The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer (17 page)

The expedition moved onward, following its old trail in a northerly direction. On August 14, Custer chose Bear Butte, an isolated granite laccolithic formation rising twelve hundred feet above the prairie on the northern fringe of the Black Hills, as the location to halt his column and prepare his official report. Ironically, Bear Butte held a special place in the Sioux Nation, where they had for a century gathered to trade, share news, and participate in religious ceremonies.

The column marched east from Bear Butte through the hot, dusty plains, with Custer pushing the troopers hard. With the band striking up “Garry Owen,” the Seventh Cavalry triumphantly paraded into Fort Abraham Lincoln on August 30, after a march of sixty days and 883 miles.

Public outcry for admittance to this forbidden territory became overwhelming following Custer's expedition. The nation was gripped in a deep economic depression, and the news about gold aroused the imagination of the poverty-stricken public. Adventurers immediately made plans to journey to the Black Hills to prospect for gold. It was reasoned that the Sioux were not settled within the Hills and they should therefore be opened to settlers, miners, and loggers and for any other practical purpose.

Naturally, word of this potential intrusion into Lakota Sioux land in violation of the treaty infuriated many tribal leaders. The Lakota called Custer's route through the Black Hills the Thieves' Road and prepared for war. This tribe of fierce warriors was not about to give up Paha Sapa without a fight. They had taken the Black Hills by force and would defend it with force, if necessary.

 

Seven

Prelude to War

While the Sioux and their allies held meetings to discuss this grievous intrusion into the Black Hills, George Armstrong Custer and Libbie visited Monroe, Michigan, for six weeks before settling in for another winter at Fort Abraham Lincoln. The social season was once again quite agreeable to the Custers as the post maintained its normal routine of drills and monotony. In addition, Armstrong put his free time to good use by writing about his remarkable career.

One of Custer's classmates at West Point, J. M. Wright, wrote that the “greatest surprise in Custer's whole career in life was that he should turn out to be a literary man. If any one had said in the four years before the Civil War that Cadet Custer would in fifteen years be a scholar of artistic tastes and writer of graphic contributions to the magazines, the prediction would have been derided.”

To consider that this devil-may-care cavalier could gain fame as an author may have seemed preposterous given his lack of attention to academics, but Custer did indeed turn out to be a literary man, and an accomplished one at that.

Custer's initial foray into the publishing world was with a New York–based weekly sportsman's journal called
Turf, Field and Farm,
which suited his taste for horses, hounds, and hunting. His first article or “letter,” which he wrote under the pseudonym Nomad, was submitted on September 9, 1867—just six days before his court-martial convened at Fort Leavenworth. In spite of the pseudonym, readers knew that Nomad was actually the famous General Custer. He would write a total of fifteen letters describing his adventures to this publication between September 1867 and August 1875.

Custer, convicted by court-martial, served out much of his one-year suspension with Libbie while residing in Phil Sheridan's quarters at Fort Leavenworth. It was during this period of time that Custer began work on his Civil War memoirs, and six years later at Fort Lincoln he was still working on this subject. Unfortunately, he never finished these memoirs, completing only the period from his reporting for duty at Bull Run in July 1861—three days out of West Point—to the May 5, 1862, Battle of Williamsburg where he was said to have captured the first battle flag taken by the Union army.

In 1872, while stationed at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Custer began writing a series of articles for a magazine called
Galaxy
. In 1874, Sheldon & Company, the owners of the magazine, published selected articles in book form titled
My Life on the Plains or, Personal Experiences with Indians,
which remains in print today. The book, which detailed his activities on the Great Plains from 1867 to 1869, established Custer as a bestselling and respected author.

Also in 1874, Custer became embroiled in a literary feud of sorts with Colonel William Hazen over the merits of the land that the Northern Pacific Railroad was attempting to sell along its route. The sale of this property was vital to the future of the railroad, but Hazen responded in a letter to the
New-York Tribune
on February 7, 1874, with a pessimistic view, claiming that the land in that region was not worth “a penny an acre.”

