The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (64 page)

In a Jan. 28, 1934, letter, Goldin wrote, “McIntosh showed the Indian blood in his features very plainly,” in John Carroll,
Benteen-Goldin Letters,
p. 47. In a June 5, 1934, letter to Goldin, Fred Dustin quoted Charles Roe’s account of finding McIntosh’s body: “[I]t was naked, badly mutilated . . . and the features hammered to a jelly. As our sergeant-major picked up a gutta percha sleeve button, he said, ‘This may lead to its identification.’ ” Later that day, McIntosh’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant Gibson, said that “before leaving Fort Abraham Lincoln his wife gave him those sleeve buttons,” in John Carroll,
Benteen-Goldin Letters,
p. 133. Charles White’s account of how Reno refused to go back for the wounded is in Hardorff’s
Indian Views,
p. 21. Several of the Lakota in the valley fight later told of an officer of unusual courage. It might have been Captain Thomas French, but it also might have been Dr. James Madison DeWolf. According to Charles Eastman in “Story of the Little Big Horn,” several Native participants told him there was an officer who killed three warriors before “a gunshot brought him down” after crossing the river. “The Indians told me,” Eastman wrote, “of finding peculiar instruments on his person, from which I thought it likely this brave man was Dr. DeWolf, who was killed there.” DeWolf made the mistake of taking the leftmost route up the bluff, where a group of Indians were waiting in ambush. Although the warriors apparently rifled through DeWolf’s medical kit, the doctor’s notebook diary was found intact. Later inspection showed that DeWolf had been killed by a gunshot to the chest, then shot four times in the face with his own revolver; see Hardorff’s
The Custer Battle Casualties, II,
pp. 121–24. Porter recounted Reno’s assertion, “That was a charge, sir!” in W. A. Graham,
RCI,
p. 63.

Benteen described his swing left as “valley hunting ad infinitum,” in W. A. Graham,
RCI,
p. 147. Gibson told Camp that he thought he did finally see the valley of the LBH before they headed back for the rest of the column. “He now thinks however,” Camp wrote, “that he only went far enough to look down on the valley of the south fork of Sundance Creek,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 80. Benteen wrote of his premonition of trouble in the LBH Valley in his narrative, in John Carroll,
Benteen-Goldin Letters,
p. 168; he also described how he outwitted his horse Old Dick at the morass, p. 169. My thanks to Susan Beegel for pointing out that by taking the bit out of his horse’s mouth at the morass Benteen unnecessarily delayed his battalion. Camp wrote that Benteen “heard firing just before starting [from the morass],” in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 219. Godfrey heard one of the officers at the morass say, “I wonder what the old man is keeping us here so long for?” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 75. Godfrey said that Weir impatiently said the battalion “ought to be over there” and left the morass without orders; “Benteen, seeing this, immediately ordered the column to advance,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 75. Godfrey recorded Kanipe’s claim “We’ve got them, boys!” in his
Field Diary,
edited by Stewart, p. 12. Martin’s description of his ride from Custer to Benteen, during which he encountered Custer’s brother Boston, is in W. A. Graham,
The Custer Myth,
pp. 290–91, and in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
pp. 101, 104. Martin told Camp he never said, as Benteen claimed, that “the Indians were skedaddling,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 101; however, Edgerly claimed in a July 4, 1876, letter to his wife that Martin said, “The Indians skedaddled, leaving the village,” in Bailly, “Echoes from Custer’s Last Fight,” p. 177. Benteen wrote of Cooke’s note in a July 4, 1876, letter to his wife, in which he commented that Cooke “left out the K in the last packs,” in John Carroll,
Benteen-Goldin Letters,
p. 152. Edgerly reported that Benteen responded to the message by saying, “If I am going to be of service to him I think I had better not wait for the packs”; he also heard Martin “telling the boys that Reno had attacked the village,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
pp. 54, 55. When the battalion reached the split in the trail, Gibson heard Benteen say, “Here we have the two horns of a dilemma,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 80. Martin recounted Reno’s first words to Benteen, “For God’s sake . . . halt your command,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 101. Benteen wrote “My first query of Reno was—where is Custer?” in his narrative, in John Carroll,
Benteen-Goldin Letters
, p. 170.

