The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer

by Thom Hatch

  Anyone who has served in the military can attest to the fact that Marcus Reno disobeyed orders. It is an open-and-shut case. But many people think that Reno had an option to carry out his orders or not and therefore did nothing wrong. Foolish thought to anyone who has worn the uniform. The most inconsequential infraction of rules in the minds of civilians could lead to prison time and a dishonorable discharge in military life. This conclusion, however, does not always compute in the equations of those researchers working in the safe confines of a classroom or a library who lack firsthand knowledge.

  As a result of this absence of military service, most students of the battle have never experienced combat. If one has never heard a shot fired at them in anger by an enemy trying to kill them, they cannot imagine the effect it has on the behavior and senses of them or their comrades. How men react under enemy fire and what is expected of them, especially in leadership roles, is essential to understanding any battle. There are consequences to every act executed under fire. There is no room for miscalculation or hesitation—or disobedience of orders.

  The controlled terror of combat cannot be effectively re-created or simulated in a classroom, or in a video game, or in movies or by reading diaries, journals, or accounts of battles or hearing about it firsthand from veterans. There is no other way, not even extensive military training, that will allow an understanding of what it is to stand on the sanguinary field of man versus man fighting to the death. It must be experienced.

  This fact was perhaps summed up best by none other than George Armstrong Custer. On Sunday, July 21, 1861, Custer found himself on the field at Bull Run, the first meaningful battle of the Civil War. His cavalry unit was protecting an artillery battery, which was under fire from enemy artillery.

  Custer later wrote: “I remember well the strange hissing and exceedingly vicious sound of the first cannon shot I heard. Of course I had often heard the sound made by cannon balls while passing through the air during my artillery practice at West Point, but a man listens with changed interest when the direction of the balls is toward instead of away from him. They seem to utter a different language when fired in angry battle from that put forth in the tamer practice of drill.”

  Military service and combat is indeed a different language and a different world, and if one has not learned that language and lived in that reality they will find it almost impossible to comprehend.

  Accordingly, it has been rather easy for noncombatants and those inexperienced in military affairs to generate excuses for the malfeasance of Reno and Benteen and to place the blame on Custer, who was not available to defend his true intentions and thereby became a convenient target.

  Also, not too many people who delve into the Little Bighorn battle admit to having an intimate familiarity with Custer’s incredible Civil War career—possibly due to the lack of readily accessible material—and therefore treat Little Bighorn as a lone entity. People who wish to comment on the Little Bighorn would be well served to learn those battlefield strategies and tendencies that made Custer a national hero.

  By the same token, this battle against the Sioux must be examined through the eyes of 1876, not from the twenty-first-century standards by people who tend to ignore necessary truisms of that distant time and replace them with societal rules of today.

  There is a darker, more sinister reason—one rarely proposed for fear of accusations of prejudice—why Custer has been blamed for the tactical decisions that led to this defeat, however. A disgraceful school of alleged scholars have desperately searched for any way to place the blame for this devastating defeat on George Armstrong Custer. They have grasped at the flimsiest of straws and cited the absurd during this demonization process where one person or entity must be denigrated in order to support the rise of another. Why?

  Some so-called revisionists hold to the opinion that they must attempt to absolve the Lakota Sioux from all culpability for their actions that day. In order to elevate the role of the Sioux from enemy to honorable in this battle—with the thought that they had been poltically wronged and thereby had a reputable cause—Custer and his Seventh Cavalry must be painted as villains. This methodology is simply a misguided effort of building up wrong by pulling down right. It is virtually impossible to accurately analyze evidence when influenced by such a preconceived notion.

  These people who believe they are righteously righting some terrible historic political wrong have been willing to compromise their integrity and credibility to try to prove their opinion. Those with a bias against Custer believe that the soldiers got what they deserved that day and they are expected to and indeed must portray Custer as a bumbling tactician in order to sell that absurd misconception.

  True revisionism constitutes a continuing dialogue between the past and present that is based on fact and adds to the record without compromising the truth. The process of changing history without regard for the credibility of evidence is not revisionism—it is historical terrorism that cheats the student of an accurate portrayal of events.

  Consequently, this pseudo-revisionist agenda that discourages independent research and fails to follow the pathway of evidence leads to faulty conclusions. Myths are accepted in place of evidence and then perpetuated, the result being a subtle form of brainwashing that has been shamefully passed down from one generation of unwitting scholars to the next.

  To study this battle is to enter a maze that heretofore may have been deemed without a verifiable outlet. Now gaping holes have been punched through the walls of this maze that lead to a shining vision of that illusive open exit—at least until the next red herrings are brought forth with the hope of condemning Custer and exonerating Reno, and the Sioux and Cheyenne, and the representatives of the government who ordered the military action of 1876.

  Nineteen

  Heroes and Villains

  The initial interest in establishing a lasting memorial for George Armstrong Custer and his men was created by newspapers that began publishing sensational stories soon after the battle about half-buried bodies strewn across the barren field. This revelation caused an outcry from the public and high-ranking army officers, who demanded that Congress allocate funds for a cemetery to properly bury the fallen.

