“The supply steamer will be pushed up the Big Horn as far as the forks if the river is found to be navigable for that distance, and the Department Commander, who will accompany the Column of Colonel Gibbon, desires you to report to him there not later than the expiration of the time for which your troops are rationed, unless in the meantime you receive further orders.” Overfield, The Little Big Horn, 1876, 23–24.
36. Brown, in The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone, says 3,000. Nabokov, in Two Leggings, 155, says that there were 4,100 in 1871. (back to text)
37. Information on the Crows comes from Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers, 135, and McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses, 135–38. (back to text)
38. McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses, 138. (back to text)
39. Gibbon, quoted in Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 180. (back to text)
40. “White Swan’s Story: Interview with Mr. and Mrs. J. S. Burgess in 1894,” LBBNM Files; Plainfeather, “A Personal Look at Curly’s Life,” 18, where Curly refers to White Swan as “Biike,” meaning “my elder brother”; and Riebeth, 103, 112, where White Swan is said to be Curly’s brother, though in Plains Indian culture, a person often considered his cousin as close as his brother. (back to text)
41. Custer, Boots and Saddles, 275. (back to text)
42. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 245. (back to text)
43. Dixon, The Vanishing Race, 159. (back to text)
44. Gibbon, “Last Summer’s Expedition,” 293. (back to text)
45. Libby, The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign, 61, 77. (back to text)
46. Godfrey, in “Custer’s Last Battle,” wrote that each troop was followed by its pack mules, but this is the only reference that claims such an arrangement. (back to text)
47. Gibbon, “Last Summer’s Expedition,” 293. Later, this lighthearted exchange would be misinterpreted in an attempt to prove that Custer’s “greed” for glory was evident from the start. But Gibbon’s own subordinate, Lieutenant Edward J. McClernand, wrote that Gibbon told him that Gibbon had said essentially the same thing the evening before (McClernand, “With the Indian,”16). It should be abundantly clear that both statements were anything but serious. (back to text)
48. Hardorff, The Custer Battle Casualties, II, 188–89. (back to text)
49. Holley, Once Their Home, 262. (back to text)
CHAPTER TEN: THE TRAIL TO THE GREASY GRASS
Epigraph: Coleman, quoted in Liddic, I Buried Custer, 81. This is from Coleman’s diary entry for June 24, 1876, which was likely filled in at a later date.
1. Vestal, New Sources of Indian History, 163. (back to text)
2. Graham, The Custer Myth, 6. (back to text)
3. A Sioux named Bull Eagle said “emphatically and further that no prominent chief of Minneconjou was at Little Bighorn.” Camp IU Notes, 237. (back to text)
4. Discussions of the village size are plentiful; see Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 309–12; Gray, Centennial Campaign, 346–57; Marshall, “How Many Indians Were There?”; Anderson, “Cheyennes at the Little Big Horn”; and Smalley, Little Bighorn Mysteries, chap. 6, “How Large Was the Village?” (back to text)
5. Milligan, Dakota Twilight, 59. (back to text)
6. Hardorff, Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 68. (back to text)
7. Powell, Sweet Medicine, vol. 1, 101; Marquis, Custer on the Little Bighorn, 36; Marquis, Wooden Leg, 182; Manzione, I Am Looking to the North for My Life, 46; Miller, “Echoes of the Little Bighorn,” 27. Some or all of these Assiniboines were likely attached to Inkpaduta’s group, since much of his wanderings over the past twenty years had been through Assiniboine country. (back to text)
8. Graham, The Custer Myth, 109–11. (back to text)
9. The consensus of Indian and soldier opinion seems to be somewhere between these figures, though some soldiers who survived the siege thought that most or all of the Indians carried rifles. See Hardorff, Indian Views of the Custer Fight, 32; Hammer, Custer in ’76, 208; Marquis, Wooden Leg, 213, 230; Scott et al., Archaeological Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 118; Anderson, Sitting Bull, 84; Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 78. (back to text)
10. Camp IU Notes, 347; Saindon, “Sitting Bull,” 7; Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 352; McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian, 44; and Hardorff, Cheyenne Memories, 154. For a good overview of the subject, see Krott, “Was Custer Outgunned?” (back to text)
11. Stands in Timber, Cheyenne Memories, 194–95. The literature on these suicide boys is disappointingly scant, but oral tradition supports it. See Viola, Little Bighorn Remembered, 49, for an account of the suicide boys derived from a battle participant, Louis Dog. For further discussions of suicide vows among the Plains Indians, see Hoebel, The Cheyennes, 80, and Stands in Timber, Cheyenne Memories, 63. (back to text)
