Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
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At the start of the 1868 campaign, a new base in the Indian Territory was established for Custer’s column, called Camp Supply. Custer brought his prisoners back here. Unlike most Western forts, it featured enclosing walls. Library of Congress
Custer’s column moved out in a blizzard on November 23, 1868. He followed the trail of a Cheyenne war party to the Washita River, as depicted at the top. At dawn on November 27, the 7th Cavalry stormed a village led by Black Kettle, a spokesman for peace among the Southern Cheyennes. The cavalry suffered significant casualties, including the death of Capt. Louis Hamilton, shown here. Library of Congress
At the Washita the 7th Cavalry took no male prisoners. They killed all the horses of Black Kettle’s band, destroyed all the lodges and other possessions, and fought off warriors from a much larger camp down the river. They returned to Camp Supply with all the surviving women and children as prisoners, shown here. Library of Congress
Custer closed his campaign after surprising a large Cheyenne village on March 15, 1869, on Sweetwater Creek in the Texas panhandle. Rather than attack, he negotiated for the release of two captive white women and for the Cheyennes’ surrender. To secure both he seized three hostages: Big Head (also called Curly Head), Fat Bear, and Dull Knife. Big Head and Dull Knife later died in a fight with guards at Fort Hays, Kansas. Kansas State Historical Society
Theodore Davis drew the interior of a store operated by a sutler—a military post merchant—at Fort Dodge, Kansas. It shows the typical sutler’s operation on the frontier, a combination of a crude bar and a general store. Library of Congress
This rare photograph captures a buffalo hunt led by Custer on the Kansas plains. He remained on duty in the state for two years, alternating between Leavenworth and Big Creek outside Fort Hays. He engaged in no more warfare there, but frequently led lengthy buffalo hunts for visiting dignitaries. Kansas State Historical Society
Impeached by the House of Representatives, Andrew Johnson endured a trial in the Senate in the spring of 1868, shown here, and escaped conviction by one vote. Regardless, the Republicans reigned supreme in the federal government for several years. After they lost the House in the 1874 election, Custer appeared in the Capitol, visibly associating himself with the Democratic leadership. Library of Congress
Inaugurated as president in 1869, Ulysses S. Grant tried with mixed success to guide the nation in a more humane direction. He inaugurated a “peace policy” toward American Indians and enforced civil rights laws and black suffrage in the South. But the office isolated him as political foes and the white South resisted his initiatives, Indians declined to abandon their cultures and independence, and close friends proved corrupt. Library of Congress
Taken in Omaha on January 11, 1872, this portrait shows Custer in both cosmopolitan finery and a sealskin cap that he wore on a grand hunting expedition with the Russian grand duke Alexis. The combination captures Custer’s many roles at the time: frontiersman, public intellectual, popular magazine writer, mine promoter, gambler, stock speculator. He spent most of 1871 on leave, attempting to capitalize on his fame in the West to find a fortune on Wall Street. Kansas State Historical Society
Thomas Nast’s 1874 engraving captures the outrage in the North at the wave of violence unleashed on African Americans in the South. State and local organizations of white supremacists adopted the common name, costumes, rituals, and brutality of the Ku Klux Klan. They helped to restore the Democratic party to power in several states by suppressing black votes. Library of Congress
President Grant signed a law popularly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act on April 20, 1871. It armed federal authorities with new powers to investigate and prosecute individuals for civil rights violations. Custer was assigned to enforce the act in Kentucky, a former slave state wracked by racial political violence. Custer complained about his troops’ being used in this manner. Library of Congress
In March 1873 Custer and the 7th Cavalry were redeployed to the Dakota Territory in preparation for a march west to the Yellowstone River basin to escort a surveying party for the Northern Pacific Railway. The expedition commander was Col. David S. Stanley, who bristled against Custer and his terrible reputation within the army. “He is universally despised,” Stanley wrote to his wife. Library of Congress
On the 1873 Yellowstone Expedition, Custer forged a good working relationship with Bloody Knife, a half-Arikara, half-Hunkpapa Lakota scout. Bloody Knife grew up with the Hunkpapas, and felt a deeply personal as well as national enmity toward them. He was a highly effective guide. National Archives