  Finally, on August 1, 1879, Custer Battlefield National Cemetery was established by General Order No. 78. Troopers from Fort Custer were called upon to make the field more presentable, which included erecting a log memorial on top of Custer Hill and re-marking the scattered graves with a substantial wooden stake.

  In 1881, the log memorial was replaced by a huge white granite monument on which the names of the dead—a number of them misspelled—had been inscribed. The remains of the enlisted troopers were at that time collected from their various graves and reinterred in a mass grave at the base of the monument. White marble headstones replaced the wooden markers in 1890 to designate the places where the cavalrymen had fallen. Three years later, the first superintendent was named to oversee the care of the cemetery.

  In 1930, the parcel of land that was the location of the Reno-Benteen hilltop fight was added. The two distant battlefields were connected by a right-of-way road between them. Ten years later the National Park Service of the Interior Department assumed responsibility from the War Department for the area. In 1946, the historic site was renamed Custer Battlefield National Monument and the principal mission became the study of the battle—primarily from the standpoint of the soldiers, although that has gradually changed over the years to include the Indian side of the story.

  In 1983, a prairie fire swept across six hundred grassy acres of the battlefield, which removed much of the obscuring vegetation and made the area suitable for examination. James V. Court, the superintendent at that time, had the foresight to wonder what artifacts might have been exposed that could shed new light on the famous battle and thereby enhance the interpretive programs at the battlefield. Court called in a young archaeologist named Richard A. Fox, Jr., who examined the field and prepared two reports indicating
that there was a great potential of uncovering items of significance.

  Fox submitted his reports to Douglas D. Scott, Chief of the Rocky Mountain Division, Midwest Archaeological Center, National Park Service. Scott also was impressed with the potential and organized a two-year project in which he and Fox would serve as co-principal investigators. National Park Service approval for this dig was obtained, but no funding. The Custer Battlefield Historical & Museum Association, a nonprofit historical interest group, came forward to finance the project. In 1984, Scott, Fox, and about one hundred volunteers embarked on an initial dig that lasted about five weeks.

  The battlefield was swept with electronic sensing devices—metal detectors—and each site where a possible relic was indicated was marked with a small plastic flag. That area was then probed with a trowel, and every item found was recorded and coded into a computer with a specific number. Among the four thousand artifacts that the dig unearthed were buttons from various types of clothing, pieces of firearms, a watch, coins, a pocketknife, iron arrowheads, horse trappings, bone fragments, and, most of all, a huge number of bullets and cartridge casings from many different weapons. The computer coding assisted in generating a map that detailed battle events from the position of found bullets and cartridge casings.

  One of the more interesting discoveries was that of a nearly complete skeleton they named “Trooper Mike.” These remains were examined by famed forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who estimated that this trooper was between nineteen and twenty-two years old, five feet eight, and weighed 150 to 160 pounds. Mike had been shot twice in the chest, with one bullet fragment embedded in his left wrist. Post-death mutilation was indicated by his shattered skull, his knocked-out teeth, and his right thighbone gashed by six chopping blows, likely from a hatchet. Trooper Mike’s remains were reburied in Custer National Cemetery in June 1985.

  There have been subsequent excavations in various areas in and around the battlefield that have resulted in additional artifacts. The discovery of artifacts during these excavations has been most helpful in answering certain questions about the battle, such as identifying weapons used by both sides, with shell casings, bones, buckles, et cetera.

  But perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the specific locations of those finds. The battlefield lies within a ragged terrain of ravines and hillsides that have been exposed to the elements—blizzards, gully-washing downpours, hurricane-force winds, et cetera—for over a century and a quarter.

  Anyone who has lived in comparable terrain knows that objects are subject to relocation, often by great distances, during even the most common storm. It has even been documented that the Little Bighorn River itself has changed course in that period of time. Locations where artifacts have been found cannot be discounted as a guide for speculation as to positions of groups or individuals or plotting troops’ movements but must be viewed with a skeptical eye.

  In 1991, the battlefield was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument by an act of Congress. The mandate also provided that an Indian Memorial was to be built in the vicinity of the Seventh Cavalry Monument.

  This name change and new monument has provoked an ongoing controversy among those who respect the sacrifice of Custer and his cavalrymen as they served their country. Some people believe that his name should have remained on the battlefield and further that the addition of a monument honoring people hostile to our country is an insult to the United States Army—as well as the other branches—much less to the United States of America.

  This change in the official attitude opened the door in 1996 for then battlefield superintendent Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa Indian and paid representative of the United States government, to not only permit but also organize what he called an “Attack at Dawn.” On June 25, Indians rode horses onto the national monument and “counted coup” by using a stick to hit the stone obelisk that marks the mass grave of over two hundred Seventh Cavalry troopers.

