A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  On the morning of November 23, in the midst of a heavy snowstorm, the eight hundred men of the Seventh set out with a small supply train of about thirty-six wagons. Their orders were simple and direct: “proceed South in the direction of the Antelope Hills, thence toward the Washita River, the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.” Four experienced scouts and a dozen Osage guides, bitter enemies of the Cheyennes, would assist in locating the enemy.61

  A few days later, an advance scouting party led by Major Elliott, now Custer’s second in command, hit a fresh trail — a war party of at least one hundred Cheyenne warriors62 heading southeast, no doubt returning from a raid into Kansas. The command left all but eight wagons behind and rode in pursuit over rolling hills covered with thick snow. Just after midnight, they reached the valley of the Washita River and quietly followed it for several miles until a halt was called. Beyond the next ridge, the Osage scouts had found a village sheltered in a wooded bend of the river. No one was absolutely sure that the camp was hostile, but the war party’s trail had led them to it, and that was enough for Custer.63 Over the next few hours, he deployed squadrons to surround the encampment of fifty-one tepees and what they presumed were about one hundred fighting men, though Custer’s scouts did not reconnoiter farther afield. The near-frozen troopers were enjoined from even stamping their feet to keep warm, for fear of being discovered.

  Just before dawn, a squadron led by Captain Albert Barnitz descended a butte to find themselves beset by four howling fox-hounds — probably Custer’s — which had escaped from the wagon train back on the Canadian River and pursued the column’s trail. Followed by the baying dogs, the troopers continued their approach to the sleeping camp, which was apparently oblivious to their presence.64 Minutes later, at daybreak, a shot from an Indian rifle rang out, followed by the trumpeters sounding the charge and the regimental band playing one feeble strain of “Garry-Owen,” a favorite of Custer’s, before their spittle froze. Custer led the charge from the north into the village — “He would allow no one to get ahead of him,” remembered scout Ben Clark65 — and the regiment galloped through the tepees from several directions, firing indiscriminately and killing men and women alike.66 Within ten minutes, the bulk of the camp was secured. Most of the warriors were either dead or fleeing to the surrounding ravines and woods, or to the banks of the river to attempt resistance. Few of them carried guns, and the frigid weather made it difficult for them to wield their bows and arrows.67 Some of the troopers began herding the women and children together.

  By midmorning, mopping up had commenced. Then Custer was alerted to two alarming developments. Major Elliott was enterprising and, in the words of a fellow officer during the war, “brave as a lion.” He also had something to prove, having lost command of the Seventh. Earlier, Elliott had galloped off downstream to the east with the regiment’s Sergeant Major and sixteen troopers to pursue a group of fleeing Indians. None of them had returned. Even worse, Lieutenant Godfrey, in pursuit of ponies and Indians, had ridden about three miles downstream and discovered tepees “as far as I could see down the well wooded, tortuous valley. . . . Not only could I see tepees, but mounted warriors scurrying in our direction.”68 The village they had attacked was only one of several. Downriver lay several larger encampments, a danger that proper reconnaissance would have revealed.

  As more than a thousand armed warriors from downstream began surrounding the troopers,69 Custer ordered the village burned, the herd of almost nine hundred ponies destroyed, and the fifty-three captives mounted. Meanwhile, Custer sent a detail a few miles downriver to search for Elliott,70 to no avail. (When Custer and the Seventh returned to the site with Sheridan two weeks later, they found the bodies of Elliott and his men in a circle miles from the camp, frozen solid, riddled with arrows and badly mutilated.)

