As the post transformed into a black town, Brown gained a rich social life. She would change out of her work clothes and call on the fort’s African American women, many employed as laundresses. Here, too, she asserted her independence. One night she came back “boiling with rage,” Libbie wrote to Armstrong. Brown had heard a husband tell his wife to light his pipe. “Eliza says managing men like that is too great drudgery to please her.”69
Libbie would later blame her discomposure on Armstrong’s absence. She missed him, she would write. No doubt she did. Yet the core problem posed by their separation was how it prevented them from resolving the crisis in their marriage.
Shirley Leckie observes that Armstrong’s letters to his wife reveal ongoing trouble. Even those that Libbie later chose to publish hint at his emotional distress. On April 25, he wrote that he had been uncharacteristically praying to God “that I may be made worthy, and be led to pursue such a moral life” so as to be an example to others. He included a poem on sin and redemption. It read, in part, “Blest, indeed, is he who never fell…/ Strong is temptation, willing are the feet / That follow pleasure; manifold her snares /…Pardon, not wrath, is God’s best attribute.” When he did not hear from her, he wrote, “Something wrong seemed a-brewing.”70
Leckie examined letters then held by the Custer family (now apparently in the hands of private collectors), and found even clearer evidence of persistent “dissension.” He was afraid of losing her because of his sins. “You know that I promised never to give you fresh cause for regret by attentions paid to other girls,” he wrote (emphasis added). He wished that she could “read my innermost heart and see the disgust” he felt at the memory of other women. Curiously, he referred not to a single affair or flirtation, but to at least two. His love for Libbie, he wrote, drove “all thoughts even of them from my mind.…I never thought of a single girl to whom I ever paid the slightest attention with any feeling but that of supreme indifference, and without wishing to see them, have cared nothing if I never met either of them again.”71
Guilt explains Armstrong’s agitation to unite with Libbie as separation alone does not. After all, he had voluntarily spent much of 1866 apart from her, and she had left him to spend a week in St. Louis. Nor did he express any particular fears for her as Indian attacks spread across the plains; indeed, he urged her again and again to cross an active war zone to join him at Fort Hays, and later at Fort Wallace. Guilt can be a shattering emotion for anyone. How much more so for a man who assiduously cultivated an image of gallantry?
Something even worse than guilt may have goaded him: the fear of discovery. In the same family papers, Leckie discovered a later letter to Armstrong written by “Anna.” She told him that she had just heard a love song. “I am so forcibly reminded of you that I cannot resist the temptation of telling you how I wish you were here,” she wrote. If he did have an affair with Anna Darrah, even if they merely flirted with infidelity, his anxiety to unite with Libbie makes sense. Every day he remained in the field—every day that Libbie and Darrah spent together in his absence—he was powerless to prevent his wife from discovering his sins against her. Once he rejoined her, he would regain a sense of control, and might begin to repair the damage.72
For there was already damage. The problem went deeper than any particular flirtation or even infidelity. It was in his nature to seek the attention of women. Libbie’s alienation forced him to look hard at himself, and the possible cost of how he behaved. Under orders to march back into the wilderness, he could do nothing to save their marriage.
“The inaction to which I am subjected now, in our present halt, is almost unendurable,” he wrote on April 22. He said he was reading Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. He demanded she come to Fort Hays—otherwise he would “try to kill time by killing Indians,” as if the campaign were a sidelight to his marriage.73
Sherman intervened. He appeared at Fort Riley in May and personally escorted Libbie, Darrah, Brown, and Tom Custer to Fort Harker. Colonel Smith took them to Fort Hays on May 17. But things only grew worse.74
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TO CAPT. ALBERT BARNITZ, the wait at Fort Hays began well. Thirty-two years old, with a broad mustache and curling, bristling hair brushed back from his forehead, Barnitz was an enthusiastic man, prone to ending his sentences with exclamation points. He was inclined to think well of Custer.75 The cavalry camped outside the fort, a cluster of “rude log and adobe huts,” as General Hancock described it, on the banks of Big Creek. Custer organized footraces, horse races, and a bison-hunting contest. He told Barnitz they would be there for three weeks, and he had sent for Libbie; Barnitz’s new bride, Jennie, could come as well.
