by David Fisher
“Why, I’ve come to arrest you,” Reeves replied. He then asked the date, explaining that by law he had to write down the date of the arrest on the warrant. The brothers apparently found that amusing, considering that they were holding him at gunpoint. “Here, look at this,” Reeves continued, handing over the warrant to the outlaw holding the gun. As the man glanced at it, his two brothers moved closer to look at it over his shoulders—and while their attention was diverted, Reeves grabbed the barrel of the gun and pushed it away, holding on to it while the man wasted three shots. At the same time, he drew his own gun with his other hand, shot a second brother, slammed the third brother over the head with his pistol, then stuck the barrel in the first outlaw’s stomach.
His career wasn’t without controversy. In 1886, he was arrested for the murder of his trail cook, William Leech, and eventually tried by Judge Parker. Although Parker is remembered in history as the Hanging Judge, he was in fact respected for running a strict but fair courtroom. While it’s probable that no deputy kept Parker’s courtroom more crowded than Reeves, and the two men were said to be on friendly terms, this was a fair trial. In the courtroom of Judge Isaac Parker, the law was respected. Reeves testified that his rifle had gone off accidentally while he was cleaning it, striking Leech in the neck. Initially the wound was not considered serious and Reeves immediately tried to get medical help, but eventually the cook took a turn for the worse and died. However, nine people testified against Reeves—every one of them a fugitive he had captured and was bringing to Fort Smith. They testified that there was bad blood between the two men, and that when the cook fed boiling oil to Reeves’s dog, the deputy had lost his temper and shot him.
Judge Parker’s ornate courtroom in Fort Smith, Arkansas, about 1890. When Reeves was tried for the shooting of his trail cook several years earlier, Judge Parker had presided in a courtroom located in a converted military barracks.
The case against Reeves pretty much fell apart when another witness testified that all those men actually had been chained in the prisoners’ tent at the time of the shooting and couldn’t have seen it happen. After deliberating for a full day, the jury found Reeves not guilty.
Although racism really wasn’t an issue during most of Reeves’s career, it ironically became important at the end of it. Judge Parker died in 1896, and two years later Reeves was transferred to Muskogee, in the Northern District of the federal court. He worked there until 1907, when Oklahoma was admitted to the Union and immediately instituted a series of harsh Jim Crow laws. Although these laws made Indians “honorary whites,” they were specifically designed to keep the races apart. That made it almost impossible for a black man such as Reeves to enforce the law on white people. Rather than retiring, the sixty-seven-year-old Bass Reeves joined the Muskogee police department and actually walked a beat—with the help of a cane—for two more years, until a lifetime of adventure caught up with him. He died in 1910, and as institutionalized racism became part of American culture, he was mostly lost to history. In fact, it isn’t even known where he is buried.
Judge Isaac Parker, shortly before his death in 1896.
After Judge Parker’s death, Reeves transferred to Muskogee, in the Indian Territory, where this photo of federal marshals and local police officers was taken in about 1900.
As this country has begun recovering that history, the fact and legend of Bass Reeves has emerged. Did he serve as the model for the Lone Ranger? There is no specific evidence that he did, and the men credited with creating the character in 1933 never spoke about it. But the parallels between the real Bass Reeves and the fictional Lone Ranger are too strong to ignore. If the character was not based on Reeves, the coincidences would be almost as impossible to believe as the facts of Bass Reeves’s extraordinary life.
GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER
a General’s Reckoning
On the hot sunny afternoon of June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, his younger brother Tom Custer, and two other men brought their mounts to a halt atop the Crow’s Nest, a bluff above the Little Bighorn River in the Montana Territory. Custer raised his binoculars and looked into the distance—and what he saw must have taken his breath away. Nestled in a valley almost fifteen miles distant was the largest Indian encampment he had ever seen. He knew immediately that he had found Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. There was little visible activity in the village, leading Colonel Custer to believe he had caught them by surprise. That was an extraordinary bit of good luck. “We’ve caught them napping,” he said. He immediately sent a note to Captain Frederick Benteen, an experienced officer commanding a nearby battalion. “Come on,” the note read. “Big village. Be quick. Bring packs.”
