The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (65 page)

Thompson’s habit of incorporating the unsubstantiated anecdotes of others into his own personal story was essentially that of many of the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, whose accounts are, in the words of Michael Donahue, “a blend of native oral history and personal observation,” in
Drawing Battle Lines,
p. 193. Thompson’s tendency to remember specific scenes, often without any chronological context, is typical of many battle veterans. In the preface to his incomparable memoir of World War II,
Quartered Safe Out Here,
George MacDonald Fraser writes, “Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happening, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place. I suspect it is the same with most folk.”

The novelistic style of Thompson’s
Account
has caused some scholars, such as Fred Dustin, to speculate that the manuscript “may have fallen into the hands of a novelist.” “Not so,” Susan Taylor claims. “Thompson was too independent and stubborn and proud to allow anyone to touch the wording of his MS except for the corrected spelling and grammar. Thompson wrote in the flowery manner in vogue in the late 1800’s,” in Susan Taylor MS, p. vi. Several LBH veterans, including William Slaper (who almost got into a fistfight with Thompson during the 1926 reunion) and Theodore Goldin, dismissed Thompson’s
Account
because James Watson, the soldier who supposedly accompanied Thompson during his adventures beside the river, never mentioned the incident. But as Camp discovered, Watson (who was dead by the early decades of the twentieth century) had, in fact, spoken about the incident to Private Frank Sniffen, in Liddic and Harbaugh’s
Camp on Custer
, p. 88. John McGuire of C Company told Camp the reason Thompson’s and Watson’s stories weren’t mentioned much at the time was that “the company filled up with new men in the fall who would not understand such discussions, and the old men never said much about questions of this kind,” in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 125. Several of the officers Camp spoke with, especially Godfrey, also discounted Thompson’s story because they had heard nothing about it at the time. But as several of the enlisted men Camp interviewed pointed out, this was not particularly surprising: “[A]fter the battle the officers never encouraged discussion of the details of the fighting. . . . [T]he habitual reserve between officers and enlisted men operated both ways,” in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 33. Susan Taylor remembered that Thompson “wished so many times that he could find Watson” so that he could confirm the truth of his
Account,
footnote in Susan Taylor MS, p. 314.

Walter Camp found corroboration of Thompson’s story from the Arikara scout Soldier, who spoke of coming upon two soldiers whose horses had given out and how a group of five Sioux “were circling them.” Camp informed Thompson: “When I told this Ree [Arikara] that at least one of the two soldiers whom he had seen surrounded by the five Sioux was still living he would not believe me”; see W. A. Graham,
The Custer Myth,
p. 44, and Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
pp. 188–89. The researcher Fred Dustin had his doubts about Thompson’s
Account
but grudgingly admitted that the account could not be completely dismissed: “In sifting the wheat from the chaff, it is necessary to exercise patience, discrimination and toleration. A story as a whole may be unreliable, but it may furnish a few corroborative facts that might not otherwise be obtained. Thompson’s alleged story is an instance in the matter of his horse giving out between where Custer’s battalion left Reno’s [i.e., Sun Dance] Creek and Reno’s Hill. Even that incident might have been discredited had not the Rees seen such an event,” in a Feb. 26, 1934, letter to Theodore Goldin, in John Carroll,
Benteen-Goldin Letters,
p. 116. Goldin, who claimed to have delivered a message from Custer to Reno, was an LBH veteran who ran into many of the same problems as Thompson when it came to being believed by others. Unlike Thompson, Goldin proved to be quite good at adjusting his story to meet the expectations of his audience (see W. A. Graham,
The Custer Myth,
pp. 267–78); Goldin’s chief contribution to the history of the LBH was to draw Frederick Benteen into the series of very frank and opinionated letters in John Carroll,
The Benteen-Goldin Letters.

