Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
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40. Interview between Col. E. W. Wynkoop and Little Rock, a Cheyenne Chief, at Fort Larned, Kansas, August 19, 1868, SED 13, 3rd Session, 40th Congress; Hutton, 38; West, 311; Greene, 48–57.
41. Sully’s failure in the sand hills gave PHS his specific grounds for obtaining GAC’s return to duty. Sherman wrote to Grant, “Sully got among them but I infer he failed in nerve or activity & Sheridan asks for the services of Gen’l Custar [sic]”; William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, September 27, 1868, in Simon 19: 45; Greene, 61–70.
42. Greene, 61–71, 74; Hutton, 43–49; West, 311–12.
43. Andrew C. Isenberg argues, in The Destruction of the Bison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129, that “the expansive American economy” caused the destruction of the bison on the Central and Southern Plains, through the introduction of hunters and cattle, leading to the ultimate death of nomadism.
44. Interview between Col. E. W. Wynkoop and Little Rock, a Cheyenne Chief, at Fort Larned, Kansas, August 19, 1868, SED 13, 3rd Session, 40th Congress; Affidavit of Edmund Guerrier, February 9, 1869, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series), 1861–1870, Roll 812, Microfilm Publication M619, NA.
45. William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, July 19, 1867, in Simon 17: 241. Greene, 104–05, 186–90, offers a fine summary of the thinking on the part of Sheridan and the War Department, and the question of collective responsibility for the raids.
46. Interview between Col. E. W. Wynkoop and Little Rock, a Cheyenne Chief, at Fort Larned, Kansas, August 19, 1868, SED 13, 3rd Session, 40th Congress; Hutton, 51–51; Utley, ed., Life, 198–99.
47. GAC to EBC, October 24, November 3, 1868, EBC, Following the Guidon, 13–14; Greene, 78–81.
48. New York Sun, May 14, 1899, in Richard G. Hardorff, ed., Washita Memories: Eyewitness Views of Custer’s Attack on Black Kettle’s Village (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 202–05.
49. Greene, 80; Utley, ed., Life, 204–05; Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (New York: Viking, 2010), 132.
50. GAC, My Life on the Plains, 141–42. Ironically, in testimony in the Reno Court of Inquiry (discussed at length in the epilogue of this volume), Benteen illustrated the utility of uniform horse colors when he described how he identified a company by its gray horses as he first glimpsed the battlefield at the Little Bighorn.
51. GAC to EBC, October 18, November 3, 1868, EBC, Following the Guidon, 12–13, 14–15; GAC to Kirkland C. Barker, c. October 1868, Folder 5, Box 4, MMP.
52. GAC to Annette (Nettie) Humphrey, November 8, 1868, Folder 6, Box 4, MMP; Greene, 94. The other Osage scouts, as identified by Greene, were Little Buffalo Head, Draw Them Up, Sharp Hair, Patient Man, I Don’t Want It, Big Elk, Little Black Bear, Lightning Bug, Little Buffalo, and Straight Line.
53. GAC to J. Schuyler Crosby, October 28, 1868, GAC Letters, 1867–1868, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
54. Greene, 61–62; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 147.
55. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 150; Greene, 82–85; Hutton, 61–62.
56. Utley, ed., Life, 208–10.
57. Greene, 71–72; Hutton, 52–53.
58. Greene, 106–09. For Hazen’s account of his actions, and the course of the Kiowas and Comanches, see William B. Hazen, Some Corrections to “My Life on the Plains” (St. Paul, Minn.: Ramaley and Cunningham, 1875), Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
59. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 60; Hutton, 17–18, 185, also 54–55; Greene, 59, 71–72, 86. I would further argue that warfare on the Great Plains was not true guerrilla warfare, as is sometimes claimed. Guerrilla warfare occurs in settled societies; insurgents derive support from a static civilian population. The high-plains nations engaged in raiding warfare, a distinct product of nomadic societies. Both feature hit-and-run tactics, in which the guerrillas or raiders seek tactical superiority under circumstances of strategic inferiority; but nomadic raiders take their populations with them, so to speak, removing them from the enemy’s grasp. See for example Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
60. Greene, 86–88.
61. New York Sun, May 14, 1899, in Hardorff, ed., 205; Utley, ed., Life, 210, 213; Greene, 97.
62. Greene, 94–95; GAC to EBC, February 20, 1869, EBC, Following the Guidon, 51–56.
63. Greene, 97; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 146.
64. Greene, 97–98; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 146–48; Utley, ed., Life, 213.
65. Greene, 99; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 148; New York Sun, May 14, 1899, in Hardorff, ed., 205.