Custer knew he had come upon the main Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux camp. One of his scouts reportedly told him, “General, I have been with these Indians for thirty years, and this is the largest village I have ever heard of.” Based on the best available intelligence, Custer assumed there would be no more than two thousand hostiles in the camp. His strategy was clear. As he had written just two years earlier in his well-received book, My Life on the Plains, “Indians contemplating a battle … are always anxious to have their women and children removed from all danger…. [T]heir necessary exposure in case of conflict, would operate as a powerful argument in favor of peace.”
Although his force of seven hundred troopers was outnumbered, it appeared that Custer intended to apply the same strategy he had previously used with great success: He would capture the Indian women, children, and elderly and use them as hostages and human shields. If his troops could occupy the village before the Indians organized their resistance, the warriors would be forced to surrender or shoot their own people. Initially, Custer planned to wait until the following morning to launch his attack, but when he received a report that hostiles had been seen on his trail, he feared losing the advantage of surprise. He had no way of knowing that those warriors had come out of the village and were riding away when they were spotted.
Had Custer waited through that night, it is quite possible that his scouts would have discovered the truth: What he had seen through his binoculars was only one end of a massive encampment that stretched for several miles along the river. Although the actual number of warriors has never been determined, it was many thousands more than he had estimated, and they were well armed with modern weaponry.
Custer split his force into three battalions. Major Marcus Reno’s second detachment was to lead the charge into the village from the south to create a diversion; then, while the hostiles rushed to meet this attack, Custer’s men would come down into the valley from the hills and take hostages. The Indians would be forced to kill their own families or surrender.
At noon, Custer ordered the attack to begin. Reno’s men crossed the Little Bighorn and charged—and were stunned to discover that the village was much larger than anyone had realized. Hundreds of armed warriors, rather than dispersing as Custer believed they would, instead began fighting back. Reno had led his men into a trap. His charge was halted almost a mile from the village, and the Indians counterattacked his exposed flank with a force more than five times his. Furthermore, unlike his troops, most of whom were armed with single-shot rifles, many of the Indians carried repeaters. Reno was forced to fall back into the woods, telling his men, “All those who wish to make their escape take your pistols and follow me.” After holding there briefly, he led a chaotic retreat to the top of the bluff, losing about a third of his men, where he was reinforced by the three companies commanded by Captain Benteen. Their fortunate arrival may well have saved Reno’s troops from annihilation, but the combined forces were pinned down for crucial minutes in that position and could not move to help Custer.
Custer expected the Indians to flee Major Reno’s diversionary attack. Instead, according to brave Flying Hawk, as seen in this illustration by Amos Bad Heart Buffalo, “The dust was thick and we could hardly see. We got right among the soldiers and killed a lot with our bows and arrows
and tomahawks. Crazy Horse was ahead of all, and he killed a lot of them with his war club.”
When Custer first came upon the camp, it is probable that he envisioned an illustrious future. He was already a well-known soldier and Indian fighter, having been the youngest brevet—or, temporarily appointed—brigadier general in the Union army at twenty-three years old. He had been present at Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and had later toured the South with President Andrew Johnson. This final victory over Crazy Horse in the Great Sioux War would raise his status to that of an American hero. He was hard on the path to glory. Even the presidency was possible.
Two great warriors, Colonel Custer and Crazy Horse, meet in this allegorical drawing by Kills Two.
Although, according to the Cheyenne chief Two Moons, the battle at Little Bighorn lasted only “as long as it takes for a hungry man to eat his dinner,” it will forever be part of American folklore. The chaos of those brief moments was depicted by Charles M. Russell in his 1903 painting The Custer Fight.