Custer received a request from friend Tom Rosser to aid the cause. Custer obliged with an April 17 letter published in the
Minneapolis Tribune
that refuted Hazen's assertions and presented a glowing picture of the future of the railroad and the agricultural opportunities along its route. He added that “the beneficial influence which the Northern Pacific Railroad, if completed, would exercise in the final and peaceable solution of the Indian question, and which in this very region assumes its most serious aspect, might well warrant the general Government in considering this enterprise one of National importance, and in giving to it, at least, its hearty encouragement.”

Custer's letter was reprinted in a booklet published by the railroad and widely circulated. He wisely ignored Hazen's rebuttal and declined to engage in a full-scale literary duel. Instead, Custer relied on the public to determine whose opinion was more credible—and Custer was a respected and famous man whose word was golden.

Predictably, Custer was treated like a VIP by the railroad and richly rewarded for his loyalty. He was presented with a spacious wall tent, which had been stenciled with “NPRR.” Custer and Libbie traveled on the Northern Pacific compliments of free passes, occasionally in a private coach, and were once provided a special train.

He also was known to write speculative political pieces without a byline for leading Democratic papers such as the
New York World
and for his friend James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the
New York Herald
. In the summer of 1876, Bennett expected to receive anonymous articles from Custer about the Little Bighorn Campaign.

Perhaps the most entertaining and revealing, if not informative, writing by Custer, however, is his letters to Libbie and others and her letters to him. This correspondence, which was edited into a book by Marguerite Merington, one of Libbie's closest friends, reveals the intrigue of their courtship, the terror of the Civil War, the adventures and dangers of frontier life, and an inside story of the politics that ruled the day. The subject of each letter could range from the most mundane to an outburst of personal intimacy but most of all showed the devotion that these two lovers shared throughout the years.

The only other excitement at that time was the arrest, capture, and escape of Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face, who had boasted about killing sutler Augustus Baliran and veterinarian Dr. John Honsinger during the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873.

The killing by the Sioux of Baliran and Honsinger, which occurred on August 4, 1873, during the Yellowstone Expedition, was not on anyone's mind until scout Charley Reynolds visited Standing Rock Agency during the winter of 1874. While observing a scalp dance, Reynolds overheard Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face brag to a large audience of his peers that he had killed the two men. Reynolds immediately relayed that information to George Armstrong Custer at Fort Abraham Lincoln.

Custer summoned his friend Captain George Yates and ordered him to assemble fifty men for an unspecified detail. This detachment from companies F and L, along with First Lieutenant Tom Custer, proceeded to Fort Rice, where it was joined by another fifty-man detachment from the Seventh Cavalry commanded by trusted Seventh Cavalry captain Thomas H. French.

“Tucker” French was born on March 5, 1843, in Baltimore. His father passed away from a fever when Tucker was fifteen. In January 1864, French enlisted in the Tenth Infantry, and he fought in the Petersburg siege and the Battle of Weldon Railroad and was wounded at Chappell House, Virginia. In 1868, he accepted a captaincy in the Nineteenth Infantry on March 26, 1868. When the army was reorganized he was assigned to the Seventh Cavalry on January 1, 1871, and gained a reputation as a crack shot with the .50-caliber “Long Tom” Springfield infantry rifle that he carried. French had distinguished himself on August 11 during the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 while commanding two companies dispatched by Custer to thwart an attempt by the Sioux to cross the Yellowstone River. His detachment successfully prevented the Indians from crossing and closing with the main body. French had also commanded Company M during that summer's Black Hills Expedition of 1874.

Now, on December 13, 1874, the temperature was fifty-four degrees below zero as the column moved along the frozen Missouri River. After traveling twenty miles as instructed, Yates opened the sealed envelope that contained Custer's orders. Yates was directed to Standing Rock Agency to arrest Rain-in-the-Face for the murders of Baliran and Honsinger. Total secrecy was to be maintained; Custer feared that if the Indian agent learned of the mission he would warn the Sioux warrior. Charley Reynolds would travel ahead of the column to ascertain the whereabouts of the fugitive.

