13. Davis and Davis, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 47. (back to text)
14. New York Herald, January 18, 1879; Chicago Daily News, January 21, 1879; Davis and Davis, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 22, 46. (back to text)
15. Willert, March of the Columns, 254, 393–94. (back to text)
16. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 102. (back to text)
17. Ibid., 109. (back to text)
18. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 42. (back to text)
19. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 237–38. Gerard also claimed that “before the trial began he and Dr. Porter and certain of the officers were called into a room to talk over what information they could give on certain points. Dr. Porter admitted that he could testify thus and so in reference to certain pertinent questions but said he hoped he would not be called upon to do so” (ibid., 238). (back to text)
20. Ibid., 127. (back to text)
21. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 115. (back to text)
22. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 128. (back to text)
23. Ibid., 135. (back to text)
24. This exchange appeared in neither the official account nor the Chicago Times account. New York Herald, January 22, 1879; Chicago Evening Journal, January 21, 1879. (back to text)
25. Davis and Davis, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 53. (back to text)
26. Johnson, “A Captain of ‘Chivalric Courage,’ ” 44. (back to text)
27. Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 237. (back to text)
28. Davis and Davis, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 49. (back to text)
29. Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 54; Carroll, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, 64–65, 89. (back to text)
30. Chicago Evening Journal, January 22, 1879. (back to text)
31. Ibid. (back to text)
32. Chicago Daily News, January 21, 1879. (back to text)
33. Graham, The Official Record of a Court of Inquiry, viii–ix. (back to text)
34. Inter-Ocean, February 8, 1879. (back to text)
35. Chicago Daily News, January 17, 1879. (back to text)
36. Carroll, Camp Talk, 120. (back to text)
37. Inter-Ocean, January 21, 1879. (back to text)
38. Inter-Ocean, January 25, 1879. (back to text)
39. Inter-Ocean, January 14, 1879. (back to text)
40. New York Sun, February 26, 1879; Camp IU Notes, 81, 82. (back to text)
41. Camp IU Notes, 81, 82; Lee to Elizabeth Custer, June 27, 1897, Hagner Collection. (back to text)
42. Camp IU Notes, 102. According to Camp’s notes, DeRudio told him that “at Court of Inquiry there was a private understanding between a number of officers that they would do all they could to save Reno (and De Rudio says they did it when they got on to the stand!).” And at least one newspaperman also commented on the disparity between the officers’ admissions in and out of the courtroom: “I cannot refrain,” wrote the St. Paul Pioneer Press correspondent, “from remarking that the manner some of the officers have talked in private and to their friends in regard to the events of that day has been strangely at variance with their sworn testimony. It shows conclusively that they are either cowardly talking behind Reno’s back, or else that they have not courage enough to face his resentment by speaking the truth on the witness stand” (St. Paul Pioneer Press, February 3, 1879). (back to text)
43. Hammer, Custer in ’76, 238–39. (back to text)
44. Ibid., 238. (back to text)
45. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 198. (back to text)
46. Merkel, “Custer’s Forgotten Lieutenant,” 189: Soon after the battle, Weir told Reno what he thought of his conduct during those two days. Moylan told Weir, “Weir, you have been in the 7th Cavalry for ten years, and if the gov’t hadn’t paid you a cent you have earned it all for what you have said.” In an 1892 letter to Godfrey, Moylan wrote: “I desire to be understood that my defense of Reno is entirely confined to his act of taking his three troops out of the bottom. Of his personal conduct in the bottom or subsequently on the hill the least said the better. If what Col. Benteen told me at Meade in 1883 was true, and I know of no reason to doubt it, then Reno ought to have been shot” (Moylan to Godfrey, January 17, 1892, Box 4, MS 1401, Camp BYU Collection). (back to text)
47. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 205. (back to text)
48. Ibid., 232–33. (back to text)
49. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 246. (back to text)
50. Ibid., 438, 454. (back to text)
51. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 240. (back to text)
52. Davis and Davis, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 72. (back to text)