Barnitz informed his wife of all this on May 4. On May 6, his tone changed. Custer required a dress parade every evening. He demanded perfection in cleaning the camp. He banned swearing—an order he “rigidly enforced,” Barnitz wrote. “General Custer has become ‘billious’ notwithstanding! He appears to be mad about something, and is very much on his dignity!” Custer took offense at Petroleum V. Nasby’s columns in recently delivered newspapers. Nasby, pseudonym of the political satirist David Locke, mocked Custer’s role in the Swing Around the Circle in a trademark exaggerated vernacular. And Barnitz heard that Hancock was irritated with Custer as well.
Theodore Davis, the artist for Harper’s, wrote years later that Custer was “sombre.” Writing at the time, Barnitz used the word “obstreperous.” Most of the officers pretended to be sick to avoid serving as officer of the day so they would not have to make the arrests he continually demanded for petty or nonexistent crimes. Custer ordered a rapid march to Lookout Station, hoping to catch hostile Indians reported there, but he found nothing. Frustrated, he arrested Barnitz for an imaginary offense.76 By May 15, Barnitz seemed on the verge of mutiny. He wrote,
General Custer is very injudicious in his administration, and spares no effort to render himself generally obnoxious. I have utterly lost all the little confidence I ever had in his ability as an officer—and all admiration for his character, as a man, and to speak the plain truth I am thoroughly disgusted with him! He is the most complete example of a petty tyrant I have ever seen. You would be filled with utter amazement, if I were to give you a few instances of his cruelty to the men, and discourtesy to the officers.
Two days later he wrote that six enlisted men were caught buying canned fruit in the fort, hoping to stave off the scurvy now sweeping the camp. They were away for less than an hour, and missed no roll call or duty. Yet Custer ordered their heads shaved on one side and had them carted through the camp. “Tyrannical,” Barnitz wrote. By contrast, Gibbs enforced discipline without being “a martinet, like Custer.”77
In Texas, Custer had also punished with humiliation. This approach to discipline came from deep within his character. He was complex. He could be emotionally sensitive. He had taken pity on enemy civilians, dead and wounded comrades, and former slaves whose backs told the history of whipping in keloid Braille. He loved the theater, which is the mimetic experience of others’ lives. Yet he was a practical joker, finding amusement in causing embarrassment or pain. He had a faculty for sympathy, but it had a faulty switch. When it malfunctioned, he saw no farther than himself. It may be why he was so good at killing. But it served him poorly at Fort Hays.
Libbie arrived on May 17. Custer set up the new arrivals in a canvas complex some 200 or 300 yards away from the main camp. Barnitz stayed away, wanting to be “independent entirely!” But when his wife, Jennie, arrived, they too tented together beside Big Creek.
In her memoir, Libbie gave few details about this long-awaited reunion, though she insisted she was happy. On June 1 Custer finally ordered the men to move out. He himself lingered until midnight, when he rode off with four Delaware scouts and “Medicine Bill” Comstock. Eliza approached him as he mounted and shook his hand. “Ginnel, I don’t like to see you goin’ off in this wild country, at this hour of night,” she told him. He had to go, he said. “Take care of Libbie,
Eliza.”78
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LIBBIE, ANNA, AND ELIZA REMAINED in camp on Big Creek. It nearly killed them. On June 5, Libbie and Darrah went on a walk outside Fort Hays with Lieutenant Weir. A sentinel mistook them for Indians and opened fire. They dove for cover in a dip in the ground. Weir crawled to the fort to stop the firing, and the women returned safely.
Two days later a thunderstorm erupted. “The whole air was filled with electricity,” Jennie Barnitz wrote. “The thunder I cannot describe. Much heavier than cannonading, & so very near us.” Rain pounded the tents of the wives and married couples, now clustered together on a rise above the nearly dry Big Creek. At three o’clock in the morning, “Smith came to our tent & screamed, ‘For God’s sake Barnitz get up, we are under water,’ ” she wrote. The shallow creek had become “a mighty rushing river, & I think I never saw so strong a current.”
The knoll where they camped became an island. They could hear the screams of men swept away in the current close by. Libbie desperately tried to untie a rope from a tent stake to save them. Eliza ran to her and shouted over the storm. “Miss Libbie, there’s a chance for us with one man. He’s caught in the branches of a tree; but I’ve seen his face and he’s alive. He’s most all of him under water, and the current is a-switchin’ him about so he can’t hold out long.” She offered her clothesline. They made a loop and showed it to the man in a flash of lightning, then threw it to him, missed, threw it again, and again. He finally caught it and they pulled. Brown got into the water up to her waist, and they finally pulled him free. Brown recalled that they saved two more that night. As many as nine others drowned, by Jennie Barnitz’s count.
