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

by Stiles, T. J.

  65. New York Times, September 19, 1873.

  66. Barreyre, “The Politics of Economic Crises”; White, Railroaded, 81–84; Stiles, First Tycoon, 536–40.

  67. New York Times, September 3, 1875; Lubetkin, 63, 82; White, Railroaded, 81–84; Leckie, 160; Finding Aid, Unregistered Letters Received and Related Records, undated and 1864–1876, Northern Pacific Railway Company, Microfilm Publication M459, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn.

  68. Thomas A. Rosser to GAC, February 16, 1874, Other Sources, LBH; Edward S. Cooper, William Babcock Hazen: The Best Hated Man (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 239–41.

  69. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 56–60, 83–94, 148–49, 169–74.

  70. The Northern Pacific Railroad: Character and Climate of the Country It Traverses (Northern Pacific Railroad Co., 1874), GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; A. B. Nettleton to GAC, March 19, 1874, Other Sources, LBH; Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 413–14.

  71. William B. Hazen, Some Corrections to “My Life on the Plains” (St. Paul, Minn.: Ramaley and Cunningham, 1875), GAC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

  72. Independent, September 11, 1873.

  73. New York Times, July 1, 26, 1875; White, Railroaded, 81–84.

  74. Barnett, 249; Leckie, 163–66; Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Vintage, 2005), esp. 80, 134.

  75. GAC to Jairus W. Hall, April 14, 1874, Folder 10, Box 4, MMP; Jairus W. Hall to GAC, August 19, 1874, Other Sources, LBH; Erl H. Ellis and Carrie Scott Ellis, The Saga of Upper Clear Creek (Frederick, Colo.: Jende-Hagan, 1983), 96–102; Richardson, 163.

  Sixteen: The Accuser

  1. William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, June 11, 1867, Special Files of Headquarters, Division of the Missouri, Relating to Military Operations and Administration, 1863–1865, Roll 7, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  2. Paul A. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 280–81.

  3. The American belief in the necessity of violently conquering the natural West is a prevailing theme in much of the historiography. See in particular Richard Slotkin’s seminal trilogy on the nineteenth-century West, Gunfighter Nation, Regeneration Through Violence, and especially The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998 [orig. pub. 1985]), 401 and throughout.

  4. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 245–61; Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10, 106, 134–36. Sheridan and Sherman were not the only generals who believed that bison were going extinct and that it was desirable. Winfield S. Hancock expressed the same thoughts during his councils with Cheyenne and Kiowa leaders during his 1867 expedition. See New York Tribune, April 24, 1867; Theodore Davis, “A Summer on the Plains,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (February 1868); Henry M. Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), 29–35.

  5. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 286–87.

  6. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 287–90, 295–97.

  7. PHS to Jonathan Wheeler, November 24, 1874, Roll 6, PHS Papers, LOC; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 287–90; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 132–33.

  8. GAC to Lawrence Barrett, May 19, 1874, GAC Miscellaneous Manuscripts, LOC; Tom O’Neil, ed., Letters from Boston Custer (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Arrow and Trooper, 1993); Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 167.

  9. Lawrence Barrett to GAC, April 24, June 3, 1874, Other Sources, LBH.

  10. Sioux City Journal, May 14, 29, 1874; Bismarck Tribune, May 27, 1874, in Sioux City Journal, June 2, 1874. See also Baltimore Sun, July 25, 1874.

  11. Chicago Inter-Ocean, July 9, 1874.

  12. Forest and Stream, June 4, 1874; Merington, 271. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 163–68.

  13. Baltimore Sun, July 25, 1874; Chicago Tribune, July 2 and 3, 1874; Boston Advertiser, September 3, 1874.

  14. Chicago Inter-Ocean, August 27, 1874; Yankton Press and Dakotaian, August 13, 1874; GAC to EBC, July 15, August 15, 1874, Folder 10, Box 4, MMP; GAC Report, August 2, 1874, SED 32, 2nd Session, 43rd Congress.

  15. Bismarck Tribune in Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 1874.

  16. GAC Report, August 15, 1874, SED 32, 43rd Congress, 2nd Session; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1987), 105–18.