  With his supply train several miles behind him, darkness coming on, and the enemy pressing his position, Custer mounted his command and brazenly marched downriver toward the other campsites. As he had hoped, the Cheyenne warriors retreated before this show of force. As soon as it was dark, Custer quickly reversed direction and stole away. Accompanied by his prisoners, all women and children, the regiment marched until after midnight and reunited with the supply train the next afternoon. The Seventh paraded into Camp Supply a day later in a grand display of pageantry that, to one officer, “rivaled and no doubt was the prototype of the modern Wild West Shows.”71 Custer and his command were warmly congratulated by Sheridan for the complete destruction of what they learned was a Cheyenne village under the rule of the peace chief Black Kettle, who had been killed with his wife while trying to escape on horseback early in the attack. Black Kettle had remained friendly despite enduring the Sand Creek Massacre four years earlier, during which his wife had been shot nine times. Ironically, his village had been situated several miles away from the main body of Cheyennes precisely because he had dreaded a repeat of Sand Creek.72

  The military, most of the government, and the western populace echoed Sheridan’s assessment: the Battle of the Washita was heralded as a major triumph against the hostile Indians of the southern plains. Many eastern newspapers agreed, calling Custer a great Indian fighter. Other newspapers, as well as humanitarians and Indian sympathizers (including the Bureau of Indian Affairs), expressed outrage and denounced the action as an attack on peaceable and defenseless Indians. Some compared it with Chivington’s Sand Creek Massacre, persuaded no doubt by the presence at both of Black Kettle. But while most of the camp was peaceable, there seems to be little doubt that some of the warriors there had participated in depredations to the north.73 Unfortunately, Black Kettle’s innocent followers paid the price for associating with the guilty.

  Before the battle, Custer had ordered any shooting to be limited to the “fighting strength”74 of the village, but in the frenzy of the attack, some noncombatants had been killed — some deliberately, some unavoidably. According to the Cheyennes’ own count, of the 30 to 40 Indians killed, approximately half were nonwarriors,75 and some of those had taken up arms and fought back.76 Custer reported a total of 103 warrior deaths, likely a classic example of military exaggeration. The true death toll was probably somewhere in between. Though there were a few instances of indiscriminate killing by the troopers, most of the innocent deaths were inflicted by the Osage scouts.77 The Battle of the Washita was harsh war but no massacre. Custer had himself halted the shooting of some Indian women and assigned men to protect them.78

  Whatever the truth, Custer’s superiors were pleased with the result. Custer had done a superb job of whipping his troops into shape and marching deep into Indian country in severe weather, then hitting the unsuspecting Cheyennes hard on their home ground — a feat never accomplished before. Custer restored himself to the good graces of his superiors, and the victory restored some much-needed credibility to the army, both in Washington and on the plains, after the previous two years’ failures. The unseasonable attack shocked and demoralized the southern Plains tribes. No longer could they depend on their winter hideouts for safety.

  Over the next four months, Custer and the Seventh endured severe weather and a life-threatening lack of provisions as they tracked down and subjugated virtually all the remaining hostile bands. Near the end of one futile pursuit, they survived on horseflesh and parched corn for several days, and on another occasion they lived on quarter rations of bread for ten days.79 The campaign climaxed in a bold move whereby Custer, Lieutenant Cooke, and a few scouts rode into a large Cheyenne village to negotiate. They sat in the chief’s lodge and smoked a peace pipe. A medicine man, the keeper of the tribe’s sacred medicine arrows, tapped ashes from the pipe bowl onto Custer’s boot as he told Custer in Cheyenne that if the General ever broke his oath of peace with the Cheyennes, he would die along with all those in his command.

  When Custer returned to his command, he refused to attack the camp, much to the
disappointment of the members of the volunteer Kansas regiment marching with him. One Kansan noted in his diary that his fellow soldiers called Custer “a coward and traitor to our regiment.”80 But Custer had ascertained that there were two white women captives within the Indian village, and an attack would almost guarantee their deaths. After three days of delicate talks, Custer took three chiefs hostage and negotiated a swap.

  Since the clash at Black Kettle’s village, Custer and the Seventh had worked mightily to clear the southern plains below the Platte and above the Arkansas of hostile tribes. They had succeeded almost completely — all without a trooper or Indian being killed, a tribute to Custer’s skillful work.