12. Stands in Timber, Cheyenne Memories, 194. (back to text)
13. Powell, Sweet Medicine, 211. (back to text)
14. Stands in Timber, Cheyenne Memories, 193–94. (back to text)
15. MacLaine, “Our 1876 ‘Injun Fightin’ Cavalry,” 80. A cavalry regiment in 1876 was authorized 43 officers and 1 regimental sergeant major, 1 quartermaster sergeant, 1 saddler sergeant, 1 chief trumpeter, and 1 chief musician. Each company comprised 71 enlisted men: 1 first sergeant, 5 duty sergeants, 4 corporals, 2 trumpeters, 1 blacksmith, 1 farrier, 1 saddler, 1 wagoner, and 55 privates. The grand total of authorized personnel was 852 enlisted men and 43 officers — 895 men. (back to text)
16. Gray, Centennial Campaign, 151. Other totals vary about ten troopers either way; there is no definitive total. Several company rosters were lost in the battle, and some men will never be positively located, since it is not clear whether they rode with the Seventh or remained behind on the Far West or at the Yellowstone depot. Additionally, four citizen packers were definitely known to be with the column, although there may have been as many as twelve. (back to text)
17. Details of the column’s appearance come from Hutchins, Boots and Saddles at the Little Bighorn; Partoll, “After the Custer Battle”; and Godfrey, Custer’s Last Battle. (back to text)
18. Coughlan, Varnum, 35. (back to text)
19. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 23. (back to text)
20. Hutchins, Boots and Saddles at the Little Bighorn, 30. (back to text)
21. Details of the regiment’s progress up the Rosebud are chiefly derived from Godfrey, Custer’s Last Battle; Lieutenant Wallace’s official report, in Report of the Chief of Engineer for the Indian Campaign of 1876; O’Neil, The Gibson-Edgerly Narratives; Graham, The Custer Myth; Libby, The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign; Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts; and Stewart, Custer’s Luck. (back to text)
22. Hutchins, Boots and Saddles at the Little Bighorn, 48. (back to text)
23. This description of setting up camp is derived from Charles K. Mills’s well-researched Harvest of Barren Regrets, 238. (back to text)
24. Fougera, With Custer’s Cavalry, 267; Godfrey, Custer’s Last Battle, 16. (back to text)
25. E. S. Godfrey, “Notes on Chapter XXII of Colonel Homer W. Wheeler’s ‘Buffalo Days,’ ” in Carroll, A Custer Chrestomathy, 71. (back to text)
26. Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 372, quoting a letter from Godfrey discussing the battle: “The time of the arrival of Terry at the Little Big Horn is assumed to be June 26th. What authority there is for that assumption I do not now recall. It is not embodied in the ‘instructions.’ We of the command knew nothing of it till after the battle; after Terry’s arrival, that is.” Varnum’s testimony (Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 175) also made clear that neither he nor the other officers of the regiment were told of Terry’s grand scheme. (back to text)
27. O’Neil, In Reply to Van de Water, 3. Graham told Van de Water, “The probabilities are that Wallace’s watch was set by Fort Lincoln time which, I have been informed, was the same as Chicago time.” Godfrey testified that their watches had not changed, meaning that they were still oper
ating on the official time of Fort Lincoln, which was Chicago time (Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 491). (back to text)
28. Edgerly to his wife, July 4, 1876, quoted in Clark, Scalp Dance, 26. (back to text)
29. Godfrey, Custer’s Last Battle, 17. There is also an account by Gerard wherein he stated that Bloody Knife had been “very much under the influence of whisky” and had teased Custer by saying that the General “would not dare to attack” the Indians if he should find them (Holley, Once Their Home, 263). This is partly corroborated by one of the Arikaras, Red Star, who said that the scout “was missing, and the scouts waited for him till it was late but he was drunk somewhere, he got liquor from somebody. Next morning at breakfast Bloody Knife appeared leading a horse. He had been out all night” (Libby, 78). (back to text)
30. Albert Johnson to Theodore Goldin, April 2, 1933, Box 3G469, Albert Johnson Folder, Brininstool Collection. (back to text)
31. Coughlan, 9. (back to text)
32. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 220. (back to text)
33. Custer, quoted in Gray, Centennial Campaign, 156. (back to text)
34. Libby, 78–79. (back to text)
35. O’Neil, The Gibson-Edgerly Narratives, 6. (back to text)
36. Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 265. (back to text)
37. Graham, The Custer Myth, 262. (back to text)
38. William O. Taylor to Elizabeth Custer, May 29, 1910, quoted in O’Neil, Custer Chronicles, vol. 2, 12–14. (back to text)
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ON THE JUMP
Epigraph: White Man Runs Him, quoted in Graham, The Custer Myth, 23.
