by Thom Hatch
When the ceremony had concluded, the small oval-shaped pine table upon which Grant had written the terms of the surrender was purchased for twenty dollars in gold by General Phil Sheridan. The next day, the cavalry commander handed the table to Custer as a gift to Libbie Custer. Sheridan enclosed a note, which read: “My dear Madam, I respectfully present to you the small writing table on which the conditions for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia were written by Lt. General Grant—and permit me to say, Madam, that there is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring about this desirable result than your gallant husband.”
Libbie Custer cherished the table for the remainder of her life. After her death, the surrender table was added to the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
But it was not solely on the sanguinary battlefields from Bull Run to Appomattox that Custer grew into manhood and developed the attributes necessary to be a leader of men. During this time, he also underwent several transformations in his personal life as he matured from a raw young man with ambition into an adult who worried about his responsibility toward the soldiers entrusted to his command. He had started out his post–West Point career with the reputation as a prankster, one who flaunted military discipline, but after that first shot had been fired he proved that he had not been sleeping through his classes. The lessons he had learned at the Point were combined with a natural compassion that he held for his comrades. He had always been a leader, albeit often on forays to the local tavern, but the fact that the stakes now were so high and lives were on the line each day added to the process of his personal growth.
Custer had earlier vowed to abstain from alcohol and had faithfully kept that promise. Ann Reed’s other primary concern—along with wife Libbie—became saving the spiritual soul of George Armstrong. Ann had taken him to Sunday school at the Methodist church as a boy and attempted over the years to influence him to become a born-again Christian.
Custer was aware of the efforts of the two most important women in his life to convert him. Ann Reed continued her quest for Custer’s salvation and wrote to him in August 1864: “O my dear brother I think of you every day. I do wish you were a good Christian. I have often thought that was the only thing you needed to make you a perfect man. I want to meet you in heaven.”
The prayers of the two women were finally answered on Sunday evening, February 5, 1865, when Custer publicly professed his faith. The Custers had attended a service at the Monroe Presbyterian Church, and Armstrong at that time accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Savior.
Now, in the spring of 1876, Custer undoubtedly sat in that anteroom of the White House saying silent prayers to encourage President Grant to open the door to the Oval Office and welcome him inside. But the president remained adamant in his refusal to see Custer.
Certainly, he fretted about the task of outfitting his unit for the expedition against the Sioux. There were many aspects of training and logistics that he had developed over the years to ensure readiness and he needed to be there to make sure they were properly implemented. These lessons had not come without experience, and few army officers over the years had led the campaigns and expeditions that had been the learning ground that had brought George Armstrong Custer to this point in his career.
Three
Chasing Shadows on the Plains
Following the war, in June 1865 Brevet General George Armstrong Custer had been assigned duty in Louisiana and Texas, once again under the command of General Phil Sheridan. More than fifty thousand troops had been dispatched along the Rio Grande as a show of force to the French, which had invaded Mexico. Custer would head a division of four thousand, organized in Alexandria, Louisiana, and later stationed in Texas.
Custer immediately encountered severe disciplinary problems with these veteran troops who had fought in the Civil War and wanted to return home. It was the first time that he had commanded troops who had not worshiped him, which compelled him to face a rumored assassination attempt and to squelch a near mutiny. The unit in August moved to Hempstead, Texas, and by November was headquartered at the Blind Asylum in Austin.
Although Custer and his troops remained at odds, he enjoyed his duty in Texas on a personal basis. He had been accompanied by Libbie, brother Tom, and his father, Emanuel—employed as a forage agent.
The local society was extremely cordial, and the Custer clan occupied their time riding, hunting, playing practical jokes on one another, and catching up on life after the wartime separation. This assignment ended in February 1866, when the Custers traveled to New York City—with one side trip to Monroe to attend the funeral of Libbie’s father, Daniel Bacon, who had passed away on May 18 of cholera.
While in New York, due to his reputation from the Civil War, Custer was offered the position of adjutant general of the Mexican army, which was in a struggle with Emperor Maximilian, the French puppet. The position commanded a salary of sixteen thousand dollars in gold—twice Custer’s major general pay. Although he was highly recommended by President Grant, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Phil Sheridan, both Libbie and Sheridan counseled against Custer accepting the offer. The matter was settled, however, when Secretary of State William H. Seward, who thought France might be offended if an American officer directed soldiers against French troops, refused to allow Custer a leave of absence.
In September 1866, Custer and Libbie were members of an entourage that toured with President Andrew Johnson in an attempt to win support for the president’s Southern policy. Johnson likened the Union to a circle that had been broken and required mending and therefore called his tour Swinging Round the Circle. Custer believed that he was engaging in a public service by pleading for leniency toward the vanquished Southerners. After all, many of his friends from West Point had been Confederate officers and he had always practiced decent treatment of them during the war.
Custer’s participation was not well received by the Northern press, which attacked him vehemently for associating with traitor Southerners. Even in Custer country—Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana—the reception was unpleasant at best. This initial foray into politics had become a disaster. Custer soon decided he was better suited as a soldier and not a politician. Consequently, the Custers decided to leave the presidential party before the completion of the trip in order to escape the protesters and bad publicity.