Chapter 12:
Still Point

Martin claimed that after the battle, on June 27, he showed Benteen where he’d left Custer’s battalion, and Benteen estimated it was only about six hundred yards from the river at the base of Medicine Tail Coulee, in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 105. The interview with Sitting Bull appeared in the November 16, 1877,
New York Herald
and is in W. A. Graham,
The Custer Myth,
pp. 65–73. The Oglala warrior Shot in the Eye corroborated Sitting Bull’s account of there being a significant delay between Reno’s retreat and Custer’s attack: “It was . . . some little time after Reno had been pursued on top of the bluffs that Custer’s command suddenly appeared to the Sioux like an apparition,” in Michael Donahue’s
Drawing Battle Lines
, p. 164. Of this delay, Walter Camp wrote in a June 22, 1909, letter to Daniel Kanipe, “The Indians all tell me that Custer and his men were over across from the village a considerable time threatening to attack, the soldiers occasionally shooting over into the village, but that the soldiers did not at any time attempt to ford the river and come over. All this time the Sioux were crossing and getting ready to attack Custer,” in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 87.

Curtis’s account of his visit in 1907 to the LBH Battlefield with the three Crow scouts is in
The Papers of Edward S. Curtis Relating to Custer’s Last Battle,
edited by James Hutchins, pp. 37–48. According to Joseph Medicine Crow, the name White Man Runs Him is more accurately translated as “Chased by a White Man” and came from a “clan uncle who had once been chased in jest by a white trader, much to the amusement of some Crow men who had witnessed the incident,” in Herman Viola’s
Little Bighorn Remembered,
p. 105. White Man Runs Him’s account of Custer’s actions on the bluff, in which he tells how he “scolded” Custer for not assisting Reno, is in Hutchins,
Papers of Edward S. Curtis,
pp. 51–54. Theodore Roosevelt’s Apr. 8, 1908, letter to Curtis is in Hutchins,
Papers of Edward S. Curtis,
pp. 79–80. In a Feb. 9, 1908, letter to Colonel David Brainard about Curtis’s “Notes,” General Charles Woodruff wrote, “This all lends color to the theory that for three quarters of an hour or more Custer’s column was idle and he watching Reno, but it is an awful theory to contemplate,” in Hutchins,
Papers of Edward S. Curtis,
p. 76. In an Apr. 22, 1908, letter to Colonel W. H. C. Bowen, Curtis wrote, “I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts,” adding that “there certainly is no end of confusion in regard to the Custer affair,” in Hutchins,
Papers of Edward S. Curtis,
p. 85.

For an excellent summary of Walter Mason Camp’s association with the Battle of the LBH, see Hardorff’s
Camp, Custer,
pp. 11–34; according to Hardorff, Camp visited the battlefield a total of ten times, p. 28. Camp made the claim of interviewing 150 Native survivors and sixty soldiers in an Oct. 31, 1917, letter to Libbie Custer, in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 138. Camp’s notes contain an eloquent mission statement: “After having listened to the story of the LBH Expedition from the lips of some of the men who participated therein, the current literature on the subject seemed to present such a tangle of fiction, fancy, fact, and feeling that I formed an ambition to establish the truth. It occurred to me that the essential facts must rest in the minds of many men then living, and that these facts, if collected, would constitute fairly accurate history. This has been my plan: to gather my data from eyewitnesses,” in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 201. Camp dismissed White Man Runs Him’s story about Custer watching Reno’s battle from the bluffs as “entirely preposterous,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 178. Since the three Crow scouts were, by their own admission, the ones who pointed Benteen in the direction of Reno’s battalion on the top of the bluff, it is difficult to see how they could have been, as they claimed, on Weir Peak watching the Valley Fight with Custer several miles to the north at almost precisely the same time. Still, one can only wonder whether there is an element of truth in their suggestion that Custer demonstrated a less-than-sympathetic attitude toward Reno’s situation in the valley. Curley’s statement about the interpreters being responsible for the different accounts attributed to him is in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 170. Burkman, who was with the pack train, claimed that he saw Curley with some Arikara scouts riding away from the battlefield behind a herd of captured Indian ponies, in Wagner, pp. 158–59. Burkman lived out his final days in Billings, Montana, where he repeatedly confronted the Crow scout. “Curley,” he was overheard to shout, “you lie when you tell folks you fought on Custer Hill,” in Wagner, p. 27. Kanipe told Camp of the time he witnessed a similar encounter at a Billings Hotel, in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
pp. 176–77.

