Custer pressed on. They found an old trail. He asked the Osage scouts about it. “Very old, two months old at least,” they told him. He decided to follow it anyway. It led to a fresh trail. He prohibited bugle calls, shooting, anything that might alert the Cheyennes to their approach. On March 15, they surprised a large camp, some 260 lodges, on Sweetwater Creek, a tributary of the Red River. One of its leaders was Medicine Arrows, keeper of the sacred arrows, some of the holiest Cheyenne artifacts.91
Custer could have attacked. The Kansas troops demanded it. With his force of more than 1,000 men—and no women and children to protect—he almost certainly would have prevailed. But he considered the consequences. Hundreds would likely escape and continue the war indefinitely. He also remembered the captives Anna Morgan and Sarah White—and the fate of Clara and Willie Blinn after he attacked at the Washita. “I knew that the first shot fired on either side would be the signal for the murder of the two white girls,” he wrote. So he signaled for a parley. Medicine Arrows himself rode out to meet him, and Custer agreed to come to a council in the village, accompanied only by Lieutenant Cooke. On the ride in, he spotted Mahwissa.
Fifteen senior men sat with Custer in Medicine Arrows’s lodge in the center of the camp, in a circle around a large fire. Cooke was kept out. A ritual pipe was prepared, given to Custer to smoke, then passed around; a Cheyenne report claims that the ashes were dumped out on Custer’s boots to curse him. The Cheyennes acknowledged that the captives were in the camp, promised to return them, and agreed to let his troops bivouac nearby. They would surrender and come in with him.
“I felt confident that as soon as it was dark the entire village would probably steal away,” Custer later wrote. Indeed, he initially deployed his men to cut off any flight. Over the next four days, complicated negotiations unfolded. The Cheyennes did not release the captives immediately. At one point the women and children fled, only to be coaxed back with the promise of being allowed to collect their possessions—a sign he had learned from Hancock’s mistake at Pawnee Fork in 1867. Finally Custer seized three leaders, Dull Knife (also called Lean Face), Big Head (also called Curly Head), and Fat Bear. If the two white women were not released by sundown on March 19, he warned, he would kill the three men. He showed them the tree where he would hang them, so there would be no misunderstanding. After he executed them, he planned to assault the village.
Late in the afternoon of the designated day, the Cheyennes released the captives. When Daniel Brewster saw Anna Morgan and Sarah White, they were starving, dressed in rags sewn together from flour sacks and bits of old tents and blankets. One scout said, “I never saw such heart-broken, hopeless expressions on the face of another human being.” One Kansas volunteer thought Morgan looked fifty—twice her actual age. “She was stooped, pale, and haggard.”92
Custer trusted that his three hostages would induce the Cheyennes to come in to army custody. He set out on a miserable march to Camp Supply, his men suffering from a shortage of water and rations, the horses dying of starvation and exhaustion. He was often self-indulgent as a commander, lacking any sympathy for the enlisted men—but not on this expedition. The officers split up the food “equally with the men,” wrote David Spotts of the 19th Kansas, “even to Gen. Custer, who turned his private wagon over to the men and told them to divide what it contained among themselves, for he could live without eating as long as any of them.”93
Months would pass before the last of the Cheyennes and their allies came in to the forts. But the Dog Soldiers returned to the middle country when the grass came up. On July 11, 1869, Maj. Eugene Carr led the 5th Cavalry and a detachment of Pawnee scouts in a surprise attack on their camp near Summit Springs in the Colorado Territory. They killed the famous Tall Bull along with scores of men, women, and children. It was “the effective end of the Dog Soldiers as a force of resistance,” writes Elliott West, definitively terminating the Southern Plains War of 1868–69.94
Custer congratulated Carr on his extraordinary summer victory. It was a sign of his satisfaction with himself. “I have been successful in my campaign against the Cheyennes,” he wrote to Libbie on March 24. “I outmarched them, outwitted them at their own game, [and] proved to them they were in my power.” He had accomplished everything Sheridan asked of him and more. His redemption was complete.95
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“THE CHARACTER OF THE BAND of Indians, almost annihilated in the late attack by Gen. Custer, has been the subject of much discussion, some maintaining that they were friendly Indians,” wrote the New York Observer and Chronicle on December 24, 1868.96