After arriving at Standing Rock that evening and spending a freezing night in an unheated warehouse, Yates learned that Rain-in-the-Face was located in a Hunkpapa Sioux camp some three miles away. It was ration day, and all the Indians would be visiting the Hatch Trading Store at the agency to draw provisions. As a diversion, a forty-man detachment was dispatched to another Indian camp ten miles away to inquire about some other Sioux who were wanted for depredations on the Red River. Yates and the remaining men then rode to the traders' store.

Tom Custer, Charley Reynolds, and several others entered the store while the remaining troopers waited outside the entrance. Reynolds pointed out Rain-in-the-Face to Custer, who grabbed the surprised warrior and threw him to the floor. Rain-in-the-Face's hands were bound, and he was escorted outside and strapped on a waiting horse.

Due to the lateness of the hour, the cavalrymen and their captive remained at the agency that night. They departed on the morning of December 15 and struggled through eighteen-inch-deep snow to arrive at Fort Lincoln the next day.

Rain-in-the-Face was confined in the wooden guardhouse in the company of a civilian caught stealing grain from the government. Custer, through an interpreter, patiently interrogated his prisoner for hours. Finally, Rain-in-the-Face confessed to the murders in the presence of all the officers, his account matching the conclusions of the military.

Rain-in-the-Face and the white thief remained chained together in the guardhouse for several months until friends of the thief tore through the wall one night and freed them both. Rain-in-the-Face later said that he had been released by a sympathetic “old soldier,” who had waited until he was safely away before firing his weapon to sound the alarm. Whatever the circumstances, the Sioux warrior fled to Sitting Bull's camp, where Rain-in-the-Face vowed revenge for his arrest—promising to someday cut out Tom Custer's heart and eat it. As fate would have it, both Tom and Rain-in-the-Face would meet one day in the future.

The interminable winter on the Northern Plains finally turned into springtime and afforded an opportunity for its inhabitants to move about the territory. In spite of government warnings to the contrary, by the summer of 1875 more than eight hundred prospectors had invaded the Black Hills to seek their fortune. This provoked the Sioux, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, to retaliate by attacking these invaders and raiding wagon trains, mail routes, and settlements in the unceded territory. Soon the miners were demanding that the government protect them from Indian attacks.

Brigadier General George Crook was dispatched to uphold the provisions of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and chase off the miners. And if anything could be done to pacify the miners, Crook was the man who could do it.

George Crook was born on a farm near Dayton, Ohio, on September 8, 1828. He had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1852, near the bottom of his class, and was assigned to an infantry regiment in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to escort duty and building military posts, Crook was involved in the Yakima War of 1855–56 in eastern Washington Territory, as well as the simultaneous Rogue River War in southern Oregon. He received a poisoned arrow in the hip during one engagement with the Pitt Indians.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Crook was made colonel of the Thirty-sixth Ohio Infantry, which was assigned to western Virginia, and by applying lessons learned on the frontier successfully fought guerilla actions against Confederate interests. He was wounded at Lewisburg in May 1862 and promoted to brigadier general three months later. Crook commanded the Kanawha Division at South Mountain and the September 1862 Battle of Antietam. He was then placed in command of the Second Cavalry Division and participated in the heavy fighting of the August–September 1863 Chickamauga Campaign. In February 1864, Crook assumed command of the Kanawha District and led a series of raids between Lynchburg, Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. He was given command of the Department of Western Virginia in the summer of 1864 and was part of Major General Phil Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley Campaign, where Crook distinguished himself on numerous occasions and became known as Uncle George.

Crook was promoted to major general in October 1864 and was at his headquarters at Cumberland, Maryland, on February 21, 1865, when he and Brigadier General Benjamin F. Kelly were captured by Southern partisans. He was released one month later, just prior to the end of hostilities.