The water dropped rapidly the next day. Gibbs believed the danger had passed, so they remained in their camp. Another storm burst over them that night. As the creek rose once again, the Barnitzes dressed and went to Libbie’s tent. They found her calm. “Well we will all go down together. I am glad the General doesn’t know of it,” she told them. But they survived this night too.
The flooding caused them to exit the camp. The fort itself was abandoned, and a new Fort Hays was later positioned a dozen miles farther up Big Creek. On June 16, Smith took all the women in ambulances to Fort Harker. Shortly afterward Libbie, Darrah, and Brown returned to Fort Riley, farther from Armstrong than ever.79
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CUSTER’S DOWNFALL BEGAN on June 1, 1867. For all of his personal difficulties, for all his petty cruelty within his regiment, his superiors did not fault his conduct. That changed after he set out on the march that ended seven weeks later in his arrest.80
On May 3 and again on the 21st, Smith had ordered Custer to march north to Fort McPherson on the Platte River, then west to Fort Sedgwick, then south to Fort Wallace. “The object of the expedition is to hunt out and chastise the Cheyennes and that portion of the Sioux who are their allies between the Smoky Hill and the Platte,” Smith wrote.81 It was clear language—and Custer ignored it.
Custer reached Fort McPherson on June 10, after a hard 229-mile march. As the men made camp, six Lakotas rode up. They included Pawnee Killer, the Oglala leader who had previously tricked Hancock. A tall man with narrow eyes, a long nose, and a wide mouth, he wore a high-crowned hat with a feather tucked in the band. He claimed to be peaceful, blamed the Cheyennes for recent attacks, and offered to bring his band in and remain under army protection. The Oglalas were amused by the wild animals kept as pets by the cavalrymen, including a tame antelope named Little Bill. Custer agreed to Pawnee Killer’s proposal. He provided sugar, coffee, and hard bread, and let them go.82
Custer did not want to fight. He wanted to see Libbie again, but he also had professional reasons, which he had enumerated a month earlier in a letter to his wife.
Wo be unto these Indians, if I ever overtake them! The chances are, however, that I shall not see any of them, it being next to impossible to overtake them when they are forewarned and expecting us, as they now are.…I regard the outrages that have been committed lately as not the work of a tribe, but of small and irresponsible parties of young men, who are eager for war. The stampede of the Indians from the village I attributed entirely to fear.…My opinion is, that we are not yet justified in declaring war.83
“If you have faith in Pawnee Killer, which I have not, hold him and three of his men as hostages, then send the others out with two of your companies to bring in the other Sioux at once,” Sherman wrote to Custer from Fort Sedgwick. The general had waited impatiently for Custer’s arrival on the Platte, and was irritated at his parley. He rushed to McPherson, but Pawnee Killer had already disappeared, and did not return.
Sherman blamed Pawnee Killer’s band for numerous attacks. But personal guilt mattered little to him—the problem, he thought, was the Indians’ very existence. On June 11 he wrote to Grant,
It is an inevitable conflict of races, one that must occur where a stronger is gradually displacing a weaker. The Indians are poor and proud. They are tempted beyond the power of resistance to steal of the herds and flocks they see grazing so peacefully in the valley. To steal they sometimes must kill. We in our time cannot discriminate—all look alike, talk alike, and under the same passions act alike, and to get the rascals, we are forced to include all.…Hostilities between the races will continue till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched.
Those hostilities frustrated him—even worse than fighting Nathan Bedford Forrest, he wrote. He told Stanton, “Fifty hostile Indians will checkmate three thousand soldiers.” It was best to “get them out as soon as possible,” whether “coaxed out…or killed.”84
Custer and Sherman were both wrong, though they each had insights. They were correct in their military assessments. The Cheyennes and Lakotas possessed superior mobility and knowledge of the terrain, and benefited from a very low force-to-space ratio. These advantages allowed them to conduct asymmetrical warfare, striking the army where it was weak with surprise raids and escaping safely. Custer was correct that Hancock had needlessly provoked the current fighting. But Sherman was wrong to think the attacks could go on forever, or resulted from “temptation.” And Custer was wrong to blame merely “irresponsible…young men.”