  17. Chicago Inter-Ocean, September 1, 1874. Official records show that the army made serious efforts to capture and remove trespassers in the Black Hills. Captain Benteen, for example, caught forty-five miners late in 1875; Frederick W. Benteen to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, September 16, 1875, Roll 2, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  18. Independent, November 5, 1874; Indianapolis Sentinel, September 18, 1874; Cincinnati Gazette, September 18, 1874; New York Herald, October 20, 1874; Chicago Inter-Ocean, September 18, October 14, 20, 1874; Sioux City Journal, October 21, 1874.

  19. William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 305–41, 356–79; George Boutwell, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, vol. 2 (Boston: McClure, Phillips, and Co., 1902), 251.

  20. McFeely, 20, 51, 55, 87, 157, 287–331, 336–51; Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 499–506; Nicholas Guyatt, “America’s Conservatory: Race, Reconstruction, and the Santo Domingo Debate,” Journal of American History (March 2011): 974–1000; Stiles, First Tycoon, 187–88.

  21. McFeely, 336–51, 393–97; Stiles, First Tycoon, 538–39; Nicolas Barreyre, “The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10, no. 4 (October 2011): 403–23.

  22. Stiles, First Tycoon, 350–51.

  23. On the deflationary impact of the gold standard in the nineteenth century—at least until the use of cyanide for more efficient refining and the introduction of South African gold into the world economy—see Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963).

  24. Stiles, First Tycoon, 466–67, 542–47; Mark T. Kanazawa and Roger G. Noll, “The Origins of State Railroad Regulation: The Illinois Constitution of 1870,” in Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap, eds., The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 13–54. Barreyre, “The Politics of Economic Crises,” stresses the centrality of the currency question in the economic debate. Irwin Unger’s classic The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965) and Richard Bensel’s Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) have been very important sources for my discussion here. Smith, 578–82, presents a positive view of the veto of the so-called “inflation bill” and the 1875 Resumption Act, which restored the gold standard. Smith repeats the conventional wisdom of financial leaders of the era in his embrace of the gold standard, as he acknowledges, and does not discuss the economic and political costs.

  25. Barreyre, “The Politics of Economic Crises.”

  26. Foner, 546–75.

  27. Quoted in Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 150.

  28. GAC to Andrew Johnson, February 2, 1875, in Paul H. Bergeron, ed., Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 16 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 695.

  29. David S. Stanley to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, March 1, 1874, Letters Received, Office of the Adjutant General, 1871–1889, Roll 122, Microfilm Publication M666, NA.

  30. GAC to Alfred Terry, December 7 and 16, 1874, Roll 122, Microfilm Publication M666, NA.

  31. Chica
go Inter-Ocean, January 12, 1875; GAC to Alfred Terry, December 16, 1874, George Yates to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, April 23, 1875, Roll 122, Microfilm Publication M666, NA.

  32. GAC to Alfred Terry, December 18 and 19, 1874, Roll 122, Microfilm Publication M666, NA; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 144–45.

  33. Isaac P. Christiancy to GAC, February 10, 1875, Folder 11, Box 4, MMP; Foner, 554.

  34. Chicago Inter-Ocean, January 5, 1875; Chicago Tribune, January 8, 1875.

  35. Jairus W. Hall to William R. Travers, February 23, 1875, Jairus W. Hall to GAC, April and June 3, 1875, Other Sources, LBH; Erl H. Ellis and Carrie Scott Ellis, The Saga of Upper Clear Creek (Frederick, Colo.: Jende-Hagan, 1983), 96–102; See also Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 405–06.

  36. James P. McClure, “The Epizootic of 1872: Horses and Disease in a Nation in Motion,” New York History 79, no. 1 (January 1998): 5–22; Stiles, First Tycoon, 528; Brian W. Dippie, ed., Nomad: George A. Custer in Turf, Field and Farm (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 74–75.

  37. GAC to EBC, c. 1873, Folder 2, EBC Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

  38. F. A. Allen to GAC, January 25, 1875, Robert B. Roosevelt to GAC, March 28, 1875, Other Sources, LBH; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 639, 1083, 1101.