In a Mar. 24, 1914, letter to J. S. Smith, the editor of the
Belle Fourche Bee,
which was in the midst of publishing a serialized version of Peter Thompson’s manuscript, Camp recounted how he first came upon Thompson: “Some time after I began to study the battle of the LBH, Sergeant Kanipe . . . told me that a set of four had straggled behind Custer’s command, or in some way had been left behind, after Custer and Reno had separated, and that these four men all got back to Reno’s command before the Sioux did. He then said that if I could only find one Peter Thompson he could tell me all about the matter, as Thompson was one of the four. . . . No one to whom I wrote or talked had seen Thompson or heard of him since his discharge from the army in 1880, until finally I met an ex-soldier who told me that Thompson had gone to work in the Black Hills somewhere after leaving the army, but he had not seen him or heard of him since that time. . . . My inquiries had started some discussion of the man in Deadwood, and a former superintendent of the Homestake Mining Co. wrote me that Thompson had gone ranching some twenty years before that, and suggested that I address him at Alzada [Montana]. I did so, and soon had a reply from the object of my long search,” in the archives of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Camp described how Thompson’s story was received by Godfrey and the other veterans in an Apr. 4, 1923, letter to Kanipe, in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 165. He told of Thompson’s career in Montana and his battlefield tour with him in a May 28, 1923, letter to Godfrey, in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
pp. 168–69. Camp’s continued and tortured attempts to reconcile Thompson’s story over the course of more than twenty years are chronicled in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn
. “I . . . have thought it over a good many times to try to reconcile it with the known facts,” Camp wrote, “or to account for ideas on which he is certainly mistaken, but have had to give it up,” p. 169. Camp’s statement that Thompson’s
Account
“could be edited into good shape but I hardly think the historian would have the moral right to do that,” is cited in a footnote in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 126. Thompson referred to the “moving panorama” in a Jan. 26, 1909, letter to Camp, LBHBNM, 312 c12473A&B, cited in Wyman and Boyd’s introduction to Thompson’s
Account,
p. iv. The moving panorama was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the slide show or PowerPoint, in which a series of sequential images painted on a large spool of canvas was unrolled before an audience. Thompson’s reference to the preacher’s comment, “Thompson, your memory is too good,” is in a Feb. 12, 1909, letter to Camp, in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
pp. 35–36; in that letter, Thompson also states, “I do not think that any two persons can look at the same thing and tell it in the same way because our temperaments are not the same.”

Anyone writing about Peter Thompson is indebted to Michael Wyman and Rocky Boyd’s “Coming to an Understanding of Peter Thompson and His Account” in the Eighteenth Annual Symposium, June 25, 2004, edited by Ronald Nichols, pp. 37–54, as well as their preface and introduction to
Peter Thompson’s Account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn: The Waddington Typescript,
pp. i–v, published in 2004. I am personally indebted not only to Rocky Boyd for all his research help, but to June Helvie for permission to quote from her mother Susan Thompson Taylor’s unpublished manuscript “Thompson in Custer’s Cavalry, 1875–1880” (subsequently referred to as the Susan Taylor MS), in which she refers to and quotes from three different Thompson sources in the family’s possession: Thompson’s original notes, recorded in a small notebook when Thompson was still in the army; a first draft of the narrative composed prior to 1900 (subsequently referred to as the pre-1900 MS); and a shorter narrative written before 1912 (subsequently referred to as the pre- 1912 MS). Both early versions of the narrative contain material that never made it into the published 1914 account, which (with some minor variations) is the basis of subsequent published editions of the account. Susan Taylor’s unpublished manuscript also frequently refers to her many conversations with her father about the battle, in which he expanded upon the published account.

Susan Taylor described her father’s composition process: “After his hand healed [from a wound received during the battle] but while he was still in the cavalry, Thompson bought a small notebook and, in this, he jotted down events of the campaign of 1876 as he recalled them and at random. When he wrote his pre-1900 original MS, he had a lot of trouble with the sequences and guessed at the dates,” Susan Taylor MS, p. iii. When working on what would become the published version of his
Account
in the summer of 1913, Thompson frequently discussed the manuscript’s contents with his wife. Susan Taylor, who was seven years old at the time, was “a fascinated listener”: “When Father discussed points in the MS, or proposed changes, Mother acted as a ‘devil’s advocate.’ She would ask him just how it really went and just what he had actually seen. He would tell her. She especially urged him not to put down the statements of things he had not personally witnessed. . . . She insisted that he could not differentiate among facts, rumors and plain lies if he had not personally seen these things and that he should protect himself from being called a ‘liar’ in spots. But, he did not listen to her. He said, ‘That was the way it was and nobody can fault me for that.’ Too bad, as Mother was so right. . . . [T]here is too much hearsay in the MS without stating that it is hearsay,” in Susan Taylor MS, pp. iv–v; elsewhere she adds, “Thompson had the bad fault of making positive statements without proof,” p. 327.