  Of greater import to the Seventh and Custer, however, was the reaction of Captain Fred Benteen to Major Elliott’s demise at Washita. Elliott and Benteen had served in the same unit during the war, and the irascible Benteen took his young comrade’s death personally.81 Soon after the engagement, he asked at least one person — the reliable scout Clark, well respected for his intelligence and honesty — if he would be willing to make a statement that Custer had “knowingly let Elliott go to his doom without trying to save him,” Clark later reported. “I refused to have anything to do with the matter.”82 Benteen proceeded to write a letter to a friend that was published anonymously in a Missouri newspaper in February, then reprinted in the New York Times a week later. (Its florid, dramatic style makes it difficult to believe that it was not meant for publication.) In it he derisively accused Custer of the same charges of abandonment. When Custer read the letter, he called his officers together and, with a riding crop in his hand, demanded to know who had written it. He threatened to horsewhip its author. Benteen stepped up and admitted to the deed, and the confrontation ended with a flustered Custer walking away. His reaction may simply have been the result of pure shock. Benteen had been a frequent visitor to his tent and had kept his true feelings hidden, at least from Custer, who in a recent letter to Libbie had written at length of his high opinion of the Captain: “He is one of the superior officers of the regiment and one that I can rely upon.”83 Although Benteen would later brag that his commander had “wilted like a whipped cur,” it is hard to imagine how else a responsible CO should have proceeded.84

  Years later, Benteen would claim that Custer “had endeavored to the best of his ability to get Col. [Edward] Myers and myself killed at the Washita.” He would also complain that Custer, in his official report, had not singled out Benteen for commendation by name, perhaps the true source of his disgruntlement. In fact, Custer had named not a single surviving officer, later claiming that it would have been unfair to single out individuals. This was a disingenuous explanation, since battlefield commendations influenced brevet promotions and medals, a fact that Custer, of all people, should have been aware of.85 In any case, it is difficult to imagine what else Custer could have done on the Washita to aid Elliott. In the first place, Custer was friendly with Elliott and thought him an officer on the rise; why would he have deliberately sent the young man to his death? After Elliott’s absence was discovered and Custer sent a search party downriver, darkness was approaching and the regiment found itself in a sticky situation: surrounded by a thousand furious warriors, without rations or overcoats, exhausted, and miles from their supply train. His primary responsibility was necessarily to the safety of his regiment. Apparently, Custer and many of his officers believed that Elliott’s command had, upon returning, detoured around the formidable ring of combative Cheyennes and would be found on the main force’s return to the wagon train, back at Camp Supply, or even at Fort Dodge.86 Some of the enlisted men thought that Elliott’s command was already dead and that Custer was perfectly justified in returning without recovering their bodies.87

  Benteen had been an enemy of Custer’s almost from the start, and new officers assigned to the regiment realized quickly that there was a Custer “family” and a small but active anti-Custer faction led by the cantankerous Captain. Most officers, like young Godfrey, remained neutral and got along with both sides.88 But Benteen had never been as open about his feelings before. Elliott’s death gave him a legitimate (at least to his mind) reason to loathe Custer, and he would continue to rail against him over the next seven years. His letter would guarantee that the regiment’s officers would be sharply divided in their allegiance to Custer until his death, and beyond.89

  THREE

  Patriots

  When we were young all we thought about was going to war with some other nation.

  CHIPS, OGLALA SPIRITUAL MENTOR TO CRAZY HORSE

  He was an old man now, stooped and almost blind, but a generation earlier he had been the most feared Indian on the northern plains. It had been his band of renegade Santee (Dakota) Sioux that had instigated the bloody Spirit Lake Massacre in 1857.

  For more than four decades, he had been the leader of a small marauding band of Dakotas from near the homelands of all the Sioux, in southwestern Minnesota and northwestern Iowa.1 One reliable source claimed that “many of the unpleasant incidents in frontier life from 1836 to 1857 in Minnesota and Iowa were directly chargeable” to him.2 His name was Inkpaduta, translated variously as Red Top, Red Tip, or Scarlet Point — as in deer antlers red with blood.

  Born around 1815, Inkpaduta was the son of Black Eagle, or Wamdesapa, a chief of the Wahpekute band of Dakotas, who had fought alongside the Americans in the War of 1812. Despite this, the Wahpekutes had a reputation for mischief going back as far as 1805.3 Even then, their group had been made up of renegades banished from other bands.