At least one war veteran, and a Medal of Honor winner at that, Frank Anders, found Thompson’s
Account
to be entirely convincing in its sometimes perplexed but always graphic rendering of war. In a Nov. 4, 1940, letter to William Falconer, Anders wrote, “I have carefully read through Peter Thompson’s story twice to see what I could see about it. I see nothing about it that is more strange than any [other accounts]. Peter Thompson went into great detail as to what happened and that seldom or ever sets well with most people as they are generally incapable of visualizing such situations. . . . The experiences of some ten of us inside the Philippine lines from May 4th to May 10th 1899 is very comparable to those of Peter Thompson.” Later in the letter, Anders wrote, “I am supporting Peter Thompson’s story because 1) There is nothing improbable about it if my own experience is any thing to be relied upon. 2) Peter Thompson’s whole life as far as I can find out was one of honesty and integrity if the stories of those who knew him intimately [are] to be taken as a criterion. 3) If Peter Thompson had limited his story to one or two pages instead of what he did, little question about [it] would have prevailed. 4) The stories of men of greater rank who should have been in a position to correctly observe what was going on have been discredited,” in Anders Collection, North Dakota State Archives. My thanks to Rocky Boyd for bringing this letter to my attention.

Thompson’s
Account
was first published serially in the
Belle Fourche Bee
in the spring of 1914; in 1924, A. M. Willard and J. Brown published (without Thompson’s approval) the entire
Account
in
The Black Hills Trails,
edited by John Milek. In 1974 Daniel O. Magnussen published a heavily annotated edition of the Thompson
Account
that did much to obfuscate the importance of Thompson’s contribution to the history of the battle. Walt Cross has provided a more sympathetic reading in his 2007 edition of the
Account,
quite rightly pointing out that Magnussen “spent more energy disapproving much of Thompson’s writing, when he should have . . . dedicated his study to finding what was pertinent and historically viable in the narrative.” In their 2004 article, Wyman and Boyd found corroboration for several incidents in Thompson’s
Account
that others (Magnussen in particular) had found difficult to believe. In their view, Thompson was “a brave, sober, honest and successful man, who found that writing history and dealing with fame were difficult tasks. Repeated publication and distribution of his flawed account of the battle, in combination with the tenor of his times, resulted in his being discredited on a national scale. . . . Thompson’s story should be regarded as an honest eyewitness account,” in “Coming to an Understanding of Peter Thompson,” p. 48. When not otherwise indicated, all quotations in this chapter are from Wyman and Boyd’s 2004 edition of the
Account,
pp. 17–25.

Susan Taylor related her father’s description of how his fingers shook with fright as he attempted to put on the spurs, in the Susan Taylor MS, p. 224; she also recalled Thompson describing himself as running “like a bat out of hell with his wings on fire,” p. 258. On acoustics and the different theaters of battle, see Theodore Goldin to Albert Johnson, Jan. 15, 1930: “I reported these volleys and was a bit surprised to be told they were not heard by the force on the bluffs. . . . [L]ater among a group of officers, someone remarked that it would be easy to determine by putting a company of infantry on Custer Hill, while officers with compared watches went to Reno Hill, and at an agreed time their volleys were fired, BUT WERE NOT HEARD ON RENO HILL. [Not at all strange! Intervening ridges and over four miles distance, wind conditions might strongly affect.—F.D.],” in John Carroll,
Benteen-Goldin Letters,
p. 28; see also p. 82. In a footnote Susan Taylor wrote, “Peter Thompson had impaired hearing, totally deaf in the left ear, and this made his directional hearing poor. Under the rim of the bluff, sound would be distorted,” Susan Taylor MS, p. 263. Server’s comments about the myopia of war are in Eli Ricker’s
Voices of the American West,
vol. 2, p. 141. See also Gregory Michno’s “Space Warp: The Effects of Combat Stress at the Little Big Horn.”

Magnussen refers to “the hordes of black mosquitoes which infest the valley of the LBH,” in a note in his edition of Thompson’s
Account,
p. 142. According to the Cheyenne Young Two Moons, there was a “terrible plague of flies that summer,” in Hardorff’s
Cheyenne Memories,
p. 162. Thompson’s insistence that “I.D. stood for Immediately Dead” is in his pre-1912 MS, in the Susan Taylor MS, p. 265. Corroborating Thompson’s memory of seeing blankets with I.D. stamped on them is a June 29, 1876, letter from Lieutenant John Carland (with the Sixth Infantry) in which he refers to the debris found in the Indian village on June 27: “also blankets that were new and branded, ‘U.S. Indian Department.’ ” My thanks to Rocky Boyd for bringing this letter, which appeared in a Detroit newspaper, to my attention.

