Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

by Stiles, T. J.

  Having cleared the Central Plains of the Southern Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the generals contemplated the Lakotas. The halt of Northern Pacific’s westward expansion removed an immediate cause for hostilities, but it also denied the army a decisive means of destroying nomadic culture. Neither Sherman nor Sheridan wished to rush into war with such a powerful enemy, and they did not want to be blamed if one did erupt. They feuded with Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, who ordered the arrest of the Lakota leaders who fought Custer in 1873. Sheridan stopped it, calling it so provocative that the army would “have to fight all the Sioux, guilty or not.”5

  “I suppose we had better let things take their natural course until the mass of Indians commit some act that will warrant a final war,” Sherman remarked. The military, greatly reduced by Congress across successive appropriations, lacked enough men to wage an extensive campaign on the Northern Plains in 1873–75, with troops tied down by first the Modoc War and then the Red River War. Yet Lakota militancy grew toward a crisis, particularly at Red Cloud’s Oglala agency and Spotted Tail’s Brulé agency south of the Great Sioux Reservation. There Lakotas murdered a federal agent and rigged the ration system to acquire funds for scarce ammunition for their repeating rifles (the same men took issues of cattle at multiple agencies then sold the hides back to the agencies for cash). Sheridan sent troops, but tensions remained high. Sitting Bull continued to refuse rations and ignored treaty boundaries, roaming freely, warring on Indian enemies, and attracting followers outside his own Hunkpapa tribe. Sherman, stripped of real power by Secretary of War William Belknap, could do no more than state his opinions, stark as ever: “Sooner or later these Sioux have to be wiped out or made to stay just where they are put.”6

  “Meantime, the raids of Sioux Indians on the settlers and friendly Pawnee Indians continued south of the North Platte, and a constant apprehension was entertained that there would be what is called a general Indian War,” Sheridan explained to a critic. Sheridan liked clarity: clear boundaries, clear rules, clear consequences. But the unceded land west and south of the Great Sioux Reservation was a very large, very fuzzy edge. He developed an interim plan to contain the Lakotas by restricting access to this area. “I…thought it would be the best policy for the Government to surround this Reservation by large military posts to ultimately keep the Indians within its bounds and white people from encroaching on its limits,” he wrote. The latter point is noteworthy. Though Sheridan supposedly said, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” he held his own race in only slightly higher regard after witnessing racist atrocities in the South. Far more than Sherman, he believed in federal authority and the use of force to maintain it.

  Sheridan presented his plan at a meeting with President Grant, Sherman, Secretary Belknap, Secretary Delano, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward Smith. He noted that several posts already hemmed in the reservation, except to the west. With a fort on the southwest boundary, next to the unceded territory, “I would be able to make it a little hot for the villages and stock of these Indians [if] they attempted to raid the settlements south.” Until he had enough troops for the “final war” that Sherman envisioned, he could retaliate from that point, creating a deterrent.

  Grant and the assembled officials approved. Sheridan decided to build his fort in the mysterious Black Hills, a large expanse of wooded, rocky heights and valleys. He would have to send a large force to scout this unknown region and select a location. He thought of launching it from the south, but that would carry the troops through the restive Nebraska agencies, inviting trouble. Fortunately for Sheridan, his favorite subordinate commanded a fort north of the reservation. He decided to give Custer command of the expedition.7

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  “ON THE 15TH OF JUNE we bid adieu to civilization and civilized beings…and plunge into regions hitherto unvisited by white men,” Custer wrote to Lawrence Barrett on May 19, 1874. He begged his actor friend to join his expedition to the Black Hills. After a summer in the wild, “you will return a new man and feel as if you had really been drinking the true elixir of life.” Maj. George “Sandy” Forsyth and Lt. Fred Grant would join him; Custer’s younger brother Boston would come, too, though he did not mention the latter to Barrett. Custer would have ten companies of the 7th Cavalry, Gatling guns, Indian scouts, and scientists to examine the geology and hunt for fossils. “It is the freest easiest sort of life one can imagine. I generally wear buckskin coat & pants winter & summer.…You will never regret it I am sure, and I know [you] would enjoy your visit more than language can express. But give me at once your decision. I am in the midst of busy preparations for the march.”8

