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

by Stiles, T. J.

  42. West, 76–77.

  43. West, 76–86, 190–200; Isenberg, 16–29, 69, 94–107; Hämäläinen, 246, 295.

  44. H. Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854–1871 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 1–24.

  45. West, 229–309; Hämäläinen, 295; Isenberg, 14–16, 109.

  46. Report of Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, Commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, October 1, 1867, HED 1, 2nd Session, 40th Congress; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2011), 455–60.

  47. William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, June 11, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA; Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 41.

  48. West, 284–307.

  49. Maj. H. Douglass to Chauncey McKeever, Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Missouri, February 24, 1867, HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress; SED 13, 1st Session, 40th Congress; Proceedings of Council Held by Major General Hancock with Head Chief “Sa-Tan-Ta” of the Kiowa Tribe of Indians in Kansas, at Fort Larned, May 1, 1867, Headquarters Records of Fort Dodge, Kansas, 1866–1882, Unregistered Letters Received, Roll 11, Microfilm Publication M989, NA.

  50. Chalfant, 76–77.

  51. GAC to EBC, April 14, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 559–60.

  52. GAC, “On the Plains,” October 26, 1867, published in Turf, Field and Farm, November 9, 1867, reprinted in Brian W. Dippie, ed., Nomad: George A. Custer in Turf, Field and Farm (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 20–26; “A Summer on the Plains”; Kennedy, 63–76; Chalfant, 159–70.

  53. Chalfant, 170–75; Report of Winfield S. Hancock, April 13 and 15, 1867, List of Property Found in the Camps, HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress.

  54. GAC to EBC, April 15, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 560–61; Report of Winfield S. Hancock, April 13 and 15, 1867, HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress.

  55. GAC to EBC, April 15, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 560–61; Kennedy, 69; Utley, ed., Life, 33–35; William Winer Cooke to Mother, April 20, 1867, William Winer Cooke Papers, USMA; GAC, “On the Plains.”

  56. Utley, ed., Life, 34–35; List of Property Found in the Camps, HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress.

  57. J. H. Leavenworth to N. G. Taylor, April 15, 1867, SED 13, 1st Session, 40th Congress; Winfield Scott Hancock to William T. Sherman, April 17, 1867, Special Field Orders No. 12, April 17, 1867; HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress; GAC to EBC, April 15, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 560–61.

  58. GAC to Lt. Thomas B. Weir, April 16, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  59. Kennedy, 77–79; Utley, ed., Life, 35–37; GAC to Lt. Thomas B. Weir, April 17, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  60. GAC to EBC, April 20, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 562–70; Kennedy, 79; William Winer Cooke to Mother, April 20, 1867, William Winer Cooke Papers, USMA.

  61. Utley, ed., Life, 35–37; GAC to Lt. Thomas B. Weir, April 17, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  62. GAC to Lt. Thomas B. Weir, April 17 and 19, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA; Utley, ed., Life, 35–37.

  63. Utley, ed., Life, 37–38; GAC to Lt. Thomas B. Weir, April 19, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA; Winfield Scott Hancock to William T. Sherman, April 17 and 18, 1867, Special Field Orders No. 12, April 17, 1867, HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress; GAC to Thomas B. Weir, May 4, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  64. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 490–94.

  65. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 503–04, 508. In 1869, Congress consolidated the four infantry regiments of black troops, the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st, into the 24th and 25th Infantry. The 9th and 10th Cavalry continued as originally organized. See T. J. Stiles, “Buffalo Soldiers,” Smithsonian Magazine (December 1998).

  66. EBC to GAC, March [n.d.], April 5 and 20, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 503–05, 531–40.

  67. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 503–05.

  68. Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984 [orig. pub. 1973]), 25–28; see also William H. Leckie, Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), and Stiles, “Buffalo Soldiers.”

  69. EBC to GAC, March, May 4, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 531–34, 545–46; see also 456, 485, 508–12, and EBC to GAC, April 22, 1867, 540–41; Carl F. Day, Tom Custer: Ride to Glory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 105–07; Leckie, 95.