66. Greene, 89, 99; Sandy Barnard, A Hoosier Quaker Goes to War: The Life and Death of Major Joel H. Elliott, 7th Cavalry (Wake Forest, N.C.: AST Press, 2010), 145–59.
67. Greene, 100–01, 109; GAC to Mrs. Hamilton, August 29, 1869, in “In Memoriam: Brevet Major Louis McLane Hamilton, Captain 7th U.S. Cavalry,” GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
68. Greene, 110.
69. GAC, My Life on the Plains, 157; GAC to Mrs. Hamilton, August 29, 1869, in “In Memoriam: Brevet Major Louis McLane Hamilton, Captain 7th U.S. Cavalry,” GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Edward S. Godfrey, “Reminiscences, Including the Washita Battle, November 27, 1868,” in Paul Andrew Hutton, ed., The Custer Reader (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004 [orig. pub. 1992]), 159–79; Greene, 110.
70. GAC, My Life on the Plains, 157–59; “In Memoriam: Brevet Major Louis McLane Hamilton, Captain 7th U.S. Cavalry,” GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Godfrey, “Reminiscences,” in Hutton, ed., The Custer Reader, 159–79; Greene, 111.
71. Greene, 111–12; New York Sun, May 14, 1899, in Hardorff, ed., 205.
72. Greene, 111–12, 191; New York Sun, May 14, 1899, in Hardorff, ed., 205; Utley, ed., Life, 214–20.
73. Greene, 112–19; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 159–63; Utley, ed., Life, 214–20; GAC to Mrs. Hamilton, August 29, 1869, in “In Memoriam: Brevet Major Louis McLane Hamilton, Captain 7th U.S. Cavalry,” GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
74. Greene, 105–07; Black Kettle, “Speech,” November 20, 1868, in Hardorff, ed., 54–57.
75. Black Kettle, “Speech,” November 20, 1868, in Hardorff, ed., 54–57; Greene, 106–07.
76. Greene, 103, 109–10, 119, 128–35.
77. Greene, 129.
78. New York Sun, May 14, 1899, Kansas City Star, December 4, 1904, and “Interview and Field Notes by Walter M. Camp,” October 22, 1910, in Hardorff, ed., 204–34; Greene, 117–19.
79. GAC, My Life on the Plains, 167.
80. Greene, 119–29.
81. Godfrey, “Reminiscences.”
82. New York Herald in Georgia Weekly Telegraph, January 8, 1869; New York Sun, May 14, 1899, Kansas City Star, December 4, 1904, and “Interview and Field Notes by Walter M. Camp”; Greene, 117–28.
83. Godfrey, “Reminiscences”; New York Sun, May 14, 1899, Kansas City Star, December 4, 1904, and “Interview and Field Notes by Walter M. Camp”; Greene, 117–28.
84. “In Memoriam: Brevet Major Louis McLane Hamilton, Captain 7th U.S. Cavalry,” GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Greene, 135, 162–63, 171–72. Hamilton’s remains were later moved. The number of enlisted men with Elliott is variously described as seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen. See Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 68; Wert, 275.
85. Greene, 173–75; New York Herald in Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1869.
86. Greene, 135–37; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 70–71. Greene, like many historians—notably Dee Brown in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970)—largely accepts the Cheyenne total. If the true total of dead warriors truly were only 10 percent of GAC’s claim, it would have been obvious on the day of the battle and especially when the field was revi
sited two weeks later. The gap would have been exploited by his enemies, particularly Benteen.
87. New York Herald in Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1869; Leavenworth Bulletin, December 31, 1868; GAC to EBC, December 19, 1868, January 2, 1869, EBC, Following the Guidon, 46–47; GAC to My Dear Doctor, January 2, 1869, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Greene, 173–78.
