41. Literary World, March 1, 1872; New York Tribune, July 13, 1872; Turf, Field and Farm, March 22, 1872; Massachusetts Ploughman, March 23, 1872; Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1872.
42. Tebbel and Zuckerman, 61.
43. GAC, “My Life on the Plains,” Galaxy (January 1872); GAC to EBC, September 10, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP.
44. GAC, “My Life on the Plains,” Galaxy (April 1872).
45. GAC, My Life on the Plains, 244–51. See also Barnett’s fine analysis, 194–97.
46. Faust, 185–96.
47. Faust, 196–200; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994 [orig. pub. 1962]), 617–34; Ambrose Bierce, “On a Mountain,” in S. T. Joshi, ed., Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs (New York: Library of America, 2011), 655–59.
48. Menand, 56–69.
49. Charles Francis Adams Jr. to his mother, May 12, 1863, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 3–5; Edward Chase Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams Jr., 1835–1915: The Patrician at Bay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 28–31.
50. Charles Francis Adams Jr., “A Chapter of Erie,” North American Review (July 1869); Kirkland, 34–64; Stiles, First Tycoon, 467–70, 496–501.
51. Faust, 200.
52. Lawrence Barrett to GAC, September 23, 1872, Other Sources, LBH; GAC to Zachariah Chandler, January 16, 1873, Roll 3, Zachariah Chandler Papers, LOC; Turf, Field and Farm, March 7, 1873; GAC to O. D. Greene, February 15, 25, 1873, Letters Received, Department of Dakota, Roll 14, Microfilm Publication M1734, NA.
53. Special Orders No. 13, 15, 50, February 25, March 11, 13, 1873, Other Sources, LBH; GAC to O. D. Greene, February 15, 25, 1873, Letters Received, Department of Dakota, Roll 14, Microfilm Publication M1734, NA.
Fifteen: The Enemy
1. Lawrence Barrett to GAC, March 23 [1873], Folder 3, EBC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
2. Leckie, 154.
3. Lawrence Barrett to GAC, March 23 [1873], Folder 3, EBC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; EBC, Boots and Saddles, 11; GAC to EBC, n.d., Folder 14, Box 4, MMP.
4. GAC to EBC, c. 1873, Folder 2, EBC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
5. EBC, Boots and Saddles, 19–33; C. W. Foster to O. D. Greene, April 14, 1873, GAC to O. D. Greene, April 16, 1873, Special Files of Headquarters, Division of the Missouri, Relating to Military Operations and Administration, Roll 1, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA; New York Times, April 23, 1873. The 7th Cavalry’s movement to Yankton and on to Fort Rice is massively documented in Roger Darling, Custer’s Seventh Cavalry Comes to Dakota (El Segundo, Calif.: Upton and Sons, 1989). Drawing upon a newspaper printing of GAC’s telegram concerning the effects of the blizzard, which identified the recipient as the War Department in Washington, Darling, 71–97, speculates that the failure to wire Department of Dakota headquarters, rather than the War Department, angered General Alfred Terry, and polluted their relationship, leading eventually to Col. Samuel Sturgis’s temporary assignment to Yankton. In fact, the telegrams reproduced in NA Microfilm Publication M1495 show that GAC reported to department headquarters in St. Paul, so Darling’s speculation is misplaced. Other factors, discussed below, troubled his official relationship with the chain of command.
6. Charles W. Larned to Mother, April 19, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA; entry 2339, Cullum 3: 154.
7. Charles W. Larned to Mother, April 12, 19, 25, June 11, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA; Sioux City Journal, April 26, 1873.
8. Charles W. Larned to Mother, April 25, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA.
9. Charles W. Larned to Mother, April 19, 30, May 24, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA.
10. New York Tribune, September 8, 1873; M. John Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 193. Larned complained of the constant duties assigned to the men without reflecting that work kept them busy and in camp; he himself collected men who slipped into Yankton to get drunk. See Charles W. Larned to Mother, May 9, 1873, and entry for June 25, 1873, Diary, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA.