As soon as Sheridan announced the Battle of the Washita, a controversy erupted over whether Custer had committed an atrocity. Black Kettle was well known as an advocate of peace. The slaughter of his people at Sand Creek still resonated as a symbol of the brutal excesses of the Indian wars. In striking him again—with a surprise attack that completely destroyed his band—Custer appeared to have repeated it. Edward Wynkoop denounced the attack as “simply a massacre.” Other public figures said the same thing. The New York Times fiercely defended Custer against “the charge that [he] had attacked and massacred a band of peaceful Indians,” but even it observed that the Washita fight was “a pretty murderous affair.…Nothing is said of a single [male Cheyenne] being captured—from which we may guess that all were dispatched.”97
It was an inescapable fact that Custer killed the leading Southern Cheyenne peace advocate. But he did not show unusual carelessness in launching his assault, within the context of the Indian wars. He attacked Black Kettle because that was where the trail of a war party led. He and Sheridan pointed to mules, mail, and other loot in the village which had been stolen in recent raids. Even disregarding this evidence, the testimony of Edmund Guerrier, Little Rock, and Black Kettle himself identified members of the latter’s band as participants—one as a leader—in the atrocities on the Saline and Solomon and subsequent attacks. Custer has been criticized for not knowing who he was attacking; but no army officer with similar orders would have surrendered the advantage of surprise to sound out the band’s leaders. In any event, Custer only struck Black Kettle’s band because Sheridan refused to allow any Cheyennes a refuge at Fort Cobb. This order led directly to Black Kettle’s death, and Sheridan issued it long before Custer first set out from Camp Supply.
Was it a massacre? He did charge a population center and kill women and children. The historian Jerome Greene notes that he did not order their murder, but rather intervened to save them. The surprise attack on a sleeping village was a standard tactic because it was effective. “The presence of women and children immobilized the warriors and forced them to defend their ground,” writes Richard Slotkin. It inevitably killed noncombatants, though not as intentionally as the gruesome bombings of cities in World War II, for example. The point is not to justify this tactic, but to place Custer in context. At the less controversial Summit Springs, Major Carr produced a similar tally.98
And yet, Custer clearly carried out an atrocity, at Sheridan’s command. His orders were stark: “To destroy their villages and ponies; to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children” (emphasis added). The 7th Cavalry took no adult male prisoners—though not because of any special villainy on Custer’s part. Few field officers objected to such orders. They saw themselves at war with “the enemies of our race,” as Sheridan called them, and were outraged by Indian attacks on civilians. Sully, no friend to Custer, wrote privately that the Washita was entirely justified, and he hoped that there would be no “peace before these red devils are properly punished.” Custer’s bitterest enemy, Benteen, described the foe at the Washita as “the murderous redskin.” Of course, posterity need not excuse this murder of all men, no matter how ordinary at the time. Ever since the Nuremberg trials, orders have not been considered justification for crimes against humanity. In subsequent campaigning Custer himself refrained from slaughter even though it was expected of him. It could be avoided.99
; The most telling criticism of Custer, then and now, is not that he personally was unusually bloodthirsty, but that the wars themselves were unjustifiable. The relationship between the United States and the high-plains nations was one of an industrializing, rapidly growing, and aggressive society overwhelming far smaller and less powerful peoples who relied on hunting, gathering, and trade. It was not fair. One may question whether “war” is the proper term; the United States might have withheld its military power and still prevailed. The very existence of the United States was predicated on the dispossession of the indigenous. If Custer was wrong, ultimately it was because the nation was wrong. Many believe it was. But he was no outlier.100
When given a second chance to score a military victory, Custer held back. He was motivated by his hope of saving the two white women. It was a humane decision, but also a romantic one. With the desperate brother of one prisoner at his side, he recast his military mission as a rescue. Would Sheridan, Sherman, or Grant have held back? Masters of modernity’s grim realism, they may well have accepted the captives’ deaths as the price of the state’s assertion of its authority. What we know is that Custer, despite his reputation for impetuosity, exercised discretion.
