Autie Custer, as he likes to be called, is an intense man who has had a colorful military career. He finished last in his class at West Point, causing the military academy much grief with his insubordination and mischief making. But now Custer is facing the challenge of his life.
Today’s attacks and counterattacks against Confederate forces have been intense. Custer has already had one horse shot from under him. But the young general is invigorated by the fighting, even though he is exhausted, having slept little over the past week. Autie Custer wears a uniform of his own design, with tanned leather gloves and a red cravat around his neck. A thick blond mustache covers his upper lip, and his wide-brimmed hat is pressed down tightly over his shoulder-length locks.
General George Armstrong Custer, circa 1870
The men of Custer’s Michigan Brigade have taken heavy losses in the last two hours. By day’s end, more than 250 men and horses will perish, cut down by Confederate gunfire, artillery, or, in many cases, hand-to-hand fighting. But more death is near. Right now, on the opposite side of this property belonging to farmer John Rummel, Confederate cavalry under the command of General J. E. B. Stuart gather en masse, a mounted force of more than five thousand strong. Custer has just four hundred men. But his cavalry is all that stands between the Confederates and the rear of Union lines. The men of Michigan must not fail.
The cry of “Battalions, forward” peals forth from the Confederate lines—the signal for Stuart’s cavalry to advance. They ride forth from the woods in tight columns, a spectacle of flashing sabers and polished carbines glistening in the afternoon sun. Up front ride the Second Carolina Cavalry, a unit bearing the motto “Honor and Immortality.”
Union artillery opens fire, but the Confederate cavalry only increases its pace—first a walk, then a canter, and finally a full gallop. The rebels make no attempt to feint or whirl in their efforts to pierce the Union lines, riding straight at Custer and his men. Even as canister rounds and shells from the Union guns rain down in their midst, eviscerating rider and horse alike, the Confederate cavalry closes gaps to keep their ranks tight, charging closer and closer to the Michigan Brigade.
Custer can wait no longer. He draws his saber and throws his hat to the ground, revealing the long yellow hair that makes him so distinguishable on the battlefield.
“Come on, you wolverines,” shouts the general, spurring his horse.
George Armstrong Custer leads the way as his men gallop across the open field, racing into the Confederate columns at full speed. On the rebel side, the Second Carolina does not flinch or scatter, instead spurring their animals to charge even faster. The “honor” of their regimental maxim is never in doubt. However, the “immortality” will be sorely tested.
Distance between the two cavalries narrows quickly. The horses gallop at the pace of a locomotive. What was once a mile becomes a half mile, then a quarter, then just one hundred yards. Pistols are unholstered. Rifles are drawn. The air is rent by the thunder of thousands of hooves.
Fifty yards. The horses lather, shoulders and necks covered in white sweat brought on by exertion and fear.
Twenty yards. Not a single man pulls back on the reins.
Five yards.
Saber raised, General George Armstrong Custer braces for impact.
* * *
Two thousand miles away, in the land of Cochise, this strange war between the whites from the north and the whites from the south gives the Apache chief freedom to do whatever he pleases. For Cochise no longer has an enemy to fight. It is just eight years since the U.S. Army formed its first cavalry units with the intention of protecting white settlers from Indian attack. The American government has built forts throughout Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona and filled them with soldiers trained to be the equal in the saddle of any tribe.
But now those forts are empty. The vaunted cavalrymen have taken their horse skills east, where they use the tactics learned on the plains and deserts to fight the Civil War. Jefferson Davis, the former secretary of war whose vision foresaw the need for a mounted force to take control of the American West, is now president of the Confederate States, a secessionist faction of southern governments that have left the Union. Robert E. Lee, one of the U.S. Army’s original cavalry commanders, is now leader of all Confederate troops. Lee’s belief in the cavalry is total; he uses them as scouts to suss out the location of Union forces prior to battle, then uses their speed to penetrate enemy lines once shots are fired.
