The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  The analogy is not very close. To transform the incredulity of 1950 into the horror of 1876, the imagination must place Gen. MacArthur in personal command of his advance units, kill him and all those directly under his personal command, leave their bodies mutilated upon the battlefield, and permit no survivor to return to mitigate part of the incredibility and horror with a factual explanation. There are still other imaginative additions that must be made. Like Custer, MacArthur was not only a proud but a political general, in deep trouble with the President of the United States, but the imagination must reverse the political affiliations and then send MacArthur to Washington prior to the Korean campaign to testify to corruption in the administration of President Truman—who must next remove MacArthur from command, arrest him, and finally give him a lower command. It also has to make the early winter of 1950 into the summer before a presidential election, with the Democratic and Republican candidates already nominated.

  Both political parties saw the Battle as a political slaughter. To the Democrats, Grant was the butcher. “General Grant’s administration has a heavy responsibility to incur for the reverses and sacrifice of life reported in these accounts,” said the Charleston (S.C.) Times, a more moderate remark than was being made by many Democratic papers in July of 1876.10 Democratic indignation was flamed both by the President’s treatment of Custer in the Belknap case and by the unfortunate publication of Terry’s “confidential” dispatch to Sheridan, which implied that the annihilation of Custer and his troops was the result of Custer’s failure to obey orders. This dispatch was delivered to Sheridan in Philadelphia where he and Sherman were attending the Centennial. Sherman wished to forward it by telegraph to the War Department, but the man who represented himself as a government messenger proved “to be a newspaper man by profession and a thief by incidental occupation,” and the dispatch appeared in print on the evening of July 7.11 Then the President entered the battle by repeating the charge:

  “The New York Herald has interviewed the President at Long Beach, and reports as follows: ‘Correspondent: Was not Custer’s massacre a disgraceful defeat of our troops?

  ‘The President: (with an expression of manifest and keenly felt regret) I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary—wholly unnecessary. He was not to have made the attack before effecting the junction with Terry and Gibbon. He was notified to meet them on the 26th, but instead of marching slowly, as his orders required in order to effect the junction on the 26th, he enters upon a forced margin of 83 (!) miles in 24 hours and thus has to meet the Indians alone.’”12

  So the Battle on the Little Bighorn almost immediately extended its lines across the country and was on its way to being one of the longest battles ever fought.

  3. THE BURIAL

  Even the dead on the Little Bighorn were not destined for composure. In the public mind, they lay mutilated and unburied upon the battlefield, and deep in the mind of this modern age was the belief inherited from all our ancestors, that eternal peace of spirit is dependent upon decency and formality of interment and intactness of the body. There were horror stories about the general condition of the battlefield, but as usual the public imagination focussed upon the top of the Hill and took on concreteness as it approached Custer whose heart, so the stories went, had been cut from his body and then was circled by dancing Indians.

  By July 25, Lt. Bradley felt impelled to make a public report on the dead as he had found them,13 the bare fact being painful enough, as he said, without fictional exaggeration. He admitted that there had been “real mutilation” of Reno’s troopers who had fallen near the Indian village, but of the dead on Custer Hill his account was very different. According to his account, most of the bodies (although not all including the body of Kellogg, the correspondent) had been stripped; possibly a majority had been scalped; there were only a “comparatively few cases of disfiguration”; and Custer lay as if in sleep, his body “wholly unmutilated.”