88. GAC to EBC, December 19, 1868, January 2, 1869, EBC, Following the Guidon, 46–47; GAC to EBC, February 8, 1869, Folder 7, Box 4, MMP; Greene, 173–78.
89. GAC to EBC, February 8, 1869, EBC, Following the Guidon, 49–50; Greene, 178–79.
90. Greene, 179–81; David L. Spotts, Campaigning with Custer and the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry in the Washita Campaign, 1868–69, ed. E. A. Brininstool (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988 [orig. pub. 1928]), 147–48.
91. Letter from Camp Supply, March 29, 1869, quoted in New York Times, May 3, 1869; New York Tribune, April 24, 1869; Spotts, 147–48; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 232–38; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 73–74; Greene, 179–80.
92. Greene, 180–82; Spotts, 151–59; Charles Duncan and Jay Smith, “The Captives,” Research Review: The Journal of the Little Bighorn Associates 7, no. 2 (June 1993): 3–21, 31; GAC to EBC, March 24, 1869, EBC, Following the Guidon, 56–57; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 238–51; New York Times, May 3, 1869; New York Tribune, April 24, 1869. Spotts’s account, in the form of a journal, illustrates how GAC’s account in My Life on the Plains greatly romanticized and simplified the facts.
93. Spotts, 158.
94. Greene, 181–82; West, 312–15; GAC to EBC, March 24, 1869, EBC, Following the Guidon, 56–57.
95. Eugene A. Carr to GAC, August 16, 1869, Other Sources, LBH; GAC to EBC, March 24, 1869, in EBC, Following the Guidon, 56–57.
96. New York Observer and Chronicle, December 24, 1868.
97. New York Times, December 4, 13, and 22, 1868; Baltimore Sun, December 30, 1868.
98. Greene, 186–87; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994 [orig. pub. 1985]), 400. For a fine discussion of the moral quandaries of the Washita, and wars against American Indians in general, see Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 74–78.
99. Alfred Sully to Henning Von Minden, December 23, 1868, Alfred Sully Letters, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; St. Louis Democrat, February 9, 1869, in New York Times, February 14, 1869; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 63. See also Barnett, 163–66.
100. As Slotkin notes in The Fatal Environment, 400, “Ultimate culpability for the ‘massacre’ of the Washita must be with the makers of Indian policy.”
101. St. Louis Democrat, February 9, 1869, in New York Times, February 14, 1869, and Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1869.
102. New York Sun, May 14, 1899, Kansas City Star, December 4, 1904, and “Interview and Field Notes by Walter M. Camp”; Wert, 279.
103. Wert, 278–79; Barnett, 160–63; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 76–77. It is difficult to find other officers in the 7th Cavalry who shared Benteen’s anger, but Sully seized on his letter to support his own grudge against GAC; see Alfred Sully to Henning Von Minden, February 17, 1869, Alfred Sully Letters, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. The assessment of GAC’s actions presented here echoes Utley’s judgments.
104. W. A. Graham, ed., The Custer Myth: A Source Book of Custeriana (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2000 [orig. pub. 1953]), 213; Seventeenth Annual Reunion of the Association of the Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, June 10th, 1886 (East Saginaw, Mich.: Evening News, 1886), 104–06; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 96; Roger Darling, Custer’s Seventh Cavalry Comes to Dakota (El Segundo, Calif: Upton and Sons, 1989), 178–81. I find it impossible to read Benteen’s nitpicking defense of his failure to follow orders, recounted in Darling, and imagine that this was an officer who would challenge his commander to personal combat.
105. Henry L. Morrill to Henry Albers, December 1, 1865, Folder 2, Box 1, Henry Leighton Morrill Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Wert, 278–79; Barnett, 160–63.
106. “Interview and Field Notes by Walter M. Camp”; Wert, 286–88; Barnett, 194–97.
107. GAC to EBC, February 8, 1869, Folder 7, Box 4, MMP; Wert, 288–89.
Thirteen: The Financier
1. Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1915), 208.
2. Stiles, First Tycoon, 511.
3. Stiles, First Tycoon, 398–99.
4. Warner and Twain, 208–09.
5. 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), 64–73.
6. Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 74–77, 113–15; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 305–18.
