Libbie Custer would later claim that she never read Whittaker’s biography of her husband. True or not, she would have undoubtedly been pleased at the book’s portrait of the General, if not its literary quality. The lavishly illustrated tome of 648 pages was an unabashed paean to, in the author’s words, “one of the few really great men that America has produced — a man who triumphed over great odds to reach the pinnacle of greatness.” He continued:
Few men had more enemies than Custer, and no man deserved them less. The world has never known half the real nobility of his life nor a tithe of the difficulties under which he struggled. It will be the author’s endeavor to remedy this want of knowledge, to paint in sober earnest colors the truthful portrait of such a knight of romance as has not honored the world with his presence since the days of Bayard.20
That lofty estimate of his subject was maintained and often raised throughout the book, occasionally to absurd lengths,21 and similar treatment was afforded his closest comrades-in-arms. “Custer and Custer’s men were the flower of the Seventh Cavalry,” gushed Whittaker.22 Other players in the Custer saga were not so fortunate this time around. Grant, Benteen, and Reno were all castigated for their actions during the recent campaign, doubtless due to Libbie’s influence and the information received from Weir and other officers of the regiment. Benteen was charged with disobedience, Reno with cowardice, and Grant with mean-spirited pettiness, their combined malfeasance resulting in Custer’s defeat and death. Whittaker ended the book with a call for a court of inquiry (an army investigative body) to look into the matter. Whittaker’s accusations might not have carried as much weight coming from the pen of a humble Second Lieutenant. But with “Captain” on the title page, they had to be taken more seriously. No longer was his bogus rank just a harmless piece of vanity. Now it conferred a spurious authority on the military judgments he was so noisily proclaiming. He claimed that many of the Seventh’s officers had been deterred from speaking the truth “by fear of those superiors whom their evidence will impeach. . . . The nation demands such a court, to vindicate the name of a dead hero from the pitiless malignity, which first slew him and then pursued him beyond the grave.”23
Whittaker’s book betrayed scant evidence of an editor’s judicious hand, likely due to the limited time available. Awkwardly padded with large chunks of Custer’s own articles and My Life on the Plains; relying heavily on the unreliable newspaper accounts of the battle; and larded with echoes of Horatio Alger’s “pluck and luck” dime novels, Mark Twain’s recently published Tom Sawyer, Cooper’s frontier sagas, the Christ story, and the author’s own romances,24 the tome received mixed reviews. The Nation called it “a very good book, but repellently large and heavy. . . . It is well-written, without possessing any charm or style.”25 Even Whittaker’s employer, the Army and Navy Journal, criticized the work for its excessive adulation, and the Galaxy reviewer, while praising much of the text, wrote that “the great fault of this otherwise attractive biography is the unwise partisanship.”26 Its influences did not go unnoticed: “Much of it reads like ‘Charles O’Malley,’ ” said the Chicago Daily Tribune, citing a widely popular British martial romance that had enthralled boys for decades — including a young Michigan schoolboy named George Armstrong Custer.27
Though its publisher, Isaac Sheldon, wrote to Elizabeth Custer of the book’s disappointing sales, the biography likely sold well enough and was reprinted. “The times have been adverse to its success,” he wrote, “but I think it has even now earned some little profit, a share of which I have always intended should go to you so feel that you have always a little something to fall back on when necessary.”28 (Even as late as March 1877, the publisher ran ads for agents to sell the volume, calling it one of “the two best subscription books of the year,” and the book was reissued in a popular, less expensive edition soon after.)29 Despite these assurances, it is doubtful that any royalties made their way to Libbie as initially promised. (The book’s actual sales figures are lost to history.) More important, despite its critical drubbings, the book played a large part in disseminating Whittaker’s serious accusations and forming a public image of Custer, “the last cavalier,” which was quickly embraced.