  Bradley’s report, however, has not always been received as completely accurate, especially his description of the bodies on Custer Hill. There has never been any dispute about the bodies of Reno’s men who fell near the Indian village. Even as Terry’s troops moved through the deserted Indian camp on June 27 they found three burned heads threaded on a wire stretched between lodge-poles,14 and what was found up the valley was not much better. On Custer Hill, it was not so bad, if for no other reason than that mutilation was primarily the sport of squaws and children who had enough to do closer to camp. Witnesses agree that nearly all the dead on the Hill were stripped, lying in bloody socks, that most were scalped and slashed on the right thigh by Sioux knives marking their dead, and that the axe had often been used to finish off the wounded. But only some of those who saw the battlefield agree with Bradley that the disfigurement beyond this was limited, others, both Indians and whites, maintaining that the mutilation was general.15 Most certainly Bradley’s intention in writing the letter was to say what little he could in the way of comfort to the anguished families of the dead, and certainly such an intention affected what he said and did not say; for instance, he gives no detailed or concrete description of mutilations whereas he describes in commemorative prose the unmarked features of his hero whose expression was that of a man “who had fallen asleep and enjoyed peaceful dreams.” Such an intention, however, does not justify the often-whispered rumors that he and others lied about the dead to spare the living. Bradley as chief of Gibbon’s scouts was a trained observer and so unyielding in his integrity and convictions that he sometimes irritated and amused his commander; McClelland’s testimony about the condition of the dead coincides closely with Bradley’s, and part of his assignment as Gibbon’s engineer was to make an objective record. Others undoubtedly saw with their own eyes more horror than these did, since the threshold to horror varies with the observer, but probably the facts were substantially those reported by Bradley in words chosen to blur their visualization. To have seen these facts would have been something else. Nauseated troopers had to be excused from the burial details that crossed the Field on the 28th.

  We can get an early glimpse of the mind’s preference to construct history more by the principles of literature than by the canons of evidence if we observe briefly the construction that both Indians and whites have built upon the mutilated body of Tom Custer,16 and the UNMUTILATED BODY OF THE general. No literary sense is deeper than the one that recognizes the emotions most inherent in an actual situation and then does everything in its power to preserve this emotional unity and to magnify its impact by addition, subtraction, and embroidery. It took only an ordinary instinct for plot to extend the horror done upon Tom’s body into a horror story. One principle intrinsic to all plots—embryonic, amateur, or professional—is that prophecies are fulfilled (“foreshadowing,” as it is called by teachers of fiction). A slight creative act was enough to connect the disembowelment of Tom Custer with the fact he had once arrested the Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face who, it was rumored or surmised, had promised vengeance. Rain-in-the-Face had therefore sought out and found him on the Battlefield. It probably took a little time and literary talent, but only a little, to make the revision that changed the bowels to the heart; the concluding scene in which Rain-in-the-Face eats Tom’s heart also required little creative originality, since one of the oldest conventions of literature and magic has the avenger consummating his vengeance by taking some vital organ of the victim into himself. This was the version of the horror story believed by some of the nation, including Mrs. Custer, 17 and the one given out as “the true story” in 1894 by Rain-in-the-Face (who recanted, however, on his death bed).18

  The other version of the horror story appeared as a special news release on July 1219 and must have received immediate wide-spread acceptance, for Lt. Bradley’s letter, written only a month after the Battle, was partly intended, as he says, to refute the nation’s belief that the Sioux cut out Gen. Custer’s heart “and dan
ced around it.” There is nothing extraordinary, however, about this artistic alteration of bodies—it is a simple illustration of the imagination’s natural aversion to the lower echelons and of the hero’s power to attract to himself the big stories that venture into his magnetic field. This version was given poetic permanence by Longfellow’s “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face,” and both versions are permanent in popular legend.