A second controversy over the Washita exploded while Custer was still in the field. On February 9, 1869, the St. Louis Democrat published a letter written by an officer of the 7th Cavalry (reprinted within days by the New York Times and Chicago Tribune). It gave a vivid account of the Battle of the Washita, simultaneously florid and sarcastic. For example, it described the killing of the ponies this way: “Our Chief exhibits his close sharp-shooting and terrifies the crowd of frighted, captured squaws and papooses by dropping the straggling ponies in death near them. Ah! he is a clever marksman.” The main thrust of the letter was to condemn Custer for failing to look for Elliott. “But surely some search will be made for our missing comrades. No, they are forgotten. Over them and the poor ponies the wolves will hold high carnival, and their howlings will be their only requiem.”101
Benteen wrote it. He blamed the lieutenant colonel for Elliott’s disaster. He asked Ben Clark to swear that Custer had ordered Elliott to his death. Clark refused, knowing that Custer had had no idea where he went. On the feint toward the main village, Clark said, flankers were told to look for Elliott. He noted that they were in serious danger after capturing the village, and Custer’s priority had to be extricating his force.102
Sheridan believed that he should have tried harder. Indeed, Custer’s departure from the Washita without Elliott echoed his abandonment of two casualties in 1867. But the Washita was not such a clear case. Elliott rode off on his own, and sent no word of his intentions. By the time his absence was noted any rescue would have been too late. Historians would later debate whether Elliott’s death can be blamed on Custer’s failure to carry out a thorough reconnaissance before the attack, which might have detected the downstream villages. Perhaps, though Custer did dispatch his scouts to search around Black Kettle’s village; after marching all night, he feared any more maneuvering would eliminate the crucial advantage of surprise. But emotion, not logic, ruled Benteen.103
Ten years later, a friend of Benteen’s named Robert Newton Price, still a cadet at West Point during these events, published a secondhand account of the consequences of Benteen’s anonymous letter. Custer called his officers together, “and they assembled to find him walking up and down, switching his legs with a riding whip. He referred to the letter, saying it could only have been written by some officer of that regiment, and directed the author to step up to the front. Colonel Benteen did so at once.” According to Price, Custer folded, saying only, “Colonel, I’ll see you again on this matter.”
This hearsay account would be embellished over the years, with Benteen placing his hand on his revolver in a threatening manner and urging Custer to commence whipping. The latter version is preposterous on its face. Cowardice was not one of Custer’s faults; he had likely killed more men in close combat than Benteen ever had. Nor did Benteen display such physical bravado with his commanding officer on any other occasion. Rather he would defend his insubordination with petty excuses.104
It’s difficult to know what to make of even Price’s more straightforward account. This scene repeats one that occurred in Texas, where Custer threatened to whip a major in the 2nd Wisconsin for slandering him.105 That could lend credibility to Price’s account, as Custer might have repeated himself. Alternatively Price or Benteen might have heard the earlier story and inserted Benteen into it; Benteen could have developed a sincere but false memory after retelling the tale. Or perhaps some kind of confrontation took place, though not so flattering to Benteen. If it occurred as Price described it, it would have been dramatic, yet contemporary accounts from other witnesses have yet to surface. Indeed, Custer would have had grounds to arrest Benteen for the letter alone; we know he had the will, as he arrested officers for far less. If Benteen confessed—if he threatened his superior officer—why no charges? Why no official complaint? Whether it occurred or not, Custer now knew he had an enemy in the regiment.
