Authors: James S Robbins
The Real Custer (59 page)
SO “JOYOUS” AND “RECKLESS OF IT ALL”
W
hite stones, singly, in pairs, and in groups, stand scattered along Battle Ridge, marking where Custer and his men fell. They tell the story of the conclusion of the fight, but more particularly they speak to its importance. No other American battle has been so meticulously recorded and memorialized, every man honored with a marker on the spot where he met his end, the grisly scene frozen in time in clean, white marble.
Custer's luck had finally run out. Five of the twelve troops of his regiment were annihilated. Over 260 men of the 7th Cavalry and three civilians were killed or died of wounds, about 200 of them with Custer. Indian dead were probably half that number. Around fifty-five troops were wounded. According to tradition, the only known survivor from the 7th on Battle Ridge was Captain Keogh's wounded horse, Comanche, which was respectfully cared for by the regiment until it died in 1891.
It took days for word of the battle to get out. Terry and Gibbon were seven hundred miles from Bismarck. The quickest way back was by boat; the
Far West
had come up as far as the mouth of the Little Bighorn, but there was work to be done on the battlefield before the ship could cast off. The burial details began on June 28. George and Tom Custer were laid to rest side by side. Officers' graves were marked with slips of paper embedded in wooden disks or in spent cartridges, sealed with wax, and driven into the ground. The enlisted men, less well known outside their companies and harder to identify, were buried where they fell, in marked but nameless graves.
1
The most seriously wounded were moved by litters the fifteen rough miles to the steamboat and packed aboard, accompanied by Dr. Porter, the sole surviving surgeon. The
Far West
finally departed on July 3, and the ship's captain, Grant Marsh, made the voyage to Bismarck in fifty-four hours, a remarkable feat given the uncertainties of navigating a mostly unfamiliar, uncharted river course. They arrived at the city at 11:00 p.m. on July 5. Captain Marsh, Dr. Porter, and Captain Edward W. Smith of Terry's staff went immediately to
Tribune
editor Clement Lounsberry to hand him the story of the century. The group hurried to the telegraph office at the Northern Pacific station, where telegraph operator J. M. Carnahan alerted the Fargo office to cut him through directly to St. Paul because “the Custers are all killed.” Carnahan “took his seat at the keys and scarcely raised himself from chair for twenty-two hours,” Dr. Porter recalled. “What he sent vibrating around the world is history.”
2
Lounsberry meanwhile set type on a July 6 extra edition under the headline “MASSACRED.” He worked from Terry's dispatch and the notes made by slain reporter Mark Kellogg.
Around 2:00 a.m., Captain Smith reported the news to Captain William S. McCaskey, who was in temporary command at Fort Lincoln. McCaskey assembled the officers and read them Terry's dispatch. It did not come as a complete surprise; there had been some excitement among
the Indians near the post for the last few days, and whispers of a battle, but no details. “The fearful depression that had hung over the fort for the last two days had its explanation then,” Lieutenant G. L. Gurely noted.
There remained only to inform the spouses. The officers' wives had gathered in the Custers' parlor late the previous evening, nervous at the lack of hard news among the forbidding rumors. They attempted to sing hymns to calm themselvesâsomeone started playing “Nearer, My God to Thee” on the piano, but Libbie cut her off, saying, “Not that one, dear.” Instead they simply prayed and went to bed.
At 7:00 a.m. Captain McCaskey, Lieutenant Gurley, and post surgeon J. V. D. Middleton went next door to the back of the Custer quarters and told the maid Maria they wanted to talk to Mrs. Custer, Mrs. Calhoun, and Miss Reed. Libbie had not slept well that night; hearing footsteps she came out of her room in her housecoat, asking Lieutenant Gurley the reason for the early visit. He did not reply. The group gathered in the parlor, and McCaskey gave them the awful news.
“Imagine the grief of those women,” Gurley recalled, “their sobs, their flood of tears, the grief that knew no consolation.”
3
Maggie Calhoun, apparently not understanding, asked McCaskey, “Is there no message for me?” But the message was the same for all of them. After regaining her composure, Libbie, knowing there were more wives to be notified, asked for a wrap to accompany Captain McCaskey on that unhappy duty. “This battle wrecked the lives of twenty-six women at Fort Lincoln,” Libbie wrote, “and orphaned children of officers and soldiers joined their cry to that of their bereaved mothers.”