  39. Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand Terrible Polar Voyage of the U.S.S. Jeannette (New York: Doubleday, 2014), 64–76; Burrows and Wallace, 677, 954–55, 996–98, 1151–54; James McGrath Morris, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York: Harper, 2010), 80–174; James G. Bennett Jr. to GAC, April 1, 1875, Other Sources, LBH. On the rise of newspaper-driven politics in America, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

  40. James G. Bennett Jr. to GAC, April 1, 1875, Other Sources, LBH.

  41. GAC to Augusta Ward, August 18, 1875, typescript copy, GAC Papers, USMA; New York Tribune, May 22, 1875.

  42. Leckie, 171.

  43. James G. Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 5 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888), 431; Montgomery Schuyler to GAC, May 13, 1875, Ralph Meeker to GAC, September 17, 1875, Other Sources, LBH; Burrows and Wallace, 1151.

  44. Amelia Ransome Neville, “The Apollo Balls,” in Malcolm E. Barker, ed., More San Francisco Memoirs: 1852–1899: The Ripening Years (San Francisco: Londonborn, 1996), 104; Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register, February 1864; Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star, February 9, 1867; New York Times, December 18, 1883.

  45. “Emil Justh v. Benjamin Holliday [sic],” Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, Sitting in General Term, from May 25, 1882, to October 29, 1883 (Washington, D.C.: John L. Ginck, 1884), 346–60 (to be cited hereafter as “Justh v. Holliday”).

  46. “Justh v. Holliday”; New York Times, May 18 and 20, 1875.

  47. “Justh v. Holliday”; Stiles, First Tycoon, 168–69, 376–77.

  48. “Justh v. Holliday.”

  49. Leckie, 168.

  50. Robert S. Eckley, Lincoln’s Forgotten Friend, Leonard Swett (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 169–74; Leonard Herbert Swett to Laura Swett, May 30, 1875, HM 68695, Leonard Herbert Swett to Leonard Swett and Laura Swett, June 4 and 6, 1875, HM 68697 and 68698, Leonard Herbert Swett Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  51. Leonard Herbert Swett to Laura Swett, May 30, June 16, 1875, HM 68695 and 68701, Leonard Herbert Swett to Leonard Swett and Laura Swett, June 4 and 6, 1875, HM 68697 and 68698, Leonard Herbert Swett Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  52. Leonard Swett to GAC, June 13, 1875, Other Sources, LBH; Leonard Herbert Swett to Laura Swett, June 14, 28, 30, July 4, 1875, HM 68700, 68705, 68706, and 68707, Leonard Herbert Swett to Laura Swett and Leonard Swett, June 6, 1875, HM 68698, Leonard Herbert Swett Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  53. New York Tribune, August 16, 1875; see, among other reports in the same source, Frederick W. Benteen to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, September 16, 1875, Roll 2, Microfilm Publication M1495, NA.

  54. McFeely, 55, 157, 340, 343; E. Kimbark MacColl, The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1885–1915 (Portland, Ore.: Georgian Press Company, 1976), 39–43. Holladay and Ingalls were close friends, so much so that Holladay’s widow asked the courts to appoint Ingalls as one of the executors of her husband’s estate; New York Times, October 15, 1887.

  55. Rufus Ingalls to GAC, August 22, 1875, Other Sources, LBH; New York Times, May 24, June 11, 1875, February 10, April 3, 1876; Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 421–24. Slotkin argues that GAC was fully engaged in the Holladay and Ingalls plot, arguing further that its failure led GAC and Holladay to speculate in the stock market together. However, GAC’s speculations with Justh predated Ingalls’s letter. Holladay’s endorsement of a promissory note does not ipso facto indicate a joint stock operation, nor is there any evidence of a connection with a Black Hills scheme. Leckie, 173, discusses Benteen’s allegation that GAC took kickbacks from sutlers, but given that there is no evidence for his claims, and that he hated GAC, and that the army generated rampant and frequently inaccurate rumors, I feel compelled to discount Benteen’s claim.

  56. Edward S. Cooper, William Worth Belknap: An American Disgrace (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 19–21, 204–06, 217–18; McFeely, 426–29; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 295–97; Leckie, 174–75; Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 424–25; GAC testimony, March 29, 1876, HR 799, 1st Session, 44th Congress.