53. The Articles of War in force at the time concerning courts of inquiry specifically stated that “the recorder . . . unlike the judge advocate, is not a prosecuting officer, since the investigation is not a trial, nor will he properly assume the role or manner of a prosecutor.” (back to text)
54. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 283. (back to text)
55. Ibid., 284. (back to text)
56. Ibid., January 26, 1879; Davis and Davis, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 36–37. (back to text)
57. Horn, “The Tainted Testimony of Captain Frederick W. Benteen.” (back to text)
58. Utley, The Reno Court of inquiry, 338. (back to text)
59. Kuhlman, Legend into History, 132. (back to text)
60. Ibid., 585; Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 420–21; Washington Post, February 10, 1879. (back to text)
61. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 586–87. (back to text)
62. Ibid., 593. (back to text)
63. Ibid., 595. (back to text)
64. Paul Hedren, “Holy Ground,” in Rankin, Legacy, 199. (back to text)
65. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 611. (back to text)
66. Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 431. (back to text)
67. Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1879; Utley, The Reno Court of Inquiry, 447. (back to text)
68. Graham, The Reno Court of Inquiry: Abstract, 45. (back to text)
69. Inter-Ocean, February 12, 1879; Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 630. (back to text)
70. Nichols, Reno Court of Inquiry, 463. (back to text)
71. Ibid. (back to text)
72. Hutchins, The Army and Navy Journal, 199. (back to text)
73. Nichols, In Custer’s Shadow, 285. (back to text)
74. Graham, The Custer Myth, 337; R. G. Carter to A. H. Hepburn, November 9, 1934, Van de Water Papers. Lee later told researcher Walter Camp that Merritt had used almost the exact same words to him as Merritt drew up the court’s conclusions: “We will damn Major Reno with faint praise” and “We have politely cursed him and whitewashed it over” (Camp IU Notes, 58, 578; Hardorff, On the Little Bighorn with Walter Camp, 191; Jesse M. Lee autobiography, unpublished manuscript, courtesy Ephriam Dickson). (back to text)
75. Graham, The Custer Myth, 325–29. (back to text)
76. Ibid., 329–32; Philadelphia Times, March 30, 1879. (back to text)
77. See Otto Eisenschiml’s excellent and highly readable The Celebrated Case of Fitz John Porter for a particularly egregious example. (back to text)
78. “It was known and proved by Reno’s court-martials, that he was a rather vindictive person toward subordinates” (Luce, review of Echoes from the Little Big Horn Fight, 61). (back to text)
79. Whittaker to Elizabeth Custer, March 31, 1877, quoted in Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 240. (back to text)
80. Ricker, The Settler and Soldier Interviews, 361. (back to text)
81. Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 254. (back to text)
82. Barnett, Touched by Fire, 371. (back to text)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: GHOSTS DANCING
Epigraph: Kicking Bear, quoted in Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 234.
1. Carroll, General Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn, 177. (back to text)
2. I have relied primarily on the following sources for Ghost Dance and
Wounded Knee material in this chapter: Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion; Vestal, Warpath and Council Fire; Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee; Kelley, Pine Ridge, 1890; Jensen et al., Eyewitness at Wounded Knee; McGregor, The Wounded Knee Massacre; Huls, The Winter of 1890; Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation; Tibbles, Buckskin and Blanket Days; Carroll, To Set the Record Straight! Mattes, “The Enigma of Wounded Knee”; Jensen, “Big Foot’s Followers at Wounded Knee”; and “Reports and Correspondence Relating to the Army Investigations of the Battle of Wounded Knee and to the Sioux Campaign of 1890–1891,” RG 94, National Archives. (back to text)
3. Sitting Bull, quoted in Utley, Sitting Bull, 269. (back to text)
4. There is some evidence that the Lakota Sioux added a touch of vengefulness to the religion that espoused death to the whites. See Vestal, New Sources of Indian History, 42–44, 60; Wooster, The Military and the United States Indian Policy, 194; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 284. (back to text)
5. Nichols, Men with Custer, 396. Twenty-three of the medals were awarded in 1878; one, to Theodore Goldin, was awarded in 1895. Twenty-seven medals were awarded at Iwo Jima. (back to text)