  Barrett cheerfully declined. “I am compelled to forego the happiness,” he wrote. “My policy of life insurance could become invalid in case of death on the trip.” As he had implied in an earlier letter, he preferred wearing a wig onstage over losing his scalp to the Indians.9

  Reporters, on the other hand, clamored to go. “Who has not heard of the Black Hills and the rich treasures of gold and other precious metals supposed to exist there,” asked the Bismarck Tribune on May 27. “Year after year expeditions have been formed or talked of to explore this region…[only to be] checked by Government interference or driven off by the Indians. Only a month ago, the Bozeman expedition returned disorganized…after a month’s continuous fighting with the Indians.” Everyone thought Custer could push through. Recently a Lakota raiding party stole a mule herd at Fort Lincoln; within twenty minutes, the Sioux City Journal reported, Custer led the garrison in pursuit. He recovered most of the herd. “He is a ‘screamer,’ in the language of this country, and the reds are beginning to find it out.”10

  Perhaps the most influential newspaperman to appear at Fort Lincoln was young William E. Curtis of the Chicago Inter-Ocean and New York World. “I came here expecting to find a big-whiskered, swearing, ranting, drinking trooper, and I found instead a slender, quiet gentleman,” his blond hair cut short, his complexion clear, his eyes bright blue, a man who did not drink, swear, or smoke, he wrote of Custer. At twenty-four, Curtis had been a teenager during the Civil War; only now did he awake to Custer’s potential for exciting copy.

  “He is a great man—a noble man is General Custer,” he wrote. “Since I have been here I have heard anecdotes of his goodness and manliness from his soldiers and others that would fill columns.” He claimed to have entered Custer’s study and found him with two little girls—one black and one white—teaching them to read. “His wife, a charming lady, who has shared his marches and victories since early in the war, is as gentle and cultivated, and yet as soldierly as a woman can be,” he added.11

  If the presence of reporters and scientists on the Black Hills foray fit Custer’s tastes, it was entirely coincidental. The press always accompanied major military expeditions in the West. Sheridan encouraged scientific discovery, inviting a professor from Yale University to join the Black Hills column. With Sheridan’s support, Minnesota’s state geologist, Prof. Newton Winchell, and other scientists went as well.12

  Custer also bore no responsibility for the public impression of the expedition. He set out to explore a little-known region and find a site for a fort. But the typical newspaper headline resembled one that ran in the Baltimore Sun on July 25: “Looking for Gold—Custer’s Exploring Expedition.” As just noted, the public expected Custer to find the precious metal. The Chicago Tribune and a few others editorialized against the mission because it would lead to a white influx and provoke a war; and some insisted that the Fort Laramie Treaty prohibited the survey. The Boston Advertiser claimed it was “but a continuation of the long course of bad faith which the United States has consistently pursued in its dealings with the red men.” But most newspapers cheered for gold, knowing it would give hope to the public during the terrible depression.13

  What they sought, they found. “GOLD!” declared the headline of the Chicago Inter-Ocean on August 27, 1874. “From the grass roots down it was ‘pay dirt,’ ” C
urtis wrote. The two prospectors who first found the “color,” he added, “will be the pioneers of a new golden State.” Newspapers closer to the scene scooped Curtis’s story. “STRUCK IT AT LAST!” shouted the Yankton Press & Dakotaian, neatly summarizing the expectations surrounding the expedition. “PREPARE FOR LIVELY TIMES!”