  70. GAC to EBC, April 25 and 30, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 572–74; Leckie, 96.

  71. Leckie, 96–97.

  72. Leckie, 116.

  73. GAC to EBC, April 22, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 570; Leckie, 96–97.

  74. Leckie, 97–98; EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 600–09; Utley, ed., Life, 52.

  75. On Barnitz’s admiration for GAC during the Civil War, see Barnett, 133–34.

  76. Utley, ed., Life, 45–50; Winfield S. Hancock to William T. Sherman, April 21, 1867, HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress; Minnie Dubbs Millbrook, “The West Breaks in General Custer,” in Paul A. Hutton, ed., The Custer Reader (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 116–58. See also GAC to EBC, May 2 and 4, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 576–80, 609.

  77. Utley, ed., Life, 50–52. Hancock received reports of scurvy among the cavalry at Fort Hays as early as April 21; Winfield S. Hancock to William T. Sherman, April 21, 1867, HED 240, 2nd Session, 41st Congress.

  78. Blaine Burkey, Custer, Come at Once! The Fort Hays Years of George and Elizabeth Custer, 1867–1870 (Hays, Kan.: Society of Friends of Historic Fort Hays, 1991), 20–23; Utley, ed., Life, 51–55; EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 609–22, 655.

  79. Burkey, 31–32; Utley, ed., Life, 56–59; EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 636–49.

  80. On that march, see Frost, Court-Martial, 104–06; Harper’s Weekly, December 19, 1868.

  81. Frost, Court-Martial, 123–25.

  82. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains”; New York Herald, July 2, 1867; GAC to Andrew J. Smith, June 15, 1867, GAC Correspondence, LBH; GAC to My Dear Genl, June 12, 1867, Documents Relating to GAC, GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Millbrook, “The West Breaks in General Custer.”

  83. GAC to EBC, May 2, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 576–79.

  84. William T. Sherman to GAC, June 13, 1867, Other Sources, LBH; Report of Lieutenant General Sherman, October 1, 1867, HED 1, 2nd Session, 40th Congress; William T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, June 8, 1867, Roll 3, William T. Sherman Family Papers, University of Notre Dame, copy in LOC; William T. Sherman to Edwin M. Stanton, June 17, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA; William T. Sherman to GAC, June 17, 1867, Documents Relating to GAC, GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

  85. Richard White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (September 1978): 319–43. See also John D. McDermott, Red Cloud’s War: The Bozeman Trail, 1866–1868, vols. 1–2 (Norman, Ok.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2010).

  86. Merington, 201; Harper’s Weekly, August 3, 1867; GAC, “On the Plains,” Turf, Field and Farm, September 24, 1869, reprinted in Dippie, 44–50 (see 50). On the “frontier imposture,” see Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Vintage, 2005), esp. 80, 134.

  87. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains”; Millbrook, “The West Breaks in Custer”; Merington, 204–08; Leckie, 100–03; William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, July 4, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA; GAC to Winfield S. Hancock, July 10, 1867, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series), 1861–1870, Roll 722, Microfilm Publication M619, NA.

  88. GAC to EBC, June 22, 1867, EBC to GAC, J
une 27, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 547–49, 582; New York Times, July 1, 1867; Cincinnati Gazette, July 2, 1867; William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, July 4, 1867, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  89. New York Herald, July 2, 1867; New York Times, June 6, 1867; Utley, Frontier Regulars 23; Utley, ed., Life, 86–88.

  90. Frost, Court-Martial, 150–55, 159–63, 165–74, 177–92.

  91. Davis, “A Summer on the Plains”; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 76–78.

  92. Utley, ed., Life, 88–92; Wert, 260–61. GAC would later claim that Fort Wallace was in “a state of siege,” the supplies were gone, and an epidemic of cholera caused deaths on a daily basis. He claimed that he left to retrieve essential supplies, especially medicine. Millbrook, in “The West Breaks In Custer,” states, “Not one of these statements was true.” She notes that, though cholera did break out in army posts in Kansas that summer, it did not strike the 7th Cavalry until after GAC left Fort Wallace, and there is no evidence that he had yet learned of the first outbreak of cholera at Fort Harker (where EBC was not located in any event). Though some biographers and historians have taken the threat of cholera seriously as a motivation for GAC’s departure from Fort Wallace, I am convinced by Millbrook and Leckie’s arguments that it played no role in his decision, and have left it out of my narrative. See also Leckie, 102.