  The Wahpekutes, the smallest of the four eastern Dakota subtribes, never totaled more than 550 people. They hunted year-round on the rivers and streams of the area. But frequent warring with the Sauks and Foxes and other traditional enemies took its toll on the small band, and in 1839 an Indian agent wrote that “this ill-fated tribe, from being over warlike and a terror to their enemies have since 1812 nearly been exterminated.”4 A smallpox epidemic in 1837 reduced their numbers even further.

  After Wamdesapa’s death in 1846, the Wahpekutes separated into different bands, largely due to disagreements between various tribal leaders. When a Wahpekute chief and some of his adherents were murdered, Inkpaduta, now in his early thirties — tall and slender, with dark eyes set in a glowering visage pitted with smallpox scars — was held responsible and banished. He drifted southwest with his followers and large family (he would father as many as a dozen sons, including two sets of twins, and some daughters). They eventually settled along northern Iowa’s Little Sioux River and its tributaries, where they found abundant game and fowl. Inkpaduta’s band became known as a refuge for outcasts and undesirables from other tribes. They avoided whites and roamed the area for several years, hunting, trapping, fishing, and occasionally gardening in the summer, trading with fur buyers for supplies and arms and ammunition. They also warred against their traditional Indian enemies, since Inkpaduta believed that the lands he had come to belonged to the Wahpekutes by birthright.

  Inkpaduta had not been included in Dakota negotiations with the U.S. government in 1851, which made it difficult to collect annuities. That exclusion also meant that, at least in Inkpaduta’s mind, he was free to war when and against whom he wanted. After all, he had signed no treaties. When homesteaders began establishing small, isolated settlements and farms in the belief that the area would be opened up by treaty, the Wahpekutes tolerated them at first. But in the mid-1850s, Inkpaduta’s band, called the Red Tops after the scarlet pieces of cloth they tied to the tips of their war spears,5 began to display increasing hostility toward the homesteaders, taking captives, raiding, and generally annoying them. In 1854, after a run-in with a white whiskey trader and horse thief, Inkpaduta’s brother, Sintomniduta, and his family were murdered. Inkpaduta’s mother was among the victims. The Indians appealed for justice, but the trader went unpunished. The outraged Dakotas increased their plundering, though no whites were killed.

  For both settlers and Indians, winters
along the Minnesota-Iowa border were hard. The winter of 1856–57 was especially severe, and by the middle of February, the snow stood deep and the temperature plunged to thirty-seven below. Without annuities to fall back on, Inkpaduta’s small band was barely surviving in the lake region of northern Iowa, subsisting on whatever food they could find, beg, or steal. White settlers in the area had experienced a poor harvest, and there was little extra food to go around.

  Soon after one of Inkpaduta’s grandchildren died of malnutrition in February, warriors from his band quarreled with white hunters over some elk they were both pursuing. The fearful whites took the Indians’ guns, ripped down their tepees, and forced the Wahpekutes to leave their camp and travel through the deep snow along the Little Sioux River. In response, Inkpaduta and his warriors seized some guns from a white community and moved on in search of sustenance, raging at the whites who had invaded his land, murdered his mother, his brother, and other relatives, and were killing many of his people with smallpox and whiskey. Now they had expelled the Wahpekutes from their ancestral lands in the middle of a brutal winter, without food, shelter, or arms — an almost certain death sentence.

  Inkpaduta had restrained himself from exacting revenge before, but he would do so no longer. On the morning of March 8, 1857, Inkpaduta and about fourteen warriors entered a cabin near Spirit Lake, Iowa, and killed everyone inside except a young girl named Abbie Gardner, whom they took captive. They moved on to other settlements and killed more whites. They bashed in the brains of small infants and shot men, women, and children, decapitating some and scalping others. Within a week, some forty settlers lay dead.6 The Wahpekutes took three more women captive and moved north to Heron Lake in Minnesota. Two weeks later, they returned to Spirit Lake and murdered eight more whites at the nearby hamlet of Springfield. Few if any Indians were killed in return.