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BENTEEN TOLD ANOTHER STORY about Custer that is more likely true. In the weeks and months that followed the Washita, he said, Romero acted as a pimp with the female captives, bringing them to officers’ tents for sex. Custer selected the daughter of Little Rock, Young Grass That Shoots in Spring, or Monahsetah (also referred to as Meotzi).
Ben Clark described the same thing years later to the researcher Walter Camp, insisting that he not be quoted. He claimed that Custer disguised Monahsetah’s role as his mistress by making her the helper to the white woman who was his cook. Indeed, Custer himself praised her beauty in his published writings, and he brought her along on his last march. Cheyenne tradition agrees, and states that they had a child. The story has been closely scrutinized. Historians agree that he did not father a baby born to her in January 1869, though reportedly she became pregnant again soon after the birth. Jeffry Wert theorizes that he was sterile from treatment for gonorrhea at West Point—a plausible if unprovable conjecture. But Clark’s account gives weight to the tale of a liaison, particularly since he did not share Benteen’s spite. It would not be surprising if Custer took Monahsetah. He was enthusiastic about sex, considered American Indians exotic, and thought she was attractive. He lived in a frontier culture in which white men saw “squaws” as not fully human and “Indian wives” as acceptable regardless of legal marital status.106
Custer may have been willing to take the risk because of his restored confidence in his relationship with Libbie. His letters from the field lacked the agonized quality of his 1867 correspondence. Now he addressed her as “my little bunkey,” but in a tone of authority, even moral superiority. On February 8, 1869, he observed that she placed herself “upon guard” when he mentioned “a certain mutual friend against whom I warned you.” He said that he hoped to go to Washington but that she might not want to go, “as you so longed for 11worth last summer when away and have opposed my obtaining a leave heretofore.” He had told her before that “I must go for twenty days. This is on my own account. I will go for a longer period if you deserve it and intend accompanying me.”107
Did he suspect her of having an affair in Leavenworth? Of flirting with someone rather too blatantly? Or did he merely resent her not wanting to go with him? If nothing else, he clearly felt that he had the upper hand.
His victory at the Washita restored some of his fame. Friendly accounts in the New York Times and elsewhere more than balanced the controversy, recasting the Boy General as a “cavalier in buckskin,” to quote the title of Utley’s biography. But he would discover that the nation no longer needed cavaliers.
Thirteen
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THE FINANCIER
“HE WAS BORN INTO a time when all young men of his age caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old.”
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote those words in 1873 in their novel The Gilded Age. They could have been writing about Custer as he entered the Age of Grant.1 When Ulysses S. Grant took the presidential oath of office on March 4, 1869, the nation that emerged out of the Civil War approached maturity—or what we might call its first maturity. All that was “appointed from of old” seemed to disappear.
For both good and ill, the federal government challenged traditional, inherited distinctions and communities, as policy makers sought to turn all into individual agents, transacting business under uniform rules in a national market. For African Americans, this meant liberation; for American Indians, cultural destruction. Railroads, the telegraph, and the increasingly national media integrated the republic, connecting local markets to the whole, unifying literary tastes and culture.
Great institutions rose over this nation of individuals. Both the federal government and business corporations attained size and reach never seen before—again, for both good and ill. Antebellum companies merged to form giants. They constructed vast factories, refineries, warehouses, port facilities, rail yards, and depots. The largest firms each employed tens of thousands, from unskilled laborers to lawyers and engineers. During Grant’s presidency, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan would outdistance the mass of men in building industries and fortunes, and the venerable Cornelius Vanderbilt, lord of a railroad empire, would be hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “probably the most powerful individuality in America.”2
The same machinery that cemented empires spun “rings” as well. In the new corporate economy, all roads ended on Wall Street, where the modernizing stock exchange and other financial markets concentrated and multiplied capital. If legitimate enterprises received funds, so did well-positioned speculators, for this was also the age of conspirators and inside traders, including Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, and such political buccaneers as William “Boss” Tweed and Orville Babcock.3
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