Up and down the prairie, as soldiers leave their frontier posts and march east, ranchers, miners, and farmers are forced to abandon their now unprotected land. Since the gold rush of 1849, white settlers have flooded across the prairie on their way west. Even after gold fever abated in California, new discoveries in Colorado and Montana lured prospectors. The land west of the Mississippi once considered “Indian Territory,” an inviolable place where no whites were to be allowed, is completely disrespected by the new settlers. The Oregon and Santa Fe Trails extend from starting points in Missouri to the destinations from which they take their names. So many settlers make the journey by oxen-drawn covered wagons that it has become possible to voyage without map and compass—one has only to follow the wheel ruts heading west. However, the Civil War slows that migration significantly.
The war affects tribes all across America, though in vastly different ways. Tribes such as the Cherokee and Seminole in the southeast have owned black slaves for decades and align themselves with the Confederates. In 1861, the Creek nation, long ago relocated from Alabama and Mississippi to Arkansas, signs a peace treaty with the Confederacy meant to last “as long as grass shall grow and water run.” Later that year, tribes loyal to the Union murder seven hundred Creek, forcing the tribe to relocate again, this time to Kansas.
On the Texas plains, the Confederacy is also eager to sign a treaty of peace with the Comanche. But though the Comanche eventually enter into a treaty with the south, they also form an alliance with the Union, in the hope of extracting gifts and food from both sides. It becomes common Comanche practice to raid Texas ranches of their livestock, then sell it to the U.S. Army. More than ten thousand head of cattle are stolen and sold in 1863 and 1864 alone.
The departing soldiers represent a chance for the Comanche to reclaim their way of life. Not only have the Union troops left, an additional sixty-two thousand able-bodied Texas males have also departed and are now fighting far from home for the Confederates. There are just twenty-seven thousand white men between sixteen and sixty remaining in the entire state—most too old or too young to fight, and hardly enough manpower to stop the Comanche from riding across the prairie uncontested, lords of all they survey. The Comanche way is anathema to whites, who cannot imagine living off the land and having no permanent place to call home. But there is beauty and even romance in this lifestyle, as evidenced by the plight of Cynthia Ann Parker. The kidnapping victim who spent twenty-four years among the Comanche before being forcibly returned to white society tries again and again to escape back to the tribe. Each time she fails.
Even more than the Comanche, the departure of U.S. soldiers emboldens Cochise and the Chiricahua Apache in Arizona. The tribe is no longer content to merely raid and plunder. Since the Bascom affair, Cochise has been at war with all whites. In one bold attack on a wagon train of settlers fleeing Arizona, Cochise steals more than thirteen hundred head of cattle. Prior to his feud with Bascom, Cochise would never dare a frontal assault on a heavily fortified caravan.
Further emboldening Cochise is the closure of the Butterfield stagecoach station in Apache Pass. The move was actually not related to the Indians; Congress did not want the U.S. mail traveling through Confederate Texas and chose a new route farther north. But Cochise sees this as an Apache victory, a fact further reinforced by the departure of soldiers from Fort Buchanan and Fort Breckinridge. The army burned both forts so they wouldn’t fall into Confederate hands, making their departure appear all the more final to the Apache.
Without th
e stage line and army, the citizens of Arizona have lost a significant source of income. Businesses that sell food and whiskey to the forts, as well as men who provide services as teamsters, blacksmiths, farriers, and even harness makers are no longer needed. The growing city of Tucson, now without a stage line, sees hotels and restaurants languish.
Most settlers leave Arizona, some traveling east to the Confederacy while others depart for the free state of California, now part of the Union. Some whites choose to remain, but doing so means turning their homes into fortresses. “Every farm and rancho is abandoned,” writes one Arizona mine owner. “The loss of property is immense. I am holding my place at great expense. In fact, it is a garrison.… I am constantly prepared for a fight.”