  57. GAC testimony, March 29, 1876, HR 799, 1st Session, 44th Congress; Cooper, 204–07, 217–18.

  58. New York Times, October 1, 1875; New York Herald, October 2, 1875; Ralph Meeker to GAC, September 17, October 5, 1875, Jonathan Russell Garry to GAC, December 22, 1875, Other Sources, LBH.

  59. Leckie, 175; “Justh v. Holliday”; “Delia F. Sheldon v. Isaac E. Sheldon, et al.,” Charles H. Mills, ed., New York State Reporter, vol. 65 (Albany, N.Y.: W. C. Little and Co., 1895), 693–95.

  60. GAC Deposition, October 8, 1875, Atlantic Publishing Company v. GAC, EG Box 13, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Isaac E. Sheldon to GAC, November 11, 1875, Other Sources, LBH. Despite extensive searches during past research for the records of the Marine Court, I have been unable to locate them, possibly because the cases only dealt with small sums.

  61. Merington, 176–77; Burrows and Wallace, 1149.

  62. Leonard Herbert Swett to Leonard Swett and Laura Swett, January 15, 1876, Leonard Herbert Swett to Laura Swett, January 20, 1876, HM0361, Swett Family Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  63. Ralph Meeker to GAC, December 30, 1875, Other Sources, LBH.

  64. J. R. Pond to GAC, February 7, 1876, Folder 13, GAC letter fragment, Folder 14, Box 4, MMP.

  65. “Justh v. Holliday.”

  66. McFeely, 429.

  67. Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16–29, 61, 181–99; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Mark Wahlgren Summers, “ ‘To Make the Wheels Revolve We Must Have Grease’: Barrel Politics in the Gilded Age,” Journal of Policy History 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–72; Stiles, First Tycoon, 174–84, 257–64, 372–79, 393–401, 458–70. It has often been claimed that corruption after the Civil War emerged from a new obsession with money; see, for example, James Donovan, A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn—the Last Great Battle of the American West (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 101–02. A look at the preceding decades shows that moneymaking had long defined American culture; see, for example, Part 1 of Stiles, First Tycoon.

  68. Smith, 577–78, 582–84; McFeely
, 405–11.

  69. McFeely, 405–11; Smith, 583–85, 590–93. See also John McDonald, Secrets of the Great Whiskey Ring (Chicago: Belford, Clarke and Co., 1880), an entertaining account for the historically informed, though self-serving and not to be trusted on all points.

  70. McFeely, 430–34; Smith, 586–87.

  71. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 292–300; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 115–16, 125–28. Isenberg, 141, attributes the decline of the bison in the north less to hunting than to drought and the spread of ranching.

  72. Report of E. C. Watkins, November 9, 1875, enclosed in Edward P. Smith, Commissioner, Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, to the Secretary of the Interior, November 27, 1875, Container 91, PHS Papers, Manuscripts Division, LOC; Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 299–301.

  73. McFeely, 405–11. Smith, 590–93, entertains the possibility that Babcock was innocent. An important element in the Whiskey Ring, according to ring member John McDonald, 36–49, 315, was that it used its proceeds for partisan purposes, particularly to buy influence with key newspapers, a credible assertion given the state of political corruption and a possible explanation for Babcock’s modest lifestyle. McDonald’s claims of Grant’s knowledge of such activities are much less credible.

  74. New York Herald, February 9, 10, 1876; Cooper, 17–35; Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 441.

  75. Cooper, 29–39; Hiester Clymer Poster, 1866, LOCLC-USZ62-32498, Prints and Photographs Division, LOC.

  76. Cooper, 29–39; McFeely, 432–34.

  77. HR 799, 1st Session, 44th Congress.

  78. GAC to EBC, April 1, 1876, Folder 12, Box 4, MMP; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 156–59; EBC, Boots and Saddles, 253–59.

  79. Chicago Tribune, February 14, 1876.

  80. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 159; Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 425–26.

  81. HR 799, 1st Session, 44th Congress.

  82. GAC to EBC, April 10, 1876, Folder 12, Box 4, MMP; New York Herald, March 31, 1876; Chicago Inter-Ocean, April 14, 1876; HR 799, 1st Session, 44th Congress; Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 159; Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 425–26.