Thompson believed that he saw Curley and Custer just upriver of the ford (commonly known as Ford B) at the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee. Camp insisted that Thompson “surely is mistaken in the identity of the man he took for Custer,” in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 164. In a portion of a Feb. 27, 1909, letter to Daniel Kanipe not quoted by Hardorff, Camp speculated that instead of Curley and Custer, Thompson saw “two men belonging to the Sioux camp and mistook them for Custer and Curley. He says Custer had on buckskin pants and a blue shirt. This might have been some half-breed belonging to the Sioux village, and the man he took for Curley may have been some Sioux,” in folder 24, Walter Mason Camp Collection, LBHBNM. In a May 1, 1909, letter to Camp, Kanipe wrote, “I believe they were Sioux Indians, instead of Custer and Curley. I am not sure as to whether Custer had on buck-skin pants or not that day, but I know he had on blue shirt,” reel 1, box 1, folder 7, Walter Mason Camp Papers, BYU. In an Oct. 9, 1910, letter to Camp, Kanipe wrote: “I am like you about Peter Thompson, there is some things that he told that don’t look good to me but the times have been so long that he may have forgotten what he did see and [yet] it may all be so,” reel 1, box 1, folder 14, Walter Mason Camp Papers, BYU. In his edition of Thompson’s
Narrative,
Walt Cross argues that Thompson was mistaken in his identification of Curley: “Rather than a Crow, this Indian was likely a Ree/ Arikara scout. Two Arikara scouts were killed in Reno’s valley fight. . . . Either of these two men could have been the scout seen in the river by Thompson. Warriors traditionally took women from enemy tribes to serve as tribal slaves or even to take them for wives,” p. 43. Cross finds the meeting between Thompson and Custer entirely plausible: “With companies E and F holding the ford and the lack of significant Indian resistance, Custer would be quite comfortable riding a short distance away to reconnoiter or to talk to the Arikara scout,” p. 44. Based on his extensive study of the terrain, Rocky Boyd believes that Thompson never made it as far north as Ford B; he also believes that instead of Custer, Thompson may have seen the Custer look-alike Charley Reynolds, in a personal communication. Hardorff has enough faith in Thompson’s account that he cites his description of Custer along the river to corroborate the fact that Custer was not wearing his buckskin coat and was in his blue shirt; see note in
Cheyenne Memories,
p. 57. In
Lakota Recollections,
Hardorff states: “Although Thompson embellished considerably on his recollections, the essence of this observation does not involve a self-serving matter,” p. 68.

John Gray in
Custer’s Last Campaign
claimed that the movement of the Left Wing down Medicine Tail Coulee was a “
feint
or threat, for even a semblance of an attack on the Indian women and children should draw the warriors from Reno’s endangered battalion, allowing it to regroup in safety; it might then join Benteen and/or the packtrain and provide backup for a stronger Custer attack. . . . Custer was trying to buy time that would enable his full regiment to deliver a decisive attack,” pp. 360–61. Richard Fox claimed the move down Medicine Tail Coulee was “to gather intelligence,” since “Custer had early on anticipated that Benteen’s assistance would be necessary” before he could attack the village, in
Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle,
p. 314. According to the Oglala He Dog, “There was no fighting while Custer down near river but a few shots down there. No general fighting; fifteen or twenty Sioux on east side of river, and some soldiers replied, but not much shooting there. Did not hear Custer fire any volleys,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 207. Curley claimed that as Custer made his way down Medicine Tail Coulee, he “had all the bugles blowing for some time,” in Hammer,
Custer in ’76,
p. 172. The Cheyenne warrior Yellow Nose also commented on hearing music, in “Yellow Nose Tells of Custer’s Last Stand,” p. 40. According to Camp, “Custer no sooner came to the ford than he became aware that the main strength of the enemy were crossing the river at the north end of the village, making it necessary to attack in that direction. He may therefore have made no great effort to cross at the ford, or changed his mind, which would explain so few traces of battle there,” in Hardorff’s
On the Little Bighorn,
p. 212; on the reasons behind Custer’s delay, see also pp. 222–23.