51. Reno offered this reasoning as to why he had not expected support from a flank attack at his court of inquiry in 1879: “I expected my support to come from the direction I had crossed. I did not see how it was possible, on account of the high banks on the other side, for support to come from the flanks. I didn’t think it was practicable to get down below me” (Graham, Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 228). (back to text)
52. Mangum, “Reno’s Battalion,” 5. (back to text)
53. Even Reno’s orderly, Ed Davern — required to stay within calling distance — failed to hear the order. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 336, 348, 355. (back to text)
54. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 107; Carroll, The Seventh Cavalry Scrapbook, no. 3, 7. (back to text)
55. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 70, 217. Sergeant William Heyn of A Company summarized the nature of the movement when he told researcher Walter Camp, “The men straggled out and started across the flat without any particular command and no bugle being blown, the officers digging spurs into their horses and every man for himself” (Hardorff, Camp, Custer, and the Little Bighorn, 61). (back to text)
56. Graham, The Custer Myth, 242. (back to text)
57. Mangum, “Reno’s Battalion,” 5. (back to text)
58. Carroll, The Sunshine Magazine Articles, 10. (back to text)
59. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 223. (back to text)
60. Ibid., 262. (back to text)
61. These orders to mount, dismount, and mount were heard by Herendeen (Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 82). Private William Taylor later wrote, “All was in the greatest confusion and I dismounted twice and mounted again, all in a few moments, but why, I do not know, unless it was because I saw the others do it and thought they had orders to” (Taylor, With Custer on the Little Bighorn, 38). Private Jacob Adams, though with the pack train on June 25, wrote, “Reno ordered his men to dismount. At a second volley from the Indians, the troopers were ordered to remount, whereupon such confusion prevailed that the order was now given for every man to save himself” (Ellis, “A Survivor’s Story of the Custer Massacre,” 230). The first fully detailed story of the battle appeared in the New York Herald on July 8, 1876. Written on the battlefield on June 28, almost certainly by Major James Brisbin, it included this account of Reno’s retreat, which Brisbin must have ascertained from an officer in Reno’s battalion: “Reno soon discovered that the Indians were working around to his rear and had entered the timber above him, and between him and the reserve. The order was given to mount and charge through the timber toward the reserve. The Indians had already become so strong that it was found impracticable to dislodge them, while mounted, from behind the bushes and the trees, and the command again dismounted and charged on foot. The Indians were every moment getting thicker between the companies on the river bottom and the reserve on the hill. Colonel Reno ordered his men to mount and cut their way through. A wild scramble for life now began.” Finally, Lieutenant Charles F. Roe, with the Gibbon column, wrote an account of the expedition and Custer’s battle, in which he stated of Bloody Knife’s death: “In that emergency, Major Reno lost his head; an officer told me that he gave the command to mount and dismount three times in quick succession” (Roe, Custer’s Last Battle, 9). See also Whittaker, A Complete Life of George A. Custer, 584, where he quotes an officer present with Reno who told much the same story. Significantly, during the Reno court of inquiry, neither Reno nor his counsel objected to or made any attempt to rebut Herendeen’s testimony regarding this sequence of orders. (back to text)
62. Mangum, “Reno’s Battalion,” 5; Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 403; Brininstool, Troopers with Custer, 51; Rickey, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, 325. In early accounts, Morris identified this trooper as George Lorentz, but a later account (in Brininstool) and other troopers’ accounts identify him as Klotzbucher. (See note 66.) (back to text)
63. Rickey, 5. (back to text)
64. Carroll, The Two Battles of the Little Big Horn, 163. Lieutenant Charles Roe of Gibbon’s column, who talked to several of the Seventh Cavalry officers after the battle, claimed that Reno said this (Roe, Custer’s Last Battle, 9). (back to text)
65. Carroll, The Court-Martial of Thomas M. French, 69, 72. (back to text)
66. Roe, Custer’s Last Battle, 5–6; Hammer, Custer in ’76, 131. There is a possibility that the wounded trooper whom Morris helped was Henry Klotzbucher. William Slaper told a similar tale of Morris helping another downed trooper shot through the stomach, but in his version that trooper was Klotzbucher (Brininstool, Troopers with Custer, 51). (back to text)
67. Taylor, With Custer on the Little Bighorn, 41. (back to text)
68. Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 180. (back to text)
69. Carroll, The Benteen-Goldin Letters, 47–48. (back to text)
70. Hardorff, The Custer Battle Casualties II, 109–10. (back to text)
71. Marquis, Wooden Leg, 221; Stands in Timber statement, Cartwright Collection. (back to text)
72. Taylor, With Custer on the Little Bighorn, 42. (back to text)
73. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 223. (back to text)
74. Box 105, Notebook 34, p. 24, Campbell Collection; Hammer, Custer in ’76, 85. Sergeant Stanislas Roy remembered that he saw Reynolds “dismounted and wounded with pistol in hand trying to follow troops in retreat” (Hammer, Custer in ’76, 112). Fred Gerard told a slightly different version of the death of Reynolds (Graham, Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 40). (back to text)
75. Hardorff, Camp, Custer, and the Little Bighorn, 81; Hammer, Custer in ’76, 85. (back to text)