Instead of the irrational savages these officers imagined, the Cheyennes, Lakotas, and their allies clearly understood the threats they faced. Armed resistance was a rational policy option, quite apart from the spontaneous actions of individual warriors. Their existence was based on war. They had won their lands in fierce aggression against other peoples (as Pawnee Killer’s very name testified). Signing treaties had only brought more pressure on the critical river valleys. It was natural to think that force—a familiar tool—might work where diplomacy had failed. To the north, the Oglala leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse orchestrated attacks along the Bozeman Trail; these would help convince the U.S. government to abandon the trail and its forts.85
Sherman saw Pawnee Killer as treacherous. From Pawnee Killer’s point of view, his deception of Custer was a ruse, entirely appropriate in an unequal war for survival. More than a mere trick, his maneuver was strikingly courageous; to execute it, he had had to place himself in Custer’s power. It revealed Pawnee Killer’s sense of humor, too. He rode right into the enemy camp, thoroughly hoodwinked his opponent, and even convinced Custer to issue him supplies. Then he left Custer to wait around uselessly as the Oglalas trotted away. It was funny.
When Custer realized that Pawnee Killer had fooled him, as Sherman predicted, it added to his accumulating frustrations. Nothing was quite right. His brother Tom finally joined him in the field, but something about Tom’s “conduct”—most likely his drinking—aggravated him. Always drawn to theatrics, to the exotic, Custer dressed in full frontier style: buckskin suit, twin revolvers belted at his waist (butts forward, as Wild Bill wore them), knee-high moccasins fringed along the calves, along with his usual long hair and low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. The outfit highlighted his failures as a plainsman. He repeatedly lost Indian trails, sho
t his own horse twice again that year, and mistook an elk herd for the enemy. He had yet to fight a single skirmish.86
“Killing Indians” eluded him. Death did not. Before reaching Fort McPherson, someone burst in as Custer ate with Tom, and told them that Wyckliffe Cooper had gotten drunk and shot himself. The Custers ran to his tent and found him on his knees and face, blood pooling on the ground. Increasingly distressed, Custer anxiously insisted that Libbie meet him at Fort Wallace.
Marching west, he arrived at the headwaters of the Republican River on June 21, entering the heartland of the Cheyennes and Oglalas. On June 24, an Indian war party shot a sentinel at his camp and tried to stampede his horses. The troopers turned out to fight. It was Custer’s first chance to wage a battle with his elusive foe. Instead, he sent his interpreter to signal for a talk. The man rode forward in a zigzag, the sign for a truce, then he rode in a circle, trotted forward, and circled again—the sign for a parley. Custer and a half-dozen officers met a like number of Oglala men.
Their leader was Pawnee Killer. The sight of him should have made Custer wary. Pawnee Killer had fooled him once before, and Hancock before that. But Custer still hoped to avoid fighting, which gave the Lakota leader a chance to play his funniest joke yet. Of course he wanted peace, he assured Custer, and he invited the troopers to follow him back to his camp. The men of the 7th Cavalry saddled up and rode behind the Oglalas, who picked up their pace and soon outdistanced the soldiers. Custer lost the trail. He gave up the chase and turned back, only to discover Pawnee Killer’s punch line: as one man wrote, they “found Indians had been in our camp while we were away.” The Oglalas had circled back to pillage their tents.
Alarmed, Custer sent reinforcements to escort a supply train expected from Fort Wallace. Then he sent more. It was a wise decision, for Pawnee Killer could be as lethal as he was humorous. The troops arrived in time to save the wagons from a siege. Custer turned north toward Fort Sedgwick and marched through searing heat and fierce fields of prickly pear cactus, which caused the dogs to howl in pain when they leaped from the wagons. Custer and three others rode ahead to find a campsite on the Platte. They collapsed in exhaustion when they arrived, leaving the troops to find their own way to water. At a stage station he wired a message to Fort Sedgwick, and learned that Sherman had already sent new orders in the care of Lt. Lyman Kidder and an eleven-man escort. Custer had not seen Kidder. Ordered south to Fort Wallace, where he expected to see Libbie, he led his men back into cactus country with hardly a rest.87
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