  Still another set of stories preserves the fact that the General’s body was exempt from mutilation of any kind, for the fact in this case makes a better story in many ways than the fiction of horror. This exemption from mutilation naturally suggests an intentional act of sanctification, especially since his naked body had been leaned against the bodies of two soldiers, “his right forearm and hand supporting his head in an inclining posture like one resting or asleep.”20 Stories have always been told, therefore, that Indians recognized the body of the Big Chief and paid special respect to is bravery,21 and one of these narratives adds a funeral procession of Indians who carried the General’s body to Reno Hill, tried to deliver it to Reno and, when fired upon, carried it back some four miles to Custer Hill and gently arranged it in heroic posture.22 Another narrative version adds many more elements of the tragic drama—fulfillment of prophesy, love interest, tragic kinship between protagonist and antagonist, and purification of the dead. This version, which is gaining in popularity, rests upon the testimony of one Cheyenne squaw who quotes two other Cheyenne women.23 These latter, visitors from the Southern Cheyennes, claimed they recognized the General’s body on the Battlefield because they remembered “the handsome man” they had seen in the campaigns of 1868–69. “Thinking of Me-o-tzi” (who, according to certain stories examined earlier, was “Custer’s Indian wife”24), these two Cheyenne women announced to the Sioux warriors about to mutilate Custer that he was a “relative” of theirs, so the Sioux cut off only a joint of a finger. The Cheyenne women then punched holes in his ears with a sewing awl since he had not listened to what the Cheyenne chiefs had warned him would happen if he fought them again, and ever afterward they hoped that their ponies had kicked no dust on his body.

  There is little or no historical plausibility to any of these accounts. It is doubtful if the Indians knew they had fought Custer’s troops until they began to hear from agency Indians,25 few of the hostiles would have recognized the General or his brother in ideal circumstances, and it is hard to believe that any of them would have recognized the General with short hair and red-beard and black with battle. As for Rain-in-the-Face, he may not have been anywhere near the Battlefield on June 25.26 It intrigues the dramatic imagination, of course, that the body of one brother was horribly mutilated and the body of the elder was exempt from the surrounding violation, but nothing closely resembling authentic history remains to explain this drama or to explain it away. On the other hand, it is within the realm of psychological plausibility that the stories of the deaths of these two brothers are parts of one dramatic unity, the mind having a disposition to operate, in philosophy as well as drama, by “contraries that meet in one.” The Custer brothers were men of battle, and their bodies at times seem to be viewed as a collective expression of man’s contrary feelings about war—that it is both a horror and a god. Moreover, the opposite emotions of hatred and adulation which Gen. Custer had aroused throughout his lifetime seem dramatically validated by what remained of himself and of his other self. But almost no one, whatever he may feel about the General and his brother, fails to observe their approximation to unity in death. All writers dwell upon the fact that their bodies were found close together, and some of the more imaginative picture them as dying with hand holding hand. Sgt. Ryan who was there testifies that they were placed together in a common grave and covered with pieces of tent and then with fifteen to eighteen inches of light earth,27 but neither they nor the others who died on Custer Hill had yet found a final resting place.

  The dead on Custer Hill were buried on the 28th, although it was anything but a final interment. There were few tools among troops equipped to chase Indians, their first obligation was a heavy one—to transport Reno’s wounded to the Far West which was tied up at the mouth of the Little Bighorn, and always there was the chance that the Indian retreat had been a ruse to get the troops spread out in an indefensible position. Reno’s regiment was on Custer Hill one day only, each troop moving across an assigned piece of terrain in something like skirmish order. Certain bodies were missed altogether; others were covered by piles of sage brush; others buried by one of the details having a spade were covered by the ashy soil of the hillside and sometimes were left with a foot or hand protruding. For the officers, generally something shallow was dug, and each officer’s grave was marked by a stake into which an empty cartridge shell was driven containing a number on a piece of paper,28 and then Capt. Henry J. Nowlan made a field sketch showing the location of each officer’s grave. No record was made of the identity of the enlisted men.

  These dead have been buried and reburied until their bones have acquired a restless history of their own determined by ruin, wolves, job not well done, and some strange power that resists finality. It is a history that will be touched on here only lightly for its outline. In the following summer of 1877, Gen. Sheridan instructed his brother, Lt. Col. Michael V. Sheridan, to proceed to the battlefield with Capt. Nowlan and Company I of the 7th Cavalry for the purpose of returning the bodies of the officers to civilization and of re-interring those of the enlisted men. Because of the stakes and Capt. Nowlan’s sketch marking the location of the officers’ bodies, presumably most of them were recovered, but, as noted above, four of them were never found and the hastily buried remains of others were now exposed and scattered. Under the ground, there was also confusion. Sgt. Caddle says that when they came to the stake marked Number One they first placed in the coffin a body that later was discovered to have been lying on a corporal’s blouse: “I think,” he says, “we got the right body the second time.”29 Tom Le Forge, squaw man and scout, who claimed to be only ten feet away when this body was put in a box, said it was a thigh-bone and a skull attached to part of a skeleton-trunk.30 This constitutes what there is of reality under the General’s monument at West Point.