Sitting Bull emerged as a galvanizing religious and political figure among the Lakotas, or Teton Sioux, in the 1860s and ’70s. Committed to the nomadic culture of hunting, trade, and warfare against neighboring peoples, he rejected the treaties with the United States. He helped organize two attacks on Custer’s 7th Cavalry during the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873. He is shown here at left with his nephew, One Bull. Library of Congress
This photograph from 1891 shows the interior and exterior of Oglala Lakota lodges. The buffalo hides that comprised the lodge’s skin represented countless hours of labor, and the right trees for good support poles could be difficult to find. Library of Congress
On September 18, 1873, word went out on Wall Street that the great banking house of Jay Cooke had fallen. Cooke could no longer market the securities of the Northern Pacific, the railway that Custer defended both under arms and in print. A financial panic ensued, shown here outside Cooke’s Wall Street offices, sparking a great depression. Yet Custer himself returned to these streets two years later to speculate on the stock exchange. Library of Congress
In 1874, Custer led an expedition to explore the Black Hills, on the southwest border of the Dakota Territory and the Great Sioux Reservation, and select a site for a fort. His discovery of gold led to an influx of illegal immigrants amid the depression. During the expedition he shot a large bear, which he believed to be a grizzly, shown here. (Bloody Knife is at left.) National Archives
Custer commanded Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River, opposite Bismarck, from 1873 to 1876. This scene in his house there offers a glimpse of his social circle, including many family members. Left to right: Custer’s brother Boston, his sister Maggie Custer Calhoun, who married one of his officers, Lt. Winfield S. Edgerly, Libbie, Leonard “Bert” Swett, Richard E. Thompson, Nellie Wadsworth, Tom Custer, George Armstrong Custer, Emma Watson, and Emily Watson. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Elizabeth B. Custer Collection
A wave of corruption scandals swept over the Grant administration late in the president’s second term—some a continuation of longstanding graft, some the work of Grant’s dishonest friends and relatives, but all pressed home by Democratic politicians. Custer began to leak accounts to the New York Herald of corruption in the Indian agencies, depicted here. Library of Congress
Representative Hiester Clymer took the chairmanship of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Department of War after the Democrats swept the midterm election of 1874. In early 1876 he prepared impeachment charges against his old college roommate, Secretary of War William W. Belknap. He brought Custer to Washington to testify against Belknap, delaying a planned offensive against Sitting Bull. Library of Congress
Rumors had long circulated that Secretary Belknap took kickbacks or bribes from merchants or political fixers in return for lucrative sutler contracts for army posts. His first and second wives (sisters, curiously) were implicated in the scandal when it broke in 1876, as shown here. Library of Congress
Custer’s senior subordinate in 1876 was Maj. Marcus Reno. A deeply troubled widower, af-flicted with a drinking problem, he performed weakly at best at Little Bighorn, and was accused of drunkenness and cowardice. Reno demanded a court of inquiry to clear his name. It was the closest thing to a formal investigation of the battle ever conducted by the army. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Seventh Cavalry Military Records C
ollection
Capt. Frederick Benteen was one of Custer’s two most senior subordinates in the 1876 campaign. A capable combat officer, Benteen was a petty, arrogant man steeped in resentments. He hated Custer to the point of vendetta, which raises serious questions about his decisions on the first day of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Seventh Cavalry Military Records Collection
Custer’s ill-considered participation in the Democrats’ investigations led President Grant to remove Custer from field command of the 7th Cavalry in the offensive against Sitting Bull. Custer had by now angered Sheridan as well, but Custer’s department commander, Gen. Alfred Terry (shown here), intervened on his behalf. His tactful lobbying helped persuade Grant to relent. Library of Congress
Custer in his dress uniform as lieutenant colonel of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. (His service rank as a general during the Civil War was only in the U.S. Volunteers, an organization created strictly for the duration of the conflict.) This 1876 portrait shows him near the end of his life. He cut his hair short before riding out on his last campaign. National Archives
Custer ended his military career as he began it: conducted up from the Hudson River landing to the Plain of West Point, where his remains were interred at the U.S. Military Academy. Library of Congress
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