  There are those who have worn the uniform of this country who disapprove of this defiling of a resting place of their brave brothers in arms by such a disgraceful act by a former enemy and consider the actions that day to be despicable and cowardly. They hold to the belief that desecrating the memory of these Seventh Cavalry soldiers is tantamount to desecrating every American who has ever fallen in combat. And, in military terms, that is not what this country stands for—and too many flag-draped coffins have attested to that fact.

  Today visitors can stroll through portions of the battlefield on walkways and drive the two-lane road from Custer Hill to the Reno-Benteen defense site. Park personnel are available to provide tour information and to offer free lectures during the summer months. The visitor center and historical museum on the grounds feature an interesting array of Custer, Seventh Cavalry, and Indian artifacts, dioramas, artwork, maps, photographs, books for sale, and an impressive collection of documents. Custer’s widow, Libbie, donated nearly fifty thousand letters and papers to the museum.

  The adjoining cemetery, Custer National Cemetery, holds the remains of such notable figures as Custer’s longtime orderly John Burkman; Lieutenant John J. Crittenden; Curly the scout; Dr. George E. Lord; and a mass grave for twenty-one soldiers killed in the 1877 Snake Creek fight against the Nez Percé.

  Meanwhile, the living were left to deal with the loss of their loved ones. Maria Custer was understandably grief stricken following the deaths of her three sons, a son-in-law, and a grandson in the Little Bighorn battle. She lamented, “How can I bear it? All my boys gone.” For unknown reasons, she did not attend the ceremony at West Point when her oldest son was reinterred on October 10, 1877. Maria passed away in January 1882 at the age of seventy-five.

  Emanuel Custer, the man who valued family over everything else in his life, had lost three of his beloved sons, Armstrong, Tom, and Boston; a son-in-law, James Calhoun; and a stepgrandson, Autie Reed. Libbie arranged for Emanuel to have Armstrong’s horse Dandy, and for years he would proudly ride his son’s favorite mount in parades. Emanuel eventually went to live on son Nevin’s farm three miles west of Monroe. He passed away on November 27, 1892—two weeks before his eighty-sixth birthday.

  Libbie Custer was only thirty-four years old when she received the news at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory that her husband had been killed. She returned to Monroe, Michigan, and contemplated her future. Her life’s mission was soon decided when a debate ensued over Custer’s actions during that battle. Libbie worked tirelessly to protect the image of her beloved husband and vigorously defended him against those who brought criticism. Her first act was to assist Frederick Whittaker in the writing of his 1876 A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer by putting personal correspondence at his disposal. This favorable portrayal of Custer would be the predominant view of her husband for many years to come.

  In the summer of 1877, Libbie moved from Michigan to New York City to better her opportunities. She had been faced with considerable family debt that had exhausted her funds, and with only a nine-hundred-dollar donation raised by the Army and Navy Journal and a thirty-dollar-a-month pension (raised to fifty dollars in 1882), she would be required to find work to support herself. She also commenced raising money that would eventually pay for monuments honoring Custer in Michigan and at West Point.

  Libbie and biographer Frederick Whittaker undertook a relentless effort to convince the government to hold an official inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the Little Bighorn battle. Libbie was interested in clearing her husband’s name from those who placed blame on him for the defeat.

  Whittaker wrote a letter dated May 18, 1878, to Wyoming congressman W. W. Corlett, which demanded an investigation. The letter included the passage: “Information from participants in the battle is to the effect that gross cowardice was displayed by Major Marcus A. Reno.” This letter was leaked to the press, which was the last straw for Reno, who requested that the army convene a court of inquiry to investigate his conduct.

  By order of Presiden
t Rutherford B. Hayes, the court convened at the Palmer House in Chicago on January 13, 1879. The examining committee was comprised of three officers—Colonel John H. King, Ninth Infantry, presiding; Colonel Wesley Merritt, Fifth Cavalry; and Lieutenant Colonel W. B. Royall, Third Cavalry. The court reporter was Lieutenant Jesse M. Lee, Ninth Infantry. Members of the Custer family, including Libbie and Maggie Calhoun, attended every session.

  Reno was defended by Lyman Gilbert, the assistant attorney general of Pennsylvania. Reno’s primary defense of his actions was to blame Custer for not providing him the complete battle plan. He testified that he had been ordered to charge the village and would “be supported by the whole outfit.” He interpreted that to mean that Custer was going to follow him into the village. And because he had not observed Custer behind, Reno claimed that he was justified in not charging into the village on what could be likened to a suicide mission.

  An examination of Reno’s official report of the battle, however, reveals that he expected Custer to attack on the flank. Therefore, it does not take a lawyer to recognize that Reno’s defense was based on a contradiction.

  Reno, although evidence indicates otherwise, maintained that his retreat, in which about a third of his men became casualties, was a “charge.” He also was asked: “Did you go into that fight with feelings of confidence or distrust [of Custer]?” Reno answered: “Well, sir, I had known General Custer a long time, and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier.” This absurd and insulting statement came from a man who had never commanded troops in battle against Indians about an officer who had faced this enemy on a number of occasions with great success.