Whether motivated by honest indignation to clear Custer’s name (as he claimed in letters to Libbie)30 or cooling sales of his book (as some of his critics insisted), Whittaker was steadily lobbying behind the scenes for an investigation.31 In May 1878, after failing to persuade the War Department to open an official inquiry into Reno’s conduct in the battle, he wrote a letter to the congressional delegate from Wyoming Territory, W. W. Corlett, urging a congressional investigation and offering “a great amount of evidence, oral and written,” and “the statements of an officer, since deceased, made to me a few days before his death,” all of which would prove Reno’s cowardice.32 (Whittaker apparently had decided to focus his energies on Reno, Benteen’s sins now having been reduced to “willful neglect.” Furthermore, while Reno had few allies, Benteen was the acknowledged hero of the siege and admired by all, and there was little or no chance of anyone testifying against him.) A former Captain in Custer’s Seventh, Satterlee Plummer, acted as go-between and gave the letter to the Congressman.33 The sympathetic Corlett referred the matter to the House Committee on Military Affairs, which reported favorably on an inquiry, but Congress recessed before responding to the request. Whittaker then released the letter to the press in mid-June, and it was widely published, heaping further disapprobation on Reno.
THE LAST THING Marcus Reno needed right then was more damage to what was left of his reputation. His situation was bad enough as it was.
Upon the Seventh’s return to Fort Lincoln in September 1876, the regiment had disarmed and dismounted the Sioux at the Standing Rock and Cheyenne agencies downriver, then scattered to various posts for the winter. Because Colonel Sturgis had assumed active command of his regiment at Lincoln, Reno had been assigned to Fort Abercrombie, a drab little two-company post 220 miles northeast on the Dakota-Minnesota border. There, on more than one occasion, the lonely Major forced his attentions upon a married woman of questionable reputation whose husband, a Captain in the Seventh Cavalry, was absent for a few weeks. The woman may have been unfaithful to her husband previously, but she was ultimately not interested in Reno. When she more than once rebuffed his physical advances, and in no uncertain terms, the socially inept Major responded by attempting to besmirch her reputation even further. One thing led to another, and when the woman’s husband returned and was apprised of the situation, he pressed charges against Reno for “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” A court-martial was convened on March 8, 1877. Reno hired two experienced attorneys, but despite their efforts and the testimony of three Seventh Cavalry officers — Benteen, Wallace, and Merrill — that the woman’s reputation was indeed bad, Reno was found guilty. The court sentenced him to be dismissed from service, a verdict that was shortly thereafter confirmed by General Sherman. But the final review was left to the recently inaugurated President Rutherford B. Hayes, a former volunteer officer who had risen to the rank of General. After taking into consideration Reno’s twenty years of service, he commuted the sentence to suspension from rank and pay for two years.34
After a weeklong visit with his teenage son in Pittsburgh, Reno took a room at one of the better Harrisburg hotels. He remained in Harrisburg for the duration of his suspension, living off funds from his late wife’s estate and narrowly avoiding further charges of “conduct unbecoming” stemming from his drunken brawling the previous September at Lincoln. (Twelve officers of the Seventh — Moylan, McDougall, and DeRudio among them — endorsed the charges, but Sturgis and Terry disapproved of them, and the Adjutant General’s office declined to accept the case.)
Of Whittaker’s three principal targets in his Custer biography, Grant had ignored the book, at least publicly, and Benteen had written a single letter to the Army and Navy Journal ridiculing the writer’s accusations (and criticizing Custer severel
y) soon after publication. The debate over Reno’s part in the battle had cooled over the next year and a half, but by the time Whittaker’s letter was widely disseminated in June 1878, Reno’s stock had sunk so low that he could not afford to ignore any further slight to his name. In a widely published New York Herald interview with Sitting Bull the previous November, the Sioux chief had insulted Reno’s performance at the Little Bighorn: “The squaws could deal with them,” he had said of the troops on the bluffs. “There were none but squaws and papooses in front of them that afternoon.”35 A few days later, a Herald correspondent talked to Reno. “He is grieved,” wrote the reporter, “that certain papers should charge him with enmity toward so brave and gallant a man as Custer. They were personal friends, he says, and were upon the best of terms, having been in the Military Academy at West Point together.”36 These were questionable statements (if accurately reported), especially the last. Reno had graduated in June 1857, before Custer’s class of 1862 began its studies.