6. First Lieutenant Luther Hare was with the regiment at Pine Ridge but was relieved from duty “on account of physical disability” two weeks before the Battle of Wounded Knee and returned to Fort Riley (Army and Navy Journal, December 27, 1890, 296). Captain Frank Gibson had been on sick leave since October and would remain on it until he retired from the service in December 1891 (Army and Navy Journal, October 4, 1890). (back to text)
7. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, 202; the chapter on Wounded Knee in Ricker, The Settler and Soldier Interviews; the chapter on the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee in Ricker, The Indian Interviews; and Wells, “Ninety-Six Years Among the Indians.” (back to text)
8. Coleman, 234. (back to text)
9. Northrop, Indian Horrors, 548: In a letter, a Seventh Cavalry trooper wrote, “There were about fifty tepees set up.” (back to text)
10. Coleman, 275. (back to text)
11. Kelley, 103; McGregor, 89. (back to text)
12. Beatrice (Nebraska) Daily Express, December 30, 1890. (back to text)
13. Coleman, 294–98. The officer’s identity was never ascertained. See also Miss Elaine Goodale’s report to the Bureau of Indian Affairs as detailed in the January 17, 1891, Washington Post. Other eyewitness accounts claim that no orders were given; see Northrop, 549. (back to text)
14. Rickey, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, 289. (back to text)
15. Coleman, 301. “Reports and Correspondence,” 706: “I have reason to believe that some of our men were killed by the fire of other of our troops,” testified one of the Seventh’s medical officers, assistant surgeon Charles Ewing. “I base it from the position of the troops. . . . Located as the troops were, and firing as they did, it was impossible not to wound or kill each other.” Artillery Captain Allyn Capron agreed: “It was unavoidable that some of our troops should have been hurt from our own fire” (Coleman, 363). A Seventh Cavalry private later wrote: “I have no doubt that I was shot by one of my comrades” (quoted in Flood, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee, 41). See also McGinnis, “I Was There!” 52; Ricker, The Indian Interviews, 94–95, for a second account from a Seventh Cavalry Sergeant who was “sure that his fire was fatal to the soldiers there. Three men in his own troop were killed by the soldiers from the opposite side”; and Northrop, 549, for an account by a trooper who wrote, “From beginning to end I don’t think I saw two dozen bucks, and it is a mystery to all where the bullets came from that killed and wounded one-third of my regiment.” See also Greene, After Wounded Knee, 33–34. (back to text)
16. One surgeon who was present, Captain Charles Ewing, later reported thirty men killed (Ewing, “The Wounded of Wounded Knee Battlefield,” 7). (back to text)
17. Coleman, 307. A slight variation of this exchange was reported in a story in the February 12, 1891, Chicago Daily Tribune, as related by an Episcopalian minister at a Sioux Indian conference in Washington, D.C. According to the minister, the scout-interpreter told him of the following exchange: “ ‘Now we have avenged Custer’s death,’ says the officer, to which the scout replies, ‘Yes, but you had every chance to fight for your lives that day. These poor Indian people did not have that opportunity to protect and fight for themselves.’ ” A Seventh Cavalry trooper was later quoted as saying, “The older men of the regiment began regaling we youngsters with stories of the bloody battle of the Little Bighorn. . . . This made us eager to meet the redskins and get revenge for what they had done to our predecessors” (Greene, Indian War Veterans, 179). See also Johnson, Intensely Interesting Little Volume, 14, for an account by a man who claimed to have been at the scene: “After an effective volley, rose the sullen roar of voices whose cry was, ‘Remember Custer.’ ” (back to text)
18. Greene, After Wounded Knee, 33. (back to text)
19. For eyewitness accounts of troopers shooting women and children, see Coleman, 350, 356, 365; Flood, 41, 45–46; McGregor, 112, 126; Ricker, The Settler and Soldier Interviews, 20, 33, 38, 39; Ricker, The Indian Interviews, 202, 203, 221; Lindberg, “Foreigners in Action at Wounded Knee,” 176; and Northrop, where one trooper wrote, “Some of the men went wild; they would shoot men or women” (545), and another trooper wrote, “Of course the camp-liar was in his glory, but who shot the squaws was not known, at least no one bragged of it” (550). (back to text)