When Colonel Custer heard gunfire, indicating Reno’s troops had engaged the Indians, he turned in his saddle to face his men. “Courage, boys!” he yelled. “We’ve got them. We’ll finish them off and then go home to our station.” He did not know that Reno’s attack had failed.
Then he raised his hand in the air and began his charge into history.
Custer’s men were massacred. After forcing Reno to retreat, the main contingent of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors had turned to meet Custer. They surrounded his force and tightened the ring. Every soldier was killed, 210 men, and many of their bodies mutilated. There was no one left alive to report exactly what had happened. While the native peoples told the story from their point of view, their many versions were confused and contradictory. Countless historians have investigated and written about it, but the actual details of the battle will never be fully known. “Custer’s Last Stand,” as this worst defeat in American military history quickly became known, has become part of American mythology. Custer himself has become a historical enigma, as often praised for his courage in giving up his life for his country as he is vilified for his impetuousness in leading his men to slaughter. His name has become synonymous with defeat, and his actions that day have been cited as the ultimate example of hubris; his ego and ambition have been blamed for the decisions that resulted in the tragic loss of so many lives. Although several books published in the aftermath of the battle portrayed him as heroic, President U. S. Grant purportedly told a reporter for the New York Herald, “I regard Custer’s Massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself; that was wholly unnecessary—wholly unnecessary.”
Was Custer at fault, as Grant believed, for splitting his forces or for engaging the enemy without sufficient intelligence? Or, as many other people believe, was he betrayed by Major Reno and Captain Benteen, who were known to dislike him and were later accused of cowardice?
There is no question that George Armstrong Custer’s contributions to the victories in the Civil War and the Indian wars have been largely forgotten, and instead he is remembered almost exclusively for this devastating defeat. This is not the end that anyone would have expected.
George Custer was born in the small town of New Rumley, Ohio, in 1839. His father, a farmer and a blacksmith, belonged to the New Rumley Invincibles, the local militia, and often brought his son to their meetings. Dressed in a Daniel Boone outfit made for him by his mother, Autie (as he was called) loved the ceremony of those meetings, and by the time he was four he could execute the entire manual of arms—using a wooden stick. When war against Mexico was being debated in 1846, he stunned the corps of Invincibles by waving a small flag and declaring, “My voice for war!”
His passion for the military never wavered. Although, at that time, most of the cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point came from wealthy and well-connected families, Custer managed to convince a congressman to sponsor him for the Class of 1862. He managed to get into plenty of trouble at West Point. Each cadet was permitted 100 demerits every six months and, every six months, Cinnamon, as he was nicknamed because he would use sweet-smelling cinnamon oils on his unusually long blond hair, would manage to get close to that limit before the period ended and the clock started again. His infractions were always minor: He’d be late for supper, his long blond hair would be out of place, he’d swing his arms while marching, or he’d get into a snowball fight. His mischievous personality just couldn’t conform to the strict code of conduct. In his career at the Point he compiled 726 total demerits, which still ranks as one of the worst conduct records in Academy history. He was quite popular with his classmates, though. Once, in Spanish class, he asked the instructor how to say “Class dismissed” in Spanish. When the instructor replied, everybody stood up and walked out—another incident that helped him set that record.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t a good student, either. When the Civil War started in 1861, more than a third of his class dropped out to join the Confederacy. The rest of the class was graduated a year early to serve in the war—and academically he finished at the very bottom of the remaining thirty-four students. Ironically, he received his worst grades in Cavalry Tactics.
Few people would have predicted that a poor student who wouldn’t follow orders would soon distinguish himself on the battlefield, but as it turned out, George Custer proved to be a natural leader, a man of great courage, who—unlike many fellow officers—always rode at the front of his force when his men charged into battle. Those other officers might have found him arrogant and vain, but no one questioned his bravery.