  93. Frost, Court-Martial, 92, 104–14; Harper’s Weekly, December 19, 1868.

  94. Frost, Court-Martial, 116–23.

  95. Frost, Court-Martial, 123–30.

  96. Leckie, 102–03, finds reasons to accept these rumors, reported years later by the very hostile Benteen and also Edward Mathey, who did not join the 7th Cavalry until September 1867, and thus had no direct knowledge of these events. Mathey may well have heard this rumor from Benteen himself. I agree with the analysis in Barnett, 138–39, who finds Benteen’s claims illogical and extremely doubtful. On Mathey, see Carroll, They Rode with Custer, 171–72.

  97. Frost, Court-Martial, 131–34.

  98. Frost, Court-Martial, 120, 134–36; Arthur Brigham Carpenter to Mother, August 15, 1867, Arthur Brigham Carpenter Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

  99. Frost, Court-Martial, 137–47.

  100. Frost, Court-Martial, 149–50.

  101. Frost, Court-Martial, 150–55.

  102. Frost, Court-Martial, 165–74.

  103. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 722.

  104. Merington, 212; EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 702.

  105. GAC to unknown, September 26, 1867, Folder 5, Box 4, MMP.

  106. GAC, “On the Plains,” Turf, Field and Farm, September 21 and October 12, 1867, in Dippie, 7–19 (see also ix–6); Turf, Field and Farm, December 28, 1867.

  107. EBC to Rebecca Richmond [cousin], October 13, 1867, Folder 5, Box 4, MMP.

  108. Frost, Court-Martial, 164–65, 177–90; Benjamin Grierson to Alice Grierson, September 20, 27, 1867, Benjamin Henry Grierson Papers, Newberry Library.

  109. Frost, Court-Martial, 214–15.

  110. Frost, Court-Martial, 226, 216–37.

  111. Frost, Court-Martial, 237–46.

  Twelve: The Indian Killer

  1. Foner, 277.

  2. Foner, 271–80; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1981), 260–65.

  3. Roy Morris Jr., Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan (New York: Crown, 1992), 273–96; McFeely, 262–63; HED 1, 2nd Session, 40th Congress; New York Tribune, August 30, 1867.

  4. William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, August 3, 1867, Joseph Holt to Ulysses S. Grant, August 22, 1867, in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 17 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 242, 516–17. On Holt, see William Gardner Bell, Secretaries of War and Secretaries of the Army: Portraits & Biographical Sketches (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1992), 68.

  5. Joseph Holt to Ulysses S. Grant, November 8, 1867, in Simon 17: 370–72. See also Lawrence A. Frost, The Court-Martial of General George Armstrong Custer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 245–46.

  6. Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 [orig. pub. 1973]), 27.

  7. Leavenworth Bulletin, November 27, 1867; New York Times, November 30, 1867; Baltimore Sun, December 2, 1867; Frost, Court-Martial, 247; Robert M. Utley, ed., Life in Custer’s Cavalry: Diaries and Letters of Albert and Jennie Barnitz, 1867–1868 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987 [orig. pub. 1977]), 128, 130–31.

  8. New York Times, December 7, 1867.

  9. GAC to “My Dear Friend,” December 2, 1867, Folder 5, Box 4, MMP; Turf, Field and Farm, December 28, 1867; Wedding Invitation, April 23, 1867, Folder 6, Box 3, LAFCC; New York Times, November 18, 1899; Utley, ed., Life, 128, 130–31; Leckie, 107.

  10. EBC to Rebecca Richmond, October 13, 1867, GAC to “My Dear Friend,” December 2, 1867, Folder 5, Box 4, MMP. Leckie, 107, also notes the contrast of the Custers’ private reaction and their “outward demeanor.”

  11. EBC to Rebecca Richmond, October 13, 1867, GAC to “My Dear Friend,” December 2, 1867, GAC to unknown, September 26, 1867, Folder 5, Box 4, MMP; Frost, Court-Martial, 261–63; entry for January 3, 1868, Rebecca Richmond Diary, Dr. Lawrence A. Frost Collection, MCLS; Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1868; Memphis Avalanche, January 28, 1868.