On February 14, 1862, the Confederate Congress in Richmond, Virginia, votes to make the Territory of Arizona part of the Confederacy. In theory, this land is now under the governance of Jefferson Davis. But as Cochise solidifies his control over the region through raids and attacks, there is no doubt who controls life in Arizona. This is made clear on May 5, 1862, when Cochise and his warriors defeat a Confederate force at the Battle of Dragoon Springs, killing four, stealing horses and livestock, and suffering no Apache dead.
On July 15, 1862, white soldiers once again march into Apache country, this time on behalf of the Union. In what will become known as the Battle of Apache Pass, the Chiricahua under Cochise’s command launch a surprise attack against the column of Union infantry and cavalry who have traveled from California to drive Confederates out of Arizona. The use of artillery by U.S. forces ends the battle in a stalemate but deeply impresses Cochise’s aging father-in-law. Several months later Mangas Coloradas approaches a U.S. fort in southwest New Mexico under a white flag of truce. The seventy-year-old leader seeks peace for his people, knowing the Americans have the firepower and numbers to exterminate the tribe completely if given enough time.
The chief immediately regrets this decision.
“He looked careworn and refused to talk, and evidently felt he had made a great mistake in trusting the paleface on this occasion,” a local miner who was present on that day will remember.
Rather than broker a treaty, fort commander General Joseph R. West secretly orders the execution of Mangas Coloradas, telling guards he wants the Apache dead by morning. That night, as the aging chief lies down to sleep on the ground, his captors heat their bayonets in the campfire and prod him. When he rises up and curses the soldiers in Spanish, telling them he is not a child to be played with, the guards empty their guns into the chief—first with rifles, then pistols. He is then scalped and decapitated. His body is then thrown into a ditch.
The official U.S. Army report will state that Mangas Coloradas died while attempting to escape.
The Bascom affair at Apache Pass certainly started Cochise’s war against the whites, but it is the death of Mangas Coloradas that will fill him with the rage to take intense revenge. Cochise will long grieve the death of his friend and fellow warrior, even as Mangas’s demise gives him unmatched power in the Apache nation.
However, for all his power, Cochise will never have the one piece of personal retribution he truly desires. For on February 21, 1862, at the Battle of Valverde between Confederate and Union forces in New Mexico, his nemesis, Lieutenant George Bascom, is shot and killed. The Kentucky-born West Point graduate chose to honor his vow to preserve the Constitution of the United States rather than switch sides and fight for the Confederacy.
It is unclear if Cochise ever learns of Bascom’s death. As whites leave Arizona for a less threatening place, Cochise and the Chiricahua Apache are at war in name only, their opponents busy fighting one another thousands of miles away.
But Cochise knows the white man will return.
And on that day, the chief will once again seek revenge.
* * *
Far to the north of Cochise, a vicious war between the United States and a band known as the Sioux nation begins in August 1862. The Sioux reign over the northern prairie, from Minnesota all the way west to the newly discovered gold fields of Montana. Frustrated and starving because Washington has broken a treaty and reneged on a promise to provide them food, an eastern band known as the Santee Sioux leaves their reservation to attack federal storehouses. Within weeks, seven hundred more settlers are dead as the tribe rampages throughout Minnesota. White women are forced into mass rapes by Santee warriors before being mutilated and then murdered. Terrified they will be the next to die, more than forty thousand whites flee, turning local farm roads into an endless column of refugees.
In time, the war between the whites and the Sioux nation will escalate, making it necessary for the Union to actually use Confederate prisoners of war to man the local forts. But as the conflict with the Sioux begins, a local militia is formed to confront the violence. Four months later, these Minnesota volunteers successfully catch and publicly hang thirty-eight Sioux warriors on a snowy day after Christmas in Mankato. The number would have been greater had not President Abraham Lincoln personally pardoned more than three hundred other captured Sioux.1
The Indian rebellion finally comes to an end seven months after the hangings, when the leading Sioux instigator is shot dead by two white settlers. The body of fifty-three-year-old Little Crow, as he is known, is immediately scalped. Lighted firecrackers are placed in his ears and nostrils. The chief’s remains are dragged through the streets of Hutchinson, Minnesota. Only then is the corpse discarded in a slaughterhouse and the chief’s head severed from the torso so that it might be placed on public display.2
On August 18, 1862, a group of about thirty-five missionaries, mission workers, and government employees fled from the Lower Sioux Agency.