11. Charles W. Larned to Mother, April 30, June 11, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA.
12. Reynolds, 72–73.
13. Alfred H. Terry to O. D. Greene, April 19, 26, 1873, GAC to O. D. Greene, April 25, 26, 1873, O. D. Greene to Alfred H. Terry, April 26, 1873, C. W. Forster to O. D. Greene, May 3, 1873, O. D. Greene to GAC, April 27, 1873, Samuel D. Sturgis to O. D. Greene, May 3, 1873, Special Files of Headquarters, Division of the Missouri, Relating to Military Operations and Administration, Roll 1, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA; Lubetkin, 49, 147. GAC also complained about other things, including the variety of carbines issued to the 7th Cavalry, only to be told that records showed that the regiment “is substantially armed with Sharp’s improved carbine—a few other patterns being distributed in three troops for experimental trial on just such an expedition as you are going on. In view of this fact your application is deemed singular, and is not well understood.” See GAC to O. D. Greene, April 26, 1873, O. D. Greene to GAC, April 27, 1873, Telegram, Roll 1, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.
14. Leckie, 155–56.
15. Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1873; David S. Stanley, Personal Memoirs of Major-General D. S. Stanley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 244–55; Charles W. Larned to Mother, June 25–26, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA.
16. Entry 1544, Cullum 2: 309–10; Charles W. Larned to Mother, June 11, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA; Lubetkin, 95–98, 148–53.
17. GAC to EBC, July 19, 1873, GAC to Kirkland Barker, September 6, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP; Charles W. Larned to Mother, June 25–26, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA; Boston Globe, July 14, 1873; Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1873; Stanley, Personal Memoirs, 244–45; Leckie, 156, 161.
18. Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1873; Boston Globe, July 14, 1873; Arizona Miner, September 13, 1873.
19. Stanley, Personal Memoirs, 239–40. It’s important to note that GAC himself did not see any general dislike for him in his regiment. He wrote to EBC during the expedition, “With the exception of one officer I…would be glad to have every one of the officers now with me stationed at my post. My relations with them personal & official are extremely agreable. They are all counting on going with me to [Fort] Lincoln,” though only six companies were to be posted there. However, he wrote this after the regiment’s two battles during this expedition, and the battles seem to have changed the sentiment toward him, as discussed below. See GAC to EBC, July 19, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP.
20. Merington, 251–52.
21. Lubetkin, 54–55, 189–92; Arizona Miner, September 13, 1873.
22. Indianapolis Sentinel, September 6, 1873; Lubetkin, 191–95.
23. Lubektin, 195; GAC to EBC, September 10, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP; Stanley, Personal Memoirs, 240. Larned wrote, “Stanley is under the whiskey curse and gets on periodical tears of two or three days duration during which time he manages to disgrace himself and insult every one who happens to displease him.” Even Larned agreed that Stanley arrested GAC over a trivial matter. See Charles W. Larned to Mother, July 28, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA.
24. GAC to EBC, July 19, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP. Though this letter is dated July 19, Custer added to it daily, through July 27.
25. GAC to EBC, July 19, September 6, 10, 1873, Folder 9, and fragments, n.d., Folder 14, Box 4, MMP; Stanley, Personal Memoirs, 240–42; Charles W. Larned to Mother, June 25–26, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA.
26. GAC to EBC, fragments, n.d., Folder 14, Box 4, MMP; Lubetkin, 197–99.
27. A. Baliran to D. S. Stanley, July 24, 1873, Letters Received by Headquarters, Department of D
akota, 1866–1877, Roll 14, Microfilm Publication M1734, NA; Stanley, Personal Memoirs, 239; Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1873; GAC to EBC, September 10, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP; Lubetkin, 194, 198.