A desperate Reno traveled to Washington, D.C., to officially request the investigation Whittaker and others had called for. “I respectfully demand that I may have this opportunity to vindicate my character and record which have been thus widely assailed,” he wrote to the committee.37
After Congress adjourned without taking action on the matter, Reno wrote another letter, this one to President Hayes, asking for a military court of inquiry. General Sherman approved the request on June 25, 1878, exactly two years after the first day of the battle. (Coincidentally, the statute of limitations under military law for a more serious court-martial was two years from the time of the offense for which a man was charged.) The Secretary of War concurred the same day and ordered a court of inquiry to be convened as soon as possible at Fort Lincoln. Since the Seventh was still busy mopping up after the Sioux War, and many of its officers would be required as witnesses, it was decided that as soon as the season of active operations was over, the Reno court of inquiry would convene in Chicago, headquarters of the Division of the Missouri.38
LIEUTENANT JESSE M. Lee, acting adjutant, Ninth Infantry, had joined the Union army in 1861 at the age of eighteen and by war’s end had earned the rank of Captain of volunteers. After mustering out, he had been made a lieutenant in the Ninth Infantry, and from 1869 that regiment had carried out various duties on the frontier, mostly in Wyoming Territory.
The burly Lee was an industrious, intelligent young man with an intimate knowledge of hard work. He had toiled on the family farm in Illinois starting when he was very young, his father, a businessman and part-time lawyer, having died when Lee was three, leaving Lee’s mother with eight children, one of them an invalid. “Much work and but little play. . . . Much self denial,” he remembered years later. “Since boyhood, have had little time for play, fun, or frolic.” Like George Armstrong Custer, he had taught school at age sixteen, and also like Custer, he was a Jacksonian Democrat.39
In the decade since the Civil War, Lee had earned a reputation as a dependable soldier and a fair and honest man. In March 1877, he was made acting Indian agent at Spotted Tail Agency and was present when Crazy Horse was murdered. After fifteen months at Spotted Tail, he railed against the previous agent’s mismanagement and fraudulence in his official report. Though Lee’s grandfather had, as a young man, been shot, stabbed, and scalped by Indians in Kentucky (but lived to raise a large family),40 Lee was sympathetic to the plight of his charges and was in turn greatly respected by them.
In late 1878, Lee was notified that he had been appointed the recorder for the court of inquiry investigating the conduct of Major Marcus Reno to be held in Chicago the following January — likely because his commanding officer, Colonel John King, had been named President of the court. On the face of it, the duty assignment was a curious one, considering the importance of the case. Such courts often employed a legally trained judge advocate in the role of recorder. Most lieutenants had little legal experience to speak of, save the occasional courts-martial that every officer was required to attend and occasionally preside over. But Lee had been detailed as Judge Advocate at least twice, and during one Civil War–era court-martial, he had performed well enough to be complimented by the Judge Advocate General. The praise had led Lee a decade later to seriously consider resigning from the army to become a lawyer in his father-in-law’s office. He had taken a six-month leave to study law but had ultimately concluded that the profession was overcrowded.41
A court of inquiry, however, was different from a court-martial, in which a soldier was charged with a specific crime, prosecuted by a Judge Advocate, and judged guilty or innocent. A court of inquiry was a sort of grand jury, an investigative body that determined whether the evidence warranted further proceedings (usually a court-martial). Since the two-year statute of limitations had expired, in this case a recommendation of a court-martial was unlikely — although, as one officer pointed out, “if an officer . . . takes advantage of that regulation it is quite conclusive proof of his guilt.”42 A censure was more likely — or, as Marcus Reno hoped, a finding of innocence.