When he graduated, he was offered a cushy and safe assignment or the opportunity to go right into combat. He chose to go to war; when he was told they didn’t have a mount for him, he managed to find his own horse. Second Lieutenant Custer joined the Second Cavalry in time to fight in the First Battle of Bull Run. He began distinguishing himself as a staff officer for General George McClellan during the Union army’s first attempt to capture the Confederate capital, Richmond. At one point during their march south, McClellan’s men were trying to find a safe place to cross the Chickahominy River, which was at flood tide. When Custer overheard General Joe Johnson complaining to his staff that he wished he knew how deep the river was, Custer, with typical bravado, spurred his horse into the middle of it, continuing even as the water rose up to his neck, then turned and announced, “This is how deep it is, General.” McClellan then assigned Custer to lead four companies of the Fourth Michigan Infantry into battle. Custer’s force captured fifty prisoners—and the first Rebel battle flag of the war. McClellan described Custer as “a reckless, gallant boy, undeterred by fatigue, unconscious of fear,” and promoted him to the rank of captain.
Custer distinguished himself in battle during the Civil War, and he is shown in this 1864 engraving presenting captured battle flags to the US war department.
Custer had learned the value of self-promotion and rarely hesitated to set himself apart from other officers. Following the example of his commander, General Alfred Pleasonton, he began wearing extravagant, customized uniforms. Cavalry captain James Kidd described him as “[a]n officer superbly mounted, who sat on his charger as if to the manor born.” He wore a black velvet jacket trimmed with gold lace and brass buttons, a wide-brimmed hat turned down on one side, a sword and belt, and gilt spurs on high-top boots. And around his neck was “a necktie of brilliant crimson tied in a graceful knot at the throat, the lower ends falling carelessly in front,” which stood out brightly against his blond mustache and flowing blond hair.
Known by his troops for wearing flamboyant uniforms, Custer posed for this 1865 portrait in the traditional Union blues.
Another officer wrote that Custer “is one of the funniest-looking beings you ever saw, and looks like a circus rider gone mad.”
Custer contended that there was a good reason for his choice of uniform. “I want my men to recognize me on any part of the field,” he wrote. And, given the smoke and confusio
n of close combat, that made a lot of sense. If initially turned off by his flamboyant style, his troops were won over by his aggressive tactics and his willingness to lead attacks. There are reports that he had as many as a dozen horses shot out from under him during the Civil War, proof that he was usually in the thick of the action. Eventually his men began wearing similar red kerchiefs as a matter of pride.
Throughout his career, however, Custer was criticized for his seemingly endless pursuit of attention and recognition. At times, he would allow reporters to go out with his men on patrols. Some people believed that need for recognition caused him to behave recklessly.
It was at Gettysburg that George Custer became nationally famous. Three days before the battle began, he was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers, a temporary rank, and given command of the newly formed Michigan Brigade. At twenty-three years old, he was the youngest general in the army, but almost immediately, he showed his grit. At Hunterstown, on the road to Gettysburg, he led a charge into the mouth of Jeb Stuart’s troops. When his horse was shot and fell, he was nearly captured but was saved when a heroic private galloped forward and swooped him up, while at the same time shooting at least one Confederate soldier.
When Stuart attempted to flank the Union’s lines and attack the rear, he found Custer waiting for him at a place called Two Taverns. Ordered to counterattack, Custer stood before his troops, drew his saber, shouted “Come on, you Wolverines!” and raced into the action. He was said to be a veritable demon in the heat of battle, striking ceaselessly with any weapon available to him—slashing with his sword, firing his pistol—constantly urging his men forward, always forward. Within minutes, his horse was shot, but he commandeered a bugler’s horse and continued the fight. Seven hundred men clashed along a fence line, fighting for victory and their lives in close quarters. The sounds of battle were described as louder than a collision of giants; a relentless roar of men and horses, of carbines and pistols firing, of metal sabers clashing, and the cries of the wounded. And in the middle of it all was Custer. When he lost a second mount, he found another and never left the battlefield. His ability to stay in the middle of every fight without being wounded, even as one horse after the next was shot out from under him, became known far beyond his Wolverines as “Custer’s Luck.”