28. Stiles, First Tycoon, 526; Railroad Gazette, March 16, 1872, June 28, 1873. On Union Pacific’s travails under presidents who paid little attention to managing it, among other things, see Maury Klein, Union Pacific, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). On Carnegie and the Pennsylvania Railroad’s management team’s speculative Union Pacific maneuver, see David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2007), 123–24. This discussion of the transcontinentals owes much not only to the work that went into The First Tycoon, but also to Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), esp. 1–87. White’s prosecutorial tone invites debate, yet his massively researched work provides an essential corrective to the tradition of celebratory writing about the transcontinental railroads. As White notes, men such as Vanderbilt, who understood how to make railroad operations profitable, tended to stay away from the transcontinental lines in their early years, when they were more often run by political manipulators and financial buccaneers. In time, as Klein notes, Jay Gould made serious efforts to reform Union Pacific, and James J. Hill constructed the Great Northern Railway without federal land grants, but Northern Pacific certainly began in the class of government-supported enterprises that included the Central Pacific/Union Pacific line.
29. Stiles, First Tycoon, 467–70, 496–501; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46–54; White, Railroaded, 26–28, 31–35.
30. New York Herald, September 19, 1873; White, Railroaded, 23–24; Lubetkin, 57–79, 162–74.
31. An excellent guide to the financial integration of the nation through financial markets and federal banking laws, which caused regional bank reserves to pyramid in New York, can be found in Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 124, 152–53, 162–63, 238–81.
32. Nicolas Barreyre, “The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics,” and Scott Reynolds Nelson, “A Storm of Cheap Goods: New American Commodities and the Panic of 1873,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10, no. 4 (October 2011): 403–23, 447–53; Stiles, First Tycoon, 533–36; Lubetkin, esp. 57–79, 162–74.
33. Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 111.
34. 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.
35. White, “Winning of the West”; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 3–5. As White notes, all the Lakota tribes but the Oglala and Brulé originated in an earlier body, the Saones.
36. White, “Winning of the West”; Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 76–77; Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (December 2003): 833–62; Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 45; New York Tribune, August 27, 1873.
37. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 10–42.
38. Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 3–17; Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984 [orig. pub. 1973]), 93–107.
39. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 134–37; transcript of Fort Laramie Treaty, Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University, available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/nt001.asp.
40. White, “The Winning of the West”; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 237–42; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 84–88.
41. Utley, Frontier Regulars, 236–42; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 3–105.
42. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 112; White, Railroaded, 25. Isenberg, 125, notes that the undefined northern boundary of the unceded territory invited the conflict that ensued over the Northern Pacific Railroad.
43. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 112.
44. GAC to EBC, n.d., Folder 14, Box 4, MMP.
45. New York Tribune, September 8, 1873; Stanley, 248–49; Lubetkin, 241–44.
46. New York Tribune, September 8, 9, 1873; GAC, “Battling with the Sioux on the Yellowstone,” Galaxy (July 1876): 91–102; Ami Frank Mulford, Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry: Custer’s Favorite Regiment (Corning, N.Y.: Paul Lindsley Mulford, 1879), 136; Robert W. Larson, Gall: Lakota War Chief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 35, 55–56; Lubetkin, 126.
47. This account of the fighting on the Yellowstone on August 4, 1873 is based on New York Tribune, September 8, 9, 1873; GAC, “Battling with the Sioux on the Yellowstone”; Mulford, 134–44; Lubetkin, 244–52.
48. New York Tribune, September 8, 9, 1873; GAC, “Battling with the Sioux on the Yellowstone”; “Official Report of General Custer,” August 15, 1873, in Mulford, 134–44; Lubetkin, 244–52.