On July 28, 1866, Congress authorized four new cavalry regiments—including the Seventh Cavalry, which would be formed at Fort Riley, Kansas. Custer would have preferred a colonelcy and command of one of the regiments but with the influence of Phil Sheridan was appointed a lieutenant colonel—second-in-command under Colonel Andrew Jackson (“A. J.”) Smith—of the Seventh Cavalry. He accepted the commission and made plans for him and Libbie to travel to their new duty station on the Great Plains, where he would resume his business of fighting, this time against hostile Indians.
Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, wife Libbie, and their cook, Eliza Brown, reported for duty at Fort Riley, Kansas, on the evening of November 3, 1866. Custer, however, soon traveled to Washington to appear before an examining board and did not participate in the training of the unit until his return just before Christmas. In February 1867, commanding officer Colonel Smith departed to head the District of the Upper Arkansas and Custer assumed de facto command—a position he would hold until June 25, 1876. Enlisted recruits had arrived at the fort throughout the summer and fall, and by the end of the year the over eight hundred troops were joined by most of the officers.
The enlisted cavalryman of Custer’s era was a volunteer who was paid thirteen dollars a month. Many young men had been attracted to military service by the prospect of romance and adventure, the shiny new uniforms they would wear, the pomp and circumstance of hearing the regimental band strike up a jaunty tune, and an escape from their mundane lives on the farm or apprenticeships in the city. There was romance and adventure to be found in the military, so they thought. Quite a number of them were emigran
ts from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and England—which often posed a language problem—and many were Civil War veterans.
These would-be soldiers reported to their duty station and found that their lives would be quite different than they had envisioned. They arrived at Fort Riley to discover a cluster of crude buildings in a remote location that was surrounded by a barren prairie covered with sagebrush that was scalded by the sun in summer and buried under snow and freezing temperatures in the winter. And they soon learned that upon signing up they had forfeited all rights as American citizens and were now under an alien jurisdiction that resembled a brutal dictatorship—and they were at the very bottom of this pecking order.
Recruits were schooled in the manual of the saber, manual of the pistol, manual of the carbine, and principles of target practice. They were taught how to ride and care for their mounts and learned how to fight on horseback or dismounted. In garrison, they endured months of isolation, monotony, and rigid discipline, interrupted only by the occasional brief action against their enemy, the Plains Indians.
Reveille typically blew at 5:30, with the first drill commencing at 6:15. That would be followed by stable call, guard mount, construction, woodcutting, and water details, inspections and dress reviews, and various forms of drill. Taps sounded at 8:15 and the men would retire to crude bunks fashioned with pole or board slats and a straw tick, or in some cases during warm weather they preferred to sleep outside.
The cavalryman wore a dark-blue blouse, sky-blue trousers, a gray shirt, black boots, and a wide-brimmed hat of either army-issue blue or white straw during the summer months. His uniform was crisscrossed with leather straps that held certain necessities, such as cartridge pouches and his three-pound seven-ounce light cavalry saber. He was initially issued a seven-shot 56/50-caliber Spencer repeating carbine and a .44-caliber Colt or Remington percussion revolver, and later a .45-caliber Springfield Model 1873 single-shot breech-loading carbine and a six-shot .45-caliber Colt single-action revolver.
The cavalryman’s campaign outfit consisted of his weapons, a shelter half, haversack, poncho, canteen, mess kit, and blanket, extra clothing, extra ammunition, a feed bag, fifteen pounds of grain, a picket pin and lariat, personal items, and several days’ rations—usually greasy salt pork or salt beef and hardtack washed down with bitter coffee. Occasionally soup made of hominy would be served at the mess hall in garrison, but vegetables and fruits were virtually nonexistent.
And then there was the discipline aspect of duty. Orders from all officers and enlisted men of a superior rank were to be regarded as sacrosanct and were to be obeyed instantly and without question. Failure to obey even minor military rituals, such as saluting an officer or calling him sir, could result in punishment. The penalties could range from walking for hours while carrying a log of wood on your shoulder for being dirty to carrying around a saddle all day for not being present at an inspection at first call. For more serious offenses, a court-martial would be ordered and if found guilty the soldier could be sentenced to confinement and loss of his pay. And then there was the lure of the gold fields in California or Colorado. Needless to say, desertions were commonplace.
The primary mission of this newly formed regiment was to protect work crews on the Kansas Pacific Railway from hostile Plains Indian tribes, which had been incessantly raiding. Regimental headquarters remained at Fort Riley with four companies, while the other companies were assigned to garrison various posts along the Santa Fe and Smoky Hill Trails.
Custer and his cavalry experienced Indian fighting for the first time during the spring and summer of 1867 on what would be called the Hancock Expedition. While the troops had been back east fighting the Civil War and Western forts were for all intents and purposes abandoned, the Indians had been taking control of huge chunks of land. One of the most active areas was western Kansas. Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa, Comanche, and Arapaho warriors had been roaming the territory, incessantly menacing homesteaders and workers on the Kansas Pacific Railway.