  Custer took care not to overstate the find in his official reports, but he supported the gold claims amid lavish praise for every aspect of the Black Hills, from average rainfall to the taste of the wild berries to the region’s sheer beauty. The expedition left him in good spirits. It had operated smoothly, without any conflicts with the Lakotas. He wrote to Libbie, “At last I have reached the highest rung in the hunter’s ladder of fame. I have killed my grizzly after a most exciting hunt & combat.”14

  After his return he told the Bismarck Tribune that reports of gold “are not exaggerated in the least,” and claimed (without evidence) that the Indians “seldom visited” the Black Hills. But, he added, “the Government has entered into a solemn treaty with the Indians whereby they agree to keep off all trespassers. This is a law of the land and should be respected, and General Sheridan has already issued instructions to the military to prevent expeditions entering upon the reservation.…Until Congress authorizes the settlement of the country the military will do its duty.”15

  Talk of law and duty mattered less than his emphasis on the gold’s accessibility. “On some of the water-courses almost every panful of earth produced gold in small, yet paying, quantities,” his report stated. “It has not required an expert to find gold in the Black Hills, as men without former experience in mining have discovered it at an expense of but little time or labor.” As the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick notes in her seminal The Legacy of Conquest, classic gold rushes began with an egalitarian phase, when the metal could be found through low-skill panning or placer mining. Such gold finds drew both poor and well-capitalized migrants.

  And why not? In the 1870s, gold was not simply worth money, it was money. The gold dollar continued in existence alongside the greenback; anyone could take refined gold (and gold was easy to refine) to the mint and have it stamped into gold coin. In mining regions, gold dust and nuggets circulated as currency. Later—and often not much later—gold became harder to find, requiring investment in heavy equipment and tunnels to extract and isolate the ore. But Custer promised everyone a chance at riches.16

  He told the Bismarck Tribune that he would recommend the acquisition of the Black Hills. He was not alone. “Well, I don’t know about the minerals,” Sherman told a reporter, when asked about the region. “But there is evidently an immense and valuable region to be opened to civilization, and the army alone can do it.” For now, the Black Hills remained Sioux property, and the army remained committed to stopping the prospectors who loaded wagons and set out to find gold.17

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  “GEN. CUSTER IS A BRILLIANT and brave soldier, a fact of which, we may remark, he is perfectly aware,” the Independent observed on November 5, 1874; “but his egotism does not prevent him from writing sketches which are both interesting and useful.” The newspaper almost liked Custer’s newly published book, My Life on the Plains, despite often criticizing the man and his prose. His fame, refreshed on the Yellowstone and in the Black Hills, helped. It gained him invitations to reunions of the Army of the Cumberland in September and the Army of the Tennessee in October of that year.

  He and Libbie also attended the wedding of President Ulysses S. Grant’s son Fred in Chicago on October 20. But the Grants kept Custer at a distance. At a grand lunch at the Palmer House hotel, Charles Larned sat with the groom but Armstrong and Libbie were exiled to another table.18

  Grant and Custer had encountered each other many times in the decade since they first met on a special train to Washington. During the Civil War Grant had appreciated Custer’s willingness to fight and ability to win. After Appomattox he found Custer troublesome, even dangerous, in case after case: the affair of Don Juan, his mistreatment of troops in Texas, the Swing Around the Circle, his sins of 1867, his public attack on his court-martial, his opposition to Grant’s election in 1868, his hostility to Reconstruction in Kentucky, his rankling the chain of command in 1873. But nothing indicates that Grant, as president, gave Custer much thought. The cavalryman had wisely stepped back from overt politics in recent years, and other matters demanded Grant’s attention. That would soon change. A gale blew through their lives; it would catch hold of their personal flaws and propel them into a very public collision.

  The White House seems to attract individuals who combine ambition and tragic failings, and Grant was one. The popular memory of Grant’s presidency dwells on those failings, but his strengths dominated his first term. This unpretentious man had spent much of his life immersed in adversity. It polished his sense of justice, his simplicity and decency. In a classic example of Grant’s humor, he mocked the vanity and self-importance of Charles Sumner. Told that Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible, Grant said, “No, I suppose not; he didn’t write it.” And yet his personal distaste did not prevent him from taking action on Sumner’s central issue, civil rights. When white supremacist violence ravaged the African American South, he picked the principled Amos Akerman as his attorney general and supported efforts to crush the Ku Klux Klan. The sincerity of his Peace Policy may be gauged by his appointment of Ely Parker, a member of the Seneca nation, as his first commissioner of Indian affairs. It was an unprecedented act of racial diversification in an administration, showing personal sensitivity. At the beginning of his presidency, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk pressed him to support their attempt to corner the gold market, corrupting his brother-in-law Abel Corbin and setting up a gold account for First Lady Julia Dent Grant. Grant refused, and ordered a sale of gold that broke their corner in September 1869.19