  The bodies of the enlisted men that remained buried over the winter were located by their mounds and by a richer vegetation, and those scattered on the hillside were separated from horses’ bones; each was buried where found and marked by a willow cutting. But there is disagreement over the care given to the burial of the enlisted men in the summer of 1877, and certainly for many years there were bones of men upon the battlefield, and many further attempts to get them buried and to keep them from returning.31 In 1879 Capt. C. K. Sanderson from nearby Ft. Custer erected the first “monument” on Custer Hill under which he placed “all the human bones that could be found,” including “parts of four or five officers’ bodies.”32 This first “monument” was a cordwood crib, which he filled with all the horse bones he could find on the field, probably because he realized the large number of horses’ bones was one of the reasons for the persistency of sensational stories concerning the condition of the dead. In 1881, Lt. Charles Francis Roe erected the present granite monument at the top of the Hill some six feet from the grave marked Number One; and at its base the bones of the enlisted men were reburied in a common grave. In 1890, Capt. Owen J. Sweet placed the present white stone markers at the sites of the individual graves and on the whole they mark the places where the bodies were found. On the officers’ markers the name is given; the markers for the enlisted men say simply, “7th Cavalry, June 25, 1876.”

  Slowly, then, the horror, confusion, and remnants of one kind of reality have become a kind of geometry, a hillside of white stone lines pointing to a hilltop with a granite shaft that can be seen a long way off. Custer Battlefield is now a National Monument, and, like Glacier and Yellowstone Parks, under the direction of the National Park Service.33 Over 130,000 people visit it annually, and they, too, somehow change wh
en they turn off the main highway (US 87) on to the blacktop road leading to the Museum and the Monument and continuing as far as Reno Hill, although most of the traffic goes no farther than Custer Hill. There is a change even in their natural tone of voice, most speaking in a distinctly lower key and cautioning their children. The change in behavior is varied, but there are patterns to it. Those who talk louder than usual generally have some original theory about the Battle, and are further excited by the fact that never in ordinary life have they been surrounded by so many quiet people willing to listen to them. On the whole, most of the remarks overheard on the Battlefield sound foolish and irrelevant. A mother, standing in front of the Museum case displaying the uniform worn by the General at West Point, whispers to her son that he must study hard in school if he expects to get anywhere in life. On the Field, some original genius with a suddenly admiring wife explains to silent people what really happened at the Battle. The explanation is usually simple and often ingenious: Gen. Custer reached the top of the Hill and was doing all right against the Indians with his dismounted troops until all of a sudden his wagon train appeared on Weir Point; just like that he ordered two columns to mount and move down the Battle Ridge so the wagon train could march safely through; there wasn’t a shot until the columns got stretched out, and then bang, bang, bang and it was all over. Little of what is said on the Battlefield has much to do with events that happened there or with those who took part in them. The uniform which inspired the mother to inspire her son belonged to a cadet who was graduated 34th in a class of 34 and had other troubles before finishing West Point. The wagon train was left miles back at the mouth of the Powder river. Yet probably none of these remarks would seem foolish or irrelevant if one knew who made them. For instance, the original genius on the Battlefield is himself something of a type—usually cautious and fairly successful in life, and unknown for any original speculative efforts except when some recessive part of him accompanies incautious men on their way to disaster. Then he becomes different, more foolish and, in a way, better than himself. This particular one differs from the others in that he is in the supply business, and so probably his concern about the wagon train, even if it wasn’t there.