1. Information on the trips to the Crow’s Nest by Varnum and Custer comes from Albert Johnson to Earl Brininstool, January 15, 1933, Brininstool Collection; Coughlan, Varnum; Richard Hardorff, “Custer’s Trail to Wolf Mountains,” in Carroll, Custer and His Times, Book 2; and Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts. (back to text)
2. Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 61. (back to text)
3. Barnard, I Go with Custer, 207. (back to text)
4. Graham, The Custer Myth, 178–79. (back to text)
5. William Taylor to Elizabeth Custer, May 29, 1910, quoted in O’Neil, Custer Chronicles, vol. 2, 12–14. (back to text)
6. Godfrey, “The Death of General Custer,” 469. The soldier who wrote to Godfrey and included this remembrance did not specify that it was not a song rendered by the officers, but Godfrey wrote that the soldier said “he was thrilled by someone singing in a clear tone,” which implies a solitary singer. (back to text)
7. Davis and Davis, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 53. (back to text)
8. Barnard, Ten Years with Custer, 289. (back to text)
9. Wagner, Old Neutriment, 148. (back to text)
10. Graham, The Custer Myth, 136. (back to text)
11. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 211. (back to text)
12. Brown and Willard, The Black Hills Trails, 149. (back to text)
13. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 61. (back to text)
14. Some of the Crow accounts (White Man Runs Him, for instance) state that Custer did not go all the way to the top, just “far enough to see over and down the valley.” Graham, The Custer Myth, 14–15. (back to text)
15. Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 88. (back to text)
16. Libby, The Arikara Narrative of Custer’s Campaign, 90–93. (back to text)
17. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 250–51; Hammer, Custer in ’76, 222. (back to text)
18. Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 147. (back to text)
19. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 528; Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 79. (back to text)
20. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 222. (back to text)
21. Stewart, Custer’s Luck, 280. (back to text)
22. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 64. (back to text)
23. Carroll, The Benteen-Goldin Letters, 30–31, 41; Graham, The Custer Myth, 194. There is a different account of this exchange in Schultz’s dramatized William Jackson, Indian Scout, 133. (back to text)
24. Godfrey, “Notes on Chapter XXII of Colonel Homer W. Wheeler’s ‘Buffalo Days,’” in Carroll, A Custer Chrestomathy, 74. (back to text)
25. Liddic and Harbaugh, Camp on Custer, 81. (back to text)
26. Wagner, 151. (back to text)
27. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 64; Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 64. (back to text)
28. Theodore Goldin to E. A. Brininstool, December 3, 1933, Brininstool Collection. (back to text)
29. Wagner, 152. (back to text)
30. Most accounts list 24,000 rounds, two for each company, but there were two boxes brought along for the headquarters staff (Hammer, Custer in ’76, 68). (back to text)
31. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 439; Edgerly to his wife, July 4, 1876, quoted in Clark, Scalp Dance, 26. Besides Edgerly, four others wrote of or testified to these battalion assignments. Myles Moylan wrote of them eleven days after the battle in a letter to Captain Calhoun’s brother Fred Calhoun (O’Neil, Custer Chronicles, vol. 3, 18); Reno wrote of them in a letter to a newspaper answering an accusatory letter written by Custer’s good friend Thomas Rosser (Graham, The Custer Myth, 226); Gibson told his wife about them in his letter of July 4, 1876 (Fougera, With Custer’s Cavalry, 268); and Sergeant Daniel Kanipe mentioned the two squadrons (Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 177). (back to text)
32. Linderman, Plenty-Coups, 175. (back to text)