  Yet Grant’s years of failure had deepened other traits as well. He only felt comfortable with a cluster of friends who had stood by him during his worst years in peace and war. He made his old chief of staff John A. Rawlins—“the honest voice of humanitarian conscience,” according to William McFeely—his first secretary of war, named his ally Sherman commander of the army, and put the trusted Sheridan in charge of the West. All proved their ability. Other friends exploited their proximity to the president for personal gain. They included Grant’s private secretary, Orville Babcock, who had served on his wartime staff, the quartermaster Rufus Ingalls, an old West Point roommate and longtime intimate, as well as such opportunistic relatives as Corbin and younger brother Orvil Grant.

  Obscurity also gave Grant and his wife, Julia, a dread of poverty and a longing for respectability. He named Hamilton Fish his secretary of state, and sometimes heeded his advice even when it contradicted his instincts—particularly after the death of Rawlins, his moral rudder, in September 1869. Fish personified patrician New York. Born to a prosperous and socially eminent family, he served as governor and U.S. senator, moving from the Whig to the Republican party. He frowned on egalitarian measures such as black suffrage, which Grant supported. Grant did not change his opinions, yet he held tight to this paragon of high society. Fish managed their relationship with great tact, as seen in the attempted annexation of Santo Domingo (known today as the Dominican Republic). Fish disdained the idea, but it mattered a great deal to Grant. The president believed that, as a bastion of mixed-race American citizens, it “would make slave labor unprofitable” in such nearby places as Cuba, where slavery still existed, and give African Americans from the mainland a refuge, which would somehow undermine racial hatred in the South. To negotiate the treaty, Grant dispatched his private secretary, Babcock, who along with Ingalls sought personal profit by speculating in land. Sumner opposed the treaty, and the Senate refused to ratify it. The defeat embittered Grant against Sumner (who died on March 11, 1874) and divided the Republican Party. The president relied even more heavily on Fish, who adroitly preserved his status in Grant’s eyes as the indispensable adviser.20

  Fish also v
oiced Wall Street’s orthodox opinions on financial matters. Conventional wisdom can prevent overreaching, but it also inhibits innovation. If there was ever a time to try something new, it was after the panic of 1873. In April 1874, Congress passed a bill to put more money into circulation. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the legislation embodied a modest and conventional monetarist response to contraction. Called “quantitative easing” in recent times, the idea was to counter hoarding by frightened lenders and battle the curse of deflation. The Treasury had already conducted one such operation after the panic, so the bill could hardly be considered revolutionary. But at least it would do something to alleviate suffering. Grant personally knew the reality of hard times, and seemed to lean toward signing it.21

  The men of finance blasted it as the “Inflation Bill.” It outraged them, and it outraged Fish. The passion surrounding currency questions can seem bewildering to later generations. Americans in the 1860s and ’70s saw the nature of money as a deeply moral, even theological question. To “hard money” advocates, the gold dollar had intrinsic value, free from human manipulation. They wanted to reduce the volume of greenbacks until the Treasury could freely exchange them on demand for gold dollars, one for one. Then the supply of gold alone would determine the dollar’s value.22

  Financial stakes also drove the debate. Bankers, bondholders, and shareholders hated inflation, which ate away the real value of interest and dividends. But shrinking the volume of dollars made borrowing more costly, angering farmers, country merchants, and other soft-money types (i.e., opponents of the gold standard).23

  Both sides projected larger political philosophies through the narrow aperture of currency. Gold stood for limited government; in deriding paper currency as dishonest, hard-money men expressed a fear of Washington’s corruption and extravagance. Greenbacks stood for active government; its supporters believed government should intervene in the economy by, at the very least, controlling the medium of exchange. Indeed, a populist third party emerged during the depression, winning seats in Congress, and it was called the Greenback Party.