4
The
Bismarck Tribune
had the most complete version of the massacre but did not get the scoop. On June 27, Terry wrote a preliminary account of events that he gave to a scout named Muggins Taylor, who
was to take it overland to Fort Ellis near Bozeman, where it could be wired out. The
Bozeman Times
ran an extra with the story July 3, but for some reason it was not sent out by telegraph. Meanwhile, Muggins had given an account to a reporter with the
Helena Herald
, and editor Andrew Jackson Fisk sent the news to the AP in Salt Lake City on July 5.
5
Sheridan and Sherman dismissed this first report as a rumor. They generally distrusted the press, plus the scale of the massacre was implausible, and Custer had been falsely reported dead many times before. Official word, relayed by telegraph from Bismarck, through St. Paul and Chicago, reached Washington at 3:00 p.m. on July 6, eleven days after the first disastrous day of battle. Sherman received the confirmation during an interview in Philadelphia, where he was dismissing the stories of a massacre as speculation.
Nevin Custer was in Hastings, Ohio, headed back to Monroe when he got the news. “I didn't believe it at first,” he said, “but I drove on home as fast as the team could travel and there I found Monroe all draped in mourning.” Willard Glazier, formerly of the 2nd New York Cavalry, was riding west near Euclid, Ohio, on July 5 when he heard a rumor of the massacre. “The source of this information made it appear reliable,” he wrote, “and yet comparatively few were disposed to believe it.” Glazier said that “news was slow in reaching points east of the Mississippi and was then often unreliable,” and that with respect to Custer, “people were wholly unprepared for the final result which was flashed across the country.”
6
The skepticism that greeted the first reports made the confirmation all the more shocking. Little Bighorn was compared to the massacre of over one hundred troops led by Major Francis L. Dade in Florida in 1835, or the 1862 uprising in Minnesota in which Santee Sioux under Little Crow killed 644 whites.
7
But the body count alone did not explain the stunned reaction. There had been more-deadly battles in recent
memory; the total casualties at Little Bighorn were small compared with many Civil War engagements. But that war had been over for more than a decade, and frontier battles with Indians were not supposed to end this way. And it was the first time that reports of Custer's death were true.
Custer's Last Stand launched a thousand debates, many of which continue to this day. A
New York Times
writer wisely predicted that “the affair will be made use of as an argument by those who insist upon transferring the Indian Bureau to the War Department, and also by those who oppose such legislation. It will be made an excuse for increasing the Army, and held up as a reason for cutting it down.”
8
As with contemporary issues, the battle was viewed through many lenses, whether hindsight, political expediency, people with axes to grind, or those seeking to place blame. The battle became a national Rorschach test; people saw in it whatever they wanted, and still do.
For many, the massacre was a call for all-out war on the Indians.
Harper's Weekly
ran a cover illustration by Thomas Nast of a diplomat shaking hands with a warrior carrying a bloody club, the angry shade of Custer standing between them, mockingly titled “The New Alliance.” Colonel William H. Rowan, a former rebel partisan ranger, offered the services of a regiment of ex-Confederates to avenge Custer's death “to let the world see that we of the âLost Cause' are not deficient in patriotism.”
9
But not all former rebels concurred; a Tennessee paper asserted that given Custer's treatment of Mosby's men at Front Royal, he “deserved to be degraded by Grant, scalped by Sitting Bull, and hearted by Rain-in-the-Face.”
10
Buffalo Bill, who had already begun playing himself on stage shows in the East, had returned to the frontier during the Sioux expedition to scout with the 5th Cavalry. On July 17, 1876, the unit fought a skirmish
with Northern Cheyenne braves at Warbonnet Creek in Nebraska. Cody galloped toward the Indians and shot the first brave who came into range. He leapt from his horse, tore off the Cheyenne's feathered headdress, and scalped him. Cody raised the gory trophy aloft and said, “The first scalp for Custer!” Bill later learned that the man he had killed was named Yellow Hair.
The Sioux campaign continued into the spring of 1877, but in the end most of the Indians simply gave up and returned to the reservations. Sitting Bull, Gall, and Rain-in-the-Face fled to Canada. Crazy Horse surrendered, then was killed in captivity. There was no comparable Indian defeat to serve as a bookend to the Custer tragedy.
The Democratic press jumped on the election-year issue. A July 16
New York Herald
editorial entitled “Who Slew Custer?” blamed President Grant both for seeking negotiations with the Indians and for the corruption in the agencies that Custer himself blamed for increasing tensions on the Plains. The pro-Tilden
New York World
suggested that if Custer had been in overall command of the expedition, it would have turned out differently, and that he died because of Grant's pettiness after Custer's testimony against Belknap.