33. The actual distance to this first line of bluffs, as ascertained by Roger Darling and revealed in his book Benteen’s Scout-to-the-Left, is 1.3 miles. Postbattle reports by participants almost unanimously exaggerated the distance; such accounts usually lengthened the distance as time went on. At the Reno court of inquiry in 1879, Benteen testified that the bluffs were “4 or 5 miles away” (Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 135). In Benteen’s personal narrative of the battle, probably written sometime between 1890 and his death in 1898, he estimated the distance at two miles (Graham, The Custer Myth, 179). Godfrey in 1892 wrote of “a line of high bluffs three or four miles distant” (Godfrey, Custer’s Last Battle, 21). The only exception I have found is Lieutenant Edgerly, who testified at the Reno inquiry, “I judge in about a mile distant we came to very high bluffs” (Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 157). (back to text)
34. In a letter to his wife written on July 4, 1876, Benteen stated that he was ordered “to go over the immense hills to the left, in search of the valley, which was supposed to be very near by.” O’Neil, Custer Chronicles, vol. 5, 21. (back to text)
35. Benteen’s several different accounts of these orders were rendered at different times. His earliest accounts — a letter to his wife and his official report, both written on July 4, 1876 — agree on this version of his orders (Hunt, I Fought with Custer, 184–87). Gibson’s letter to his wife says much the same thing (Fougera, 268). (back to text)
36. Noyes, “Custer’s Surgeon, George Lord,” 17–18; New York Herald, July 10, 1876. (back to text)
37. Saum, “Colonel Custer’s Copperhead,” 45; Theodore Goldin, “The Summer Campaign of 1876,” in Cozzens, Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, vol. 4, 319; Camp IU Notes, 610. (back to text)
38. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 231. (back to text)
39. Ibid., 156. Gerard testified that he thought the Indians were more than three miles away and on the far side of the Little Bighorn (Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 125). Hare said that he saw forty or fifty Indians “on rise between us and the Little Big Horn” (Camp BYU Notes, Reel 5, 97). (back to text)
40. This Sioux warrior had been mortally wounded at the Battle of the Rosebud eight days earlier. At least five different names have been offered for the man. See Hardorff, Cheyenne Memories, 153, for a full discussion of this matter. (back to text)
41. Vern Smalley, “The Lone Tepee Along Reno Creek,” 12th Annual Symposium; Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 529. (back to text)
42. Hardorff, On the Little Big
horn with Walter Camp, 6. Not only Daniel Kanipe but also many of the Indian scouts said this. (back to text)
43. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 84. (back to text)
44. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 401; New York Herald, July 30, 1876. Though Reno did not mention the Arikaras singing while preparing themselves for battle at the tepees, it seems doubtful that they did so silently. In the Herald account, an anonymous Seventh Cavalry officer wrote, “The death song of the Crow Indians rose on the air and floated over the hills,” but I believe this officer mistook the Rees’ [Arikaras’] death songs for that of the Crows. (back to text)
45. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 276. That the village Reno was ordered after was the group of fleeing Indians who could be seen a few miles down the trail and not the huge encampment subsequently discovered across the river and two miles down the valley is abundantly clear from the many versions of the orders Reno received. See Darling, A Sad and Terrible Blunder, 202–6. In an anonymous account written by a member of the Seventh Cavalry and published in the New York Herald on July 30, 1876, the author stated, “The village was just ahead and we were sure it could not get away.” (back to text)
46. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 23. There are several versions of these orders. These are from the testimony given by the column’s itinerist, Lieutenant Wallace. Years later, Lieutenant Luther Hare told researcher Walter Camp that at the tepees, he “heard Cooke tell Reno to go on in pursuit of the Indians and Custer would follow right behind and support him,” which would help explain Reno’s later decision to leave the timber. The fact that no one, not even Reno, claimed that Custer said this leaves this just a tantalizing claim (Hammer, Custer in ’76, 64). (back to text)
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