ONE MEMBER OF the court reached Chicago early. After a two-month leave, Colonel Wesley Merritt arrived with his wife on Wednesday, January 8, and took a room at the investigation’s downtown venue. The Palmer House was the city’s elite hotel and, at eight stories, its tallest structure. Just eight years after the great fire of 1871, Chicago had almost completely recovered and was bigger and better than ever. It was now the fourth-largest city in the country, with a population of half a million. The Palmer House’s spacious rooms, luxurious appointments, and fine food made it a popular site for proceedings of this type. (A congressional investigation into a local judge was scheduled to open there a couple of weeks after the Reno inquiry.) Merritt knew Chicago well; he had served on Sheridan’s staff for two years until July 1876, when Colonel William Emory had finally retired after forty-five years of service and Sheridan had given Merritt command of the Fifth Cavalry.
Merritt and the two other members of the court — they would arrive on Sunday, the night before the court was scheduled to convene — were a distinguished group. Commissioned an officer in 1837, Colonel King had served his country extensively and honorably for more than forty years. Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall, Third Cavalry, also had achieved an excellent record over thirty-three years of service — if one did not count the dishonor General Crook had claimed that Royall had visited upon him at the Rosebud and that had (according to Crook) blown the chances of a clear-cut victory. These parallels to Reno’s case were unknown outside a small group of officers, however, since Royall was not among those Crook had immediately criticized after the battle. Later in 1876, during Crook’s “Starvation March,” Royall and Merritt had clashed over what Merritt had seen as a lack of discipline on the older officer’s part.43
Merritt — still youthful-looking at forty-four with a full, light brown beard — and Custer had been rivals since their promotion to Brigadier General on the same day in late June 1863, but the two had remained on fairly good terms. Merritt was also familiar with Reno, who had served under him in the war. According to Edward Godfrey, Reno “did not have the confidence and esteem of his Division Commander.”44
The Palmer House was, coincidentally, temporary headquarters for Sheridan’s Division of the Missouri. Nine days earlier, on the afternoon of Saturday, January 4, a fire had roared through a section of downtown a few blocks from the hotel, engulfing the Honore block, which included the post office and Sheridan’s third-floor offices. Though no records had been lost, the General and his staff had leased most of the rooms on the Palmer’s second floor until they could find more permanent quarters.
Reno had retained the legal services of a young Harrisburg acquaintance, Lyman DeHuff Gilbert, at the time the Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania. The thirty-three-year-old Gilbert had grown up near the Ross and Haldeman families, Reno’s in-laws. He had graduated from Yale in 1865 and founded a law firm in Harrisburg in 1871. He would not ar
rive until January 13, the court’s first day. Reno took residence at the Palmer on Friday, January 10. He was running short of money and had requested that the army pay for his lodgings, which it did. After dumping his luggage and private papers in his hotel apartment, he granted a short interview to a Chicago Times reporter, answering his questions “politely but guardedly” as he briefly defended his actions in the battle.45
Several of the Seventh’s officers — Benteen, McDougall, Wallace, Hare, and Varnum among them — left the same day from Bismarck on a Northern Pacific train for Chicago, a three-day journey.46 Others would arrive in Chicago in the weeks to follow. Most would stay at the Palmer. Captain Thomas French had been scheduled to testify,47 but his heavy drinking had resulted in several charges of drunkenness and conduct unbecoming, and he was involved in his own court-martial at Fort Lincoln, which had convened a week earlier than the Reno investigation. Like Thomas Weir, French had increased his consumption of alcohol and “stimulants” after the rigors and horrors of the summer of 1876. A doctor who had examined him a few weeks before had declared him “incurable by ordinary methods of treatment.”48 He was in such bad shape that for several days, he was unable to appear at his own trial, much less in a courtroom a thousand miles away.49
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