By early spring of 1866, the line—known as the Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division (UPED)—stretched for some 115 miles from Kansas City to Manhattan but had been delayed by frequent attacks from marauding Plains Indians, whose number of warriors was estimated at six thousand. The task of protecting surveyors and work crews from these hostiles was heartily embraced by General Sheridan, whose responsibility as commander of the Department of the Missouri included William Jackson Palmer’s railroad, the UPED, which traced the route of the Smoky Hill Trail.
It was determined that a military force commanded by Major General Winfield Scott Hancock would be sent into the field to demonstrate the might of the United States Army and punish these Great Plains marauders for their crimes.
“Hancock the Superb,” as he had been hailed by Civil War era newspapers, was born near Norristown, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1824. He had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1844 and distinguished himself in the Mexican War, had served in the Third Seminole War in the 1850s and the 1857 Utah Expedition, and was appointed brigadier general in the Union army in 1861.
Second Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer had served as a volunteer aide to corps commander General Hancock on May 5, 1862, in an engagement near Williamsburg when, as mentioned before, the first battle flag taken by the Union army was captured.
Hancock had become a bona fide hero at Gettysburg when, although he was badly wounded, his men held the Union center against Pickett’s charge—unknowingly with help from Custer three miles to the east. He was formally thanked by Congress for his bravery but never fully recovered from his wounds received in that battle and accepted recruiting duty in Washington. Hancock was appointed commander of the Department of the Missouri in 1867 and was anxious to return to field duty in Kansas to show that he had not lost his fighting ability.
Construction of a transcontinental railroad had become a national obsession that had unified the post–Civil War country with purpose. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific were rushing to rendezvous from the west and east respectively when in 1865 a young railroad entrepreneur named William Jackson Palmer convinced investors that they could turn worthless land into expensive real estate by building a separate railroad line from Kansas City through the Great Plains to California.
Palmer, the future founder of Colorado Springs and better known for his Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, had traveled to Europe at age nineteen to study how coal burned in locomotives and then had worked as secretary to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He had commanded one of Phil Sheridan’s brigades in the Civil War—for which he achieved the rank of brigadier general and later received the Medal of Honor. With such credentials, Palmer had little trouble raising the necessary cash for his new railroad.
In late March, more than fourteen hundred soldiers—including eight companies of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry—marched down the Santa Fe Trail to the Arkansas River.
The country through which they passed was mainly prairie with a thin cover of pale-green and rusty grass above sandy soil beneath. The air was fresh and carried breezy fragrances of native grasses—sandbur, wheatgrass, bluestem, and prairie sand reed, to name a few. Various species of songbirds—lark buntings, meadowlarks, and goldfinches being the most prevalent—darted and dived in flight around the formation, calling out shrill warnings and gobbling up insects disturbed by the horses’ hooves. Every now and then a family of quail scooted away with heads lowered or a small rodent or lizard would scurry from one hole to another. Above, red-tailed hawks glided majestically about in wide, swooping circles in search of prey. A herd of pronghorn antelope could occasionally be observed in the distance, the buck standing guard.
Along the way, the troopers were kept busy staging aggressive battle exercises that were intended to intimidate and impress the unseen Indian observers. This show of force convinced Custer that the Indians would “accept terms and abandon the war-path.”
Two notable members of the expedition were fam
ed Civil War illustrator Theodore R. Davis representing Harper’s Weekly and newspaperman Henry M. Stanley, who would later gain fame as the discoverer of the lost Livingstone in Africa. Davis and Stanley were the first correspondents to accompany an army campaign against the Plains Indians.
Earlier in the year, Davis had been traveling on a stagecoach bound for Denver when it was attacked by Indians. Davis and the other passengers held off the hostiles until rescued by the army. On February 17, 1866, Harper’s Weekly published Davis’ full-page depiction of this incident, which became the prototype of an Indian stage attack later shown on modern motion picture and television screens.
Stanley wrote about the prospects of engaging the Indians: “Custer is precisely the man for that job. A certain impetuosity and undoubted courage are his principal characteristics.”
On April 12 Edward W. Wynkoop, the former Fort Lyon commander who now served as an Indian agent for the Cheyenne and Arapaho, invited several Cheyenne and Sioux chiefs—including Tall Bull and Pawnee Killer—to Fort Larned for a parley with General Hancock. Hancock professed his desire for peace but made it clear that the chiefs must live up to the provisions of their treaties and cease hostilities. The general then decided to march his men twenty-one miles up the Pawnee Fork to the village of the Indians and resume talks at that location. The apprehensive chiefs, as well as Wynkoop, requested that Hancock keep his distance from the village. Their protestations, however, fell on deaf ears, and Hancock commenced his march.
The Indians responded by painting themselves for war and riding back and forth in front of the army column to indicate their intention to defend their village. Hancock countered by ordering his men into battle formation.
Halfway to the Indian encampment, Hancock, Wynkoop, and a handful of officers rode forward to meet with the chiefs. Both sides agreed to avoid a battle, if possible. As a show of good faith, Hancock promised that his men would not enter the village or in any way molest the inhabitants. The Indians retired to their village with Hancock’s column following and eventually halting to camp three hundred yards away.