotiations with the United States government, but when the fighting began, Crazy Horse was in command. Crazy Horse was himself a great warrior, a veteran of many indigenous battles, and an excellent tactician. He is credited with devising some of the basic strategies of guerrilla warfare on which special operations are still based. And in his daring and bravery, he was at least the equal of Custer.

Both sides seemed to know this battle was coming. As Custer prepared to mount up and leave, Libbie had a nightmare that he would die in battle and be scalped, so she pleaded with him to cut his long golden hair. To please her, he did. And during a sacred ceremony, a Sun Dance, Sitting Bull too had a vision: He had seen soldiers and their horses falling upside down from the sky like grasshoppers into his camp. This, he told his people, meant there would be a great victory.

Historians also wonder about one additional premonition: The night before the battle, Custer supposedly ordered his men to finish their whiskey rations, perhaps trying to help his raw troops find their courage; or, as some have suggested, he knew what was waiting for him.

There is no question that when planning his attack, Custer drew on his success at the Washita River. He divided his forces into three components; he commanded the largest force,
while Major Reno and Captain Benteen were in charge of smaller units. He might not have liked Benteen, but obviously he thought him a capable officer. Reno was ordered to charge into the village, presumably to create the diversion that would allow Custer to take hostages. Custer and Reno anticipated that the Indians would flee when attacked, as they had done previously; this was a grievous miscalculation. The warriors so outnumbered Reno’s troops that rather than flee, they initiated their own counterattack, trapping Reno.

Custer had dressed in a white buckskin suit with a bright red tie around his neck for the battle. As Reno’s troops swept down on the camp, Custer waved his gray hat at him in approval. But by the time Reno’s advance had been stopped and his troops were in retreat, Custer was moving along the ridgeline to launch his own attack and was not aware of what was happening.

After Benteen received Custer’s message, “Come quick,” he moved forward with his supply train, but when he reached the battlefield, the besieged Reno ordered him to stay there
and reinforce his troops. The appearance of these reinforcements forced the native warriors to cease their attack. But rather than trying to ascertain Custer’s situation and perhaps provide the timely assistance that might have saved him, Reno and Benteen remained in their defensive position much too long. Late in the battle, an officer in Reno’s command, Captain Weir, insisted that they find Custer. When Reno refused, Weir took the initiative and led his company toward Custer’s position. Far away in the swirling dust he saw riders and got ready to attack—and then he realized that all those riders were Indians and they were riding in a circle, shooting at the ground. Reno and Benteen had followed Weir, but when they discovered it was too late, they retreated to their defensive position and fought it out for the rest of the day.