76. Hardorff, Hokahey! 55. (back to text)
77. Hardorff, Lakota Recollections, 101. (back to text)
78. Crawford, Rekindling Campfires, 155. (back to text)
79. Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 153. In his superb and unrivaled analysis of Indian accounts of the battle, Lakota Noon, Gregory Michno makes a good case for this event never happening. But there are too many variables, I believe, to completely eliminate this story, and the Crawford account (see previous note) adds motivation for Sitting Bull’s kindness, which as Michno points out was characteristic of the Hunkpapa leader. (back to text)
80. Hardorff, Lakota Recollections, 94–95, 101–2; Greene, Lakota and Cheyenne, 42–43. Other accounts claim that the young man was named Deeds. He may have used both names. His sister Eagle Robe was almost certainly also known as Moving Robe and later as Mary Crawler. (back to text)
81. Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 116. Benteen erroneously claimed later that Private John Rapp, McIntosh’s orderly, had died in the timber, thus releasing McIntosh’s horse, and that Private Samuel McCormick had given up his horse to McIntosh (Carroll, The Benteen- Goldin Letters, 42). Several troopers claimed to witness McIntosh’s death, and their accounts vary slightly; see Hardorff, The Custer Battle Casualties, 131. (back to text)
82. Marquis, Wooden Leg, 222. (back to text)
83. Brust, 8, 11. (back to text)
84. Marquis, Wooden Leg, 224. (back to text)
85. Hardorff, The Custer Battle Casualties, 155. (back to text)
86. Marquis, Wooden Leg, 224. (back to text)
87. Carroll, The Two Battles of the Little Big Horn, 164. (back to text)
88. Mangum, “Reno’s Battalion,” 6. Other accounts mention another trooper, Charles Fischer, as the man whose stirrup Hodgson held on to (Brininstool, Troopers with Custer, 53; Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 118–19). (back to text)
89. Coughlan, 14. (back to text)
90. Taylor, With Custer on the Little Bighorn, 42, 44. (back to text)
91. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 119; Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 91; Nichols, Men with Custer, 85. (back to text)
92. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 351, 365–66. (back to text)
93. Johnson, “A Captain of ‘Chivalric Courage,’ ” 14; Mangum, “Reno’s Battalion,” 6. (back to te
xt)
94. Davis and Davis, That Fatal Day, 21. (back to text)
95. Ibid., 21. (back to text)
96. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 63. (back to text)
97. Marquis, Wooden Leg, 225. (back to text)
98. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 191, 539–40; Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 210. The number of wounded cited ranges from five to ten, with six or seven the most frequently mentioned number. (back to text)
99. Dixon, The Vanishing Race, 174. (back to text)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: “THE SAVIOR OF THE SEVENTH”
Chapter title: New York Herald, August 8, 1876.
Epigraph: Custer to Benteen, message, June 25, 1876 (Graham, The Custer Myth, 299).
1. Graham, The Custer Myth, 290; Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 390. (back to text)
2. Graham, The Custer Myth, 289–90; Hammer, Custer in ’76, 100–1. (back to text)
3. Marquis, Custer on the Little Bighorn, 37: “On a high ridge far out eastward from the Cheyenne camp circle I saw those other soldiers,” said Kate Bighead. Several other Indians mentioned seeing soldiers on the high ridges above Medicine Tail Coulee. (back to text)
4. There is no primary account or other evidence that corroborates this plan, but circumstantial evidence points to it. A short while after Reno’s command reached the bluffs and was joined by Benteen, at least two volleys were heard by virtually every officer on the hill and by those left behind in the timber. There were not enough Indians near Keogh’s wing to merit volley fire. According to John Stands in Timber in Cheyenne Memories, about fifty Cheyenne warriors were in the vicinity but split up to chase the soldiers going to the river and block them from the north. He made no mention of volley fire. (back to text)
5. Both the archaeological and historical records bear this movement out. See Hardorff, Lakota Recollections, 143, in which Two Eagles is quoted as saying that soldiers came down from Nye-Cartwright Ridge to Ford B and were driven to Calhoun Ridge, and other soldiers went directly from Nye-Cartwright Ridge to Calhoun Hill at the same time. See also ibid., 155. (back to text)
6. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 431. (back to text)
7. Ibid., 421. (back to text)
8. Lieutenant Frank Gibson to his wife, July 4, 1876, quoted in Gray, Custer’s Last Campaign, 259. Also, in an account given twenty-one years later to a New York newspaper, Gibson stated, “Col. Benteen was directed to take his [battalion] out of column, and proceed with it across the hills to the left, which turned out to be small mountains, and reach the valley of the Little Big Horn as soon as possible” (New York Evening Post, February 20, 1897). In 1910, in an interview with Walter Camp, Gibson said that “Benteen told him to keep going until he could see the valley of the Little Bighorn,” although Camp also wrote, “He now thinks however that he only went far enough to look down on the valley of the south fork of Sundance Creek,” another name for the small valley just east of the Little Bighorn (Hammer, Custer in ’76, 80). Benteen, in his official report written the same day, described his orders similarly, and he did the same in an early August newspaper interview (ibid.). In their later writings, both Gibson and Edgerly gave similar accounts of Benteen’s orders. Gibson, in a letter to his wife, wrote, “We were to hurry and rejoin the command as quickly as possible” (quoted in Gray, Centennial Campaign, 304). (back to text)
A Terrible Glory Page 52