20. In a special investigation into the circumstances connected with the killing of these four Minneconjous in March 1891, testimony was taken from Godfrey, a Sergeant, and three troopers; see Carroll, To Set the Record Straight! 65–72. See Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, 224 n. 43, for further discussion of this incident. See also Johnson, “Tragedy at White Horse Creek,” and Coleman, 329–33, for a later version (“Tragedy at White Horse Creek: General Godfrey’s Account of an Incident Near Wounded Knee, in 1890,” written in 1903) that was slightly different in small details; and Godfrey’s May 29, 1931, letter to the chief of the historical section, Army War College, for another account, again with some minor differences. (A copy of the letter is in the Godfrey Family Papers.) In all three versions, Godfrey said that his men saw the Indians run into the brush: “Some of my men called my attention, that they saw some Indians in the creek bottom” (1891); “My return march was down a partly wooded valley containing clumps of bushes with dead leaves on them. . . . I put flankers on each side on the high ground. As we entered one of these clumps the advance discovered some Indians running to a hiding place. I at once dismounted to fight on foot” (1931). It seems curious that none of his troopers noticed or said anything to the effect that these four Indians were not full-grown men but a woman, two children, and a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy. (In his initial testimony in 1891, Godfrey said that the boy was sixteen or seventeen. In 1931 he claimed that the boy was fourteen or fifteen. Captain Frank D. Baldwin claimed in his report that the boy was about ten years of age, and General Miles wrote in one report that the boy was between eight and ten.) In his 1903 account, Godfrey stated: “I found a squaw and two small girls . . . [who] were in their death struggles”; in his original testimony in 1891, he claimed that they were dead when he found them. Another curious fact: in his 1891 testimony, Godfrey revealed that Baldwin had told him that the boy had only one gunshot in his body, meaning that he had not been shot in the initial fusillade (Carroll, To Set the Record Straight!, 69). See Johnson, “Tragedy at White Horse Creek,” for more discussion of this action. (back to text)
21. This investigative body does not seem to have been a formal court of inquiry and was never officially called that, though it has been referred to as such many times since. As a matter of fact, when Miles telegrammed the War Department that he had detailed a body of officers to inquire into the matter and asked if the President directed “that it constitute a court of inquiry with power to take testimony under oath,” he received the following reply: “I am directed by the S
ecretary of War to inform you that it was not the intention of the President to appoint a Court of Inquiry, nor to order at this time, in the midst of the campaign, any further inquiry than you could yourself make without the necessity of a court, the purpose being simply to determine whether any officer had been so far derelict in duty as to make it necessary to relieve him from command, such result to follow upon the inquiry which you were expected to cause to be made” (quoted in Chicago Daily Tribune, January 7, 1891). The idea was, it seems, to keep any investigation under wraps for as long as possible. (back to text)
22. Coleman, 362. (back to text)
23. Dr. Charles Eastman, quoted in the Chicago Daily Tribune, January 8, 1891. (back to text)
24. Quoted in Coleman, 310. See also McGinnis, “I Was There!” 52, in which the author, a Private in K Company, wrote: “There was no discrimination of age or sex. Children as well as women with babes in their arms were brought down as far as two miles from the Wounded Knee Crossing.” (back to text)
25. Coleman, 315. (back to text)
26. Ibid., 317. (back to text)
27. The man who was paid to bury the Minneconjous, Paddy Starr, said that he buried 168 in the mass grave (Coleman, 352); 4 more were found several weeks later by Captain Frank Baldwin, victims of a platoon led by Captain Edward Godfrey. Other estimates put the death toll as high as 184 (Ricker, The Settler and Soldier Interviews, 46); 185 (Coleman, 365); or even 300 (ibid., 355). Joseph Horn Cloud, a Minneconjou participant, listed 104 survivors in Big Foot’s band and 185 killed (Ricker, The Indian Interviews, 204–8). One of the three reporters who witnessed the battle, William Fitch Kelley, claimed more than 200 dead and a total of 275 to 300 killed and wounded (Kelley, 223). One trooper claimed “about 115 bucks, and about 75 women and children killed. . . . Some of the men went wild; they would shoot men or women” (Northrop, 545). Nelson Miles wrote in a private letter that “about 200 women and children were killed or wounded” (quoted in Greene, After Wounded Knee, 33). For a thorough early discussion of the number of Indians killed, see Mooney, 870–71. (back to text)
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