The death of Little Crow comes on July 3, 1863—the same afternoon General George Custer leads his fateful cavalry charge against the Confederates at Gettysburg.
This is the first time the personal history of Custer is intertwined with that of the Sioux nation.
It will not be the last.
* * *
It is hell on earth at Gettysburg.
General George Custer threads his horse through a wall of Confederate cavalry, hacking downward with his saber at any man in his path. He is among the lucky, for he remains in the saddle as the fight begins. But the full speed, head-on collision of horses and men is not so kind to others. It is a sound like falling timber. “So sudden and violent was the collision that many of the horses were turned end over end, and crushed their riders beneath them,” one Union officer will later write.
The final phase of the Battle of Gettysburg
All around Custer, the air is thick with the screams of men and horses as the two great armies fight in the saddle and dodge bullets fired at point-blank range. There are demands for surrender and terrified cries for help from fallen men being trampled.
Quickly, the fighting becomes hand-to-hand. Men grab hold of one another for leverage, swinging their sabers down, slicing any piece of flesh they can find. After the battle, property owner John Rommel will come upon “two men … who fought on horseback with their sabers until they finally clinched and their horses ran from under them. Their head and shoulders were severely cut. And when found, their fingers, though stiff with death, were so firmly embedded in each other’s flesh that they could not be removed without the aid of force.”
In twenty minutes the battle is over. Union infantry, held in reserve, breaks from a tree line and attacks the Confederate cavalry. Even more Union soldiers pivot to attack the rear of the rebel lines. Nearly surrounded, their dead men and horses littering Rommel’s farm, the rebels have no choice but to retreat.
George Custer and the Michigan Brigade have held the line.
“I challenge the annals of warfare to produce a more brilliant or successful charge of cavalry,” General Custer will write in his report. He is prone to the dramatic and to self-aggrandizement, but in this instance the general is correct.
His victory assures the young officer that he
is invincible. That assurance will eventually be challenged in a climactic way.
The Civil War will end in two years’ time, as Confederate general Robert E. Lee rides to a small house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Union general Ulysses S. Grant, who spent the Mexican War as a homesick lieutenant, will dictate the terms of surrender. General George Custer will be among the Union army cavalry officers granted the privilege of being in the room to witness this historic event. In time, Custer will even come to own the very table upon which the surrender is signed.
For many, the end of the Civil War brings a close to their fighting days. Not so for George Custer. He is a soldier to the core, a man who needs a battlefield. So as the war concludes, and the American army once again turns its focus to protecting settlers from Indian attacks, Custer forever leaves the battlefields of the east for the wide-open plains of the west.
There, George Custer has a rendezvous with history.
There, the American Indian is waiting.
Chapter Fourteen
DECEMBER 21, 1866
DAKOTA TERRITORY
11:00 A.M.
Crazy Horse is ready to fight.
It is the first day of winter. The sky is growing dark from an approaching blizzard. The twenty-five-year-old Sioux warrior sits astride a brown pony, armed with a simple steel hatchet, a thick red blanket draped over his shoulders. He is a man of medium height, with hair and skin so light there were once rumors that he had been kidnapped from white society as a child.
Spread out on the ridgeline to Crazy Horse’s right and left are nine other warriors, specially chosen for their courage and the speed of their ponies. Like Crazy Horse, they remain out in the open, so unafraid of the American soldiers down below that they choose not to conceal their presence.
Killing Crazy Horse Page 11