49. New York Tribune, September 8, 1873; Lubetkin, 248–50.
50. New York Tribune, September 9, 1873; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 112; Lubetkin, 253–55. Apparently few Oglalas joined Sitting Bull; they were engaged in a major offensive against the Pawnees, which resulted in the devastating attack on the Pawnee hunting party on the Republican mentioned earlier. See Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1873. Lubetkin theorizes that GAC subconsciously wished to fail in his pursuit, citing as evidence the fact that he brought along cattle to slaughter for food. In fact, GAC covered forty miles in about twenty-four hours in intense heat, an extremely fast pace. Cavalry rarely moved faster than a walk on the march, particularly under such poor conditions.
51. The account that follows of the battle of August 11, 1873, is drawn throughout from a variety of sources, including New York Tribune, August 25, September 6 and 9, 1873; “Official Report” in Mulford, 134–44; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 112–15; Lubetkin, 253–67; Larson, 87–92.
52. New York Tribune, August 25, September 6 and 9, 1873; “Official Report” in Mulford, 134–44; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 112–15; Lubetkin, 253–67; Larson, 87–92.
53. Charles W. Larned to Mother, September 6, 1873, Charles William Larned Papers, USMA; GAC to EBC, September 10, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP. Contrast Larned’s September 6 letter with that of July 28, in which he wrote, “I keep away from him altogether as I have no taste for court circles and very little desire to be of use there.”
54. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 433. GAC wrote, “With the exception of one officer I…would be glad to have every one of the officers now with me stationed at my post. My relations with them personal & official are extremely agreable.” See GAC to EBC, July 19, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP.
55. Stanley, Personal Memoirs, 240–42.
56. GAC to EBC, September 21, 23, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP. On the battle, casualties, and its repercussions, see New York Tribune, August 25, September 6 and 9, 1873; “Official Report” in Mulford, 134–44; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 112–15; Lubetkin, 253–67; Larson, 87–92. A third-hand claim from the Lakotas, reported in the Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1873, stated that the Lakotas suffered only four dead and twelve wounded total in the two engagements. That count is unquestionably too low. The veracity of this report—really a report of a report of a report—is doubtful; for example, it also stated that “very few” Hunkpapas joined in the second fight, and Sitting Bull refused to participate, an assertion that is clearly false. GAC’s claims for the casualties he inflicted were quite modest—only a few in the first battle, and forty in the second—though they should be taken as t
he upper limit. Larson, Gall’s biographer, believes the troops inflicted thirty or so casualties in the second battle.
57. GAC to EBC, September 10, 1873, Folder 9, and GAC to EBC, n.d., Folder 14, Box 4, MMP.
58. Leckie, 158, 133; EBC, Boots and Saddles, 93. The quotations are from letters once held by Brice C. W. Custer, which as mentioned before appear to have passed into a private collector’s hands. I quote them because I trust Leckie’s scholarship; these letters have also been examined and quoted by such authorities as Robert Utley.
59. Leckie, 158–59.
60. Leckie, 158–60, 164; Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 81–82, 111–13. A great abundance of literature exists on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the women’s suffrage movement. On Victoria Woodhull, see Stiles, First Tycoon, 484–85, 501–05, 555–56, 668 n107; Mary Gabriel, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998); Louis Beachy Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull (Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Bridge Works Publishing, 1995); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 403–34; “A Victoria Woodhull for the 1990s,” Reviews in American History 27, no. 1 (1999): 87–97.
61. Leckie, 32–33, 158–59.
62. Leckie, 161–62; Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1873; Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in Atlanta Constitution, November 8, 1873; Cincinnati Gazette, October 16, 17, 1873; Pomeroy’s Democrat, October 25, 1873.
63. EBC, Boots and Saddles, 93.
64. GAC to William P. Carlin, February 6, 1874, Folder 10, Box 4, MMP; Leckie, 155, 162. Darling, 50–200, shows that the march from Yankton to Fort Rice was much more troubled than EBC suggests in Boots and Saddles, with insubordination by Benteen, disputes with steamboat operators, and conflict with Indian villages encountered along the way.
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