7. For the impact of the West’s multiracial, multiethnic society on the attempt to define citizenship, see Joshua Paddison, “Race, Religion, and Naturalization: How the West Shaped Citizenship Debates in the Reconstruction Congress,” in Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 181–201. Paddison’s emphasis on the limitations of the expansion of citizenship is well taken, but, for the purposes of this discussion, it is important to note that even in excluding Chinese and American Indians Congress sought grounds other than race. For an illuminating discussion of the original distinction between liberty and freedom in the American context, see David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
8. In 1871 Congress would enact an appropriations bill with a rider stating that “hereafter, no Indian nation or tribe within the United States shall be recognized or acknowledged as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” As Martha Sandweiss notes, “With that [measure], a diplomatic practice stretching back to the earliest days of the republic ended, and a new era of federal Indian policy began.” See Martha A. Sandweiss, “Still Picture, Moving Stories: Reconstruction Comes to Indian Country,” in Arenson and Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests, 158–78.
9. EBC, Following the Guidon, 83–91, 102–04, 120–21; Wert, 286–87; see also New York Herald in Georgia Weekly Telegraph, January 8, 1869.
10. EBC, Following the Guidon, 90–91; Barnett, 194–97.
11. Detroit Free Press, June 10, 1869, in New York Times, June 13, 1869.
12. EBC, Following the Guidon, 231.
13. EBC, Following the Guidon, 112–14, 120–22, 227–40, 289–98, 314–15.
14. Burkey, 47–63, 81–91; EBC, Following the Guidon, 263–77; EBC to Rebecca Richmond, September 17, 1869, EBC to Laura, September 18, 1869, EBC Correspondence, LBH; Pomeroy’s Democrat, September 22, 1869; PHS to GAC, September 28, 1869, Other Sources, LBH.
15. On GAC playing poker with fellow officers, see, for example, GAC to EBC, May 2, 1867, Tenting on the Plains, 576–79.
16. Burkey, 68–79.
17. EBC to Laura, September 18, 1869, EBC to Rebecca Richmond, October 16, n.d., EBC Correspondence, LBH; Burkey, 87, 101.
18. Albert T. Morgan, Yazoo: Or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South (Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1884).
19. Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 [orig. pub. 1973]), 15–16; Paul A. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 118, 137–41.
20. Entry 1303, Cullum 1: 159–60; Samuel D. Sturgis, endorsement, August 13, 1869, Other Sources, LBH.
21. Grant of Leave, December 2, 1869, Military Division of the Missouri, Other Sources, L
BH; GAC to EBC, November 27 and December 16, 1869, Folder 7, Box 4, MMP; Wert, 291–92; Leckie, 122–23.
22. Leckie, 126–27, was the first to grasp that these three fragments comprised the same letter. She placed the date in December 1870. In my private correspondence with Leckie, she argued that late 1869 is the most likely date, which, after my own review of the internal evidence, I accept. See EBC to GAC, letter fragment, Folder 2, EBC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; GAC to EBC, undated fragments, Folder 14, Box 4, MMP.
23. EBC to GAC, undated letter fragment, Folder 2, EBC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; GAC to EBC, two undated fragments, Folder 14, Box 4, MMP; Leckie, 126–27.
24. Rebecca Richmond to Mother, March 16 and 21, 1870, Other Sources, LBH; Rebecca Richmond Diary, March 9, 1870, Dr. Lawrence A. Frost Collection, MCLS.
25. John Schofield to GAC, April 30 and May 20, 1870, Other Sources, LBH; 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), 139. Miner and Unrau address the fate of the many low-plains nations that lie outside the scope of this biography.
26. Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1870; Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974 [orig. pub. 1964]), 135.
27. Rosa, 135–52; Leavenworth Bulletin, June 21, 1870; Richard White, “Animals and Enterprise,” and Richard Maxwell Brown, “Violence,” in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 237–73, 393–425; Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 53–58. It should be noted that Terry G. Jordan, in North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 208–40, argues that Anglo-Texan ranching began in a semitropical coastal zone, and the longhorns were unsuited to the winter conditions farther north on the plains. Yet he also notes that Texas ranching did indeed spread north prior to a collapse in the 1880s, taking root in Kansas as Texans wintered near railheads with access to the crucial Chicago market.