  12. GAC, “On the Plains,” October 26, 1867, published in Turf, Field and Farm, November 9, 1867, reprinted in Brian W. Dippie, ed., Nomad: George A. Custer in Turf, Field and Farm (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 20–26.

  13. GAC, “On the Plains,” November 11, 1867, December 15, 1867, published in Turf, Field and Farm, November 23, 1867, January 4, 1868, in Dippie, 27–39.

  14. Sandusky (Ohio) Register, December 28, 1867, copy in Dr. Lawrence Frost Collection, MCLS; New York Tribune, December 28, 1867; New York Times, December 31, 1867. West certainly was an alcoholic; see Captain Barnitz’s commentary, Utley, ed., Life, 125.

  15. Joseph Holt to Ulysses S. Grant, February 14, 1868, in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 18 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 372–73.

  16. McFeely, 264–66.

  17. McFeely, 266–73.

  18. GAC had taken pains to distance himself publicly from Johnson and the Democrats after the fiasco of the Swing Around the Circle, but he remained a supporter. See GAC to Andrew Johnson, February 2, 1875, in Paul Bergeron, ed., The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 16 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 695.

  19. Paul A. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 [orig. pub. 1985]), 1. Sheridan did not stay long enough for Colonel Grierson, 10th Cavalry, to pay his respects; Benjamin Grierson to Alice Grierson, n.d. [September 1867], Benjamin Henry Grierson Papers, Newberry Library. On Sheridan’s private support for GAC, see GAC to Dear Friend, September 26, December 2, 1867, December 2, Folder 5, Box 4, MMP.

  20. PHS to Ulysses S. Grant, April 15, 1868, in Simon 18: 373; Wert, 265.

  21. Joseph Holt to Ulysses S. Grant, May 8, 1868, in Simon 18: 560–62.

  22. GAC to Doctor, May 2, 1868, typescript copy, GAC Papers, USMA.

  23. Wert, 75; Leckie, 107–08; Utley, ed., Life, 132–36; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 173; entry for January 1, 1868, Rebecca Richmond Diary, Dr. Lawrence A. Frost Collection, MCLS.

  24. EHC to GAC, December 21, 1867, Folder 20, Box 1, LAFCC.

  25. Margaret Custer to GAC, August 5, 1867, Folder 2, Box 2, LAFCC.

  26. EHC to GAC, December 21, 1867, Folder 20, Box 1, LAFCC.

  27. Stiles, Jesse James, 202.

  28. New Orleans Picayune, July 19, 1868; Des Moines State Register, July 24, 1868.

  29. EBC to Laura, September 18, 1869, EBC Correspondence, LBH.

  30. There is a tantalizing possibility that GAC felt he could not publish his war memoirs at this time because it would force him to admit
his first court-martial and conviction, as he later would when he began to publish recollections in serial form. See GAC, “War Memoirs: From West Point to the Battlefield,” Galaxy (April 1876).

  31. PHS to GAC, September 24, 25, 1868, Other Sources, LBH.

  32. William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, September 27, 1868, Ulysses S. Grant to John M. Schofield, September 28, 1868, in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 19 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 45. Note that PHS’s telegrams to GAC predated by three days Sherman’s correspondence with Grant and Grant’s request to Secretary of War Schofield. PHS referred specifically to Sherman in his September 24 message, suggesting that Sherman promised to obtain GAC’s release from his sentence before taking it up with Grant.

  33. Jerome A. Greene, Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867–1869 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 34–38; Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1980 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 108–16.

  34. Utley, Indian Frontier, 108–16; William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, July 19, 1867, in Simon 17: 241. On the two factions on the commission agreeing on the goal, see Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 58.

  35. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 310; Greene, 35–38.

  36. Utley, ed., Life, 115; West, 310. For an example of the view that the Cheyennes and others simply had no idea what they were agreeing to, see Utley, Frontier Regulars, 143.

  37. West, 310–11.

  38. William T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, July 15, 1868, William T. Sherman Family Papers, University of Notre Dame, copy at LOC; Hutton, 35–37.

  39. Hutton, 38. In The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 102, Robert M. Utley describes the difficulties the high-plains Indians had finding a sufficient supply of ammunition for repeating rifles, such as the Spencer and Henry, which used metallic cartridges. They would gather up spent cartridges and painstakingly reload them.