More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  Although the Civil War years had been so formative, the young General and his wife now discussed his leaving the military. After all, where would be the fun, let alone the glory, in a peacetime army? But then, following a short and rather boring posting in Texas, he was offered the command of a cavalry regiment that was being formed on the western plains. True, in the now much reduced army, he would have to drop rank to a mere Colonel. Nevertheless, the high opinion he already had of himself would have been even further boosted by the knowledge that he, Custer, had been singled out, again. He and Libbie set off.

  The 7th Cavalry was forming on the eastern edge of the Kansas plains at a place called Fort Riley. (Today it is the site of one of the biggest army bases in the US.) On arrival, Custer was disappointed: he found that too many of his men were untrained recruits. Further, among his officers were a few obvious time-servers, neither inspiring nor inspired. But, for the time being, that hardly mattered because they all had a task that kept them busy: training those recruits in preparation for a campaign in the coming spring, under the overall command of General Hancock.

  Towards the end of the week between Christmas and the New Year (1866-7), the fort would have heard rumors of the Fetterman Massacre far away to the north-west. One imagines that the news gave a shocked urgency to the regiment’s training. Anyway, by late March, all was ready and General Hancock started westward with a column of 1,400 men and a supply train of more than 100 wagons. Custer and his 7th Cavalry were in the van.

  Against the mounted tribes of the western plains, Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa (it made no difference which), speed and mobility were everything. Hancock, with his plodding column strung out over 3 miles, might as well have tried to bring down a distant brave with a howitzer. True, some of the Cheyenne were persuaded, by a local official of the Indian Bureau in whom they had some trust, to “come in” for a powwow with Hancock. But, already apprehensive, and now seeing the forces poised all around them, they became frightened and belligerent. When Hancock threatened them with punishment for any future bad behavior (“insolence”, he called it), they were gone so quickly that they did not even delay to pack up their tepees. Hancock promptly burned their village and everything in it - an action that was unlikely to persuade the hearts and minds of the Cheyenne toward the paths of peace. Custer and his men were ordered to go after the “insolent fugitives”. But like all tribes when pursued by a superior (even if slower) force, they had scattered in a dozen different directions. This was not Aldie or Culpepper.

  In revenge, elusive war-parties of Cheyenne now killed more than 100 whites, including women and children. Custer lost a number of stragglers. In trying to catch the Cheyenne, Custer marched his men till some of them and their horses dropped. Characteristically, he reasoned that if he could stand the pace, so should they. Equally characteristically, and peremptorily, he had some would-be deserters shot. By the time they pulled into a huddle of tents called Fort Wallace on the western fringes of Kansas, the men of the 7th Cavalry had zigzagged well over 1,000 miles, achieving very little. Custer’s orders from General Hancock were waiting; he was to replenish his supplies and immediately get back to chasing the Hostiles.

  But Custer now did something unprecedented. He had heard a rumor that, back in Fort Riley, there was an outbreak of cholera. Concerned for his dearest Libbie, he abandoned his regiment with the excuse that he personally must return east to arrange for more supplies. So, with a company of his fittest horsemen for an escort, he set off to cover the 300 miles back to Fort Riley as quickly as possible. On the second or third day, two of his troopers dropped behind because their horses could not keep up with their Colonel’s desperate pace; he refused to go back for them, such was his personal haste, but some Cheyenne caught and killed them at a place called Downer’s Station. In the event, he found Libby in good health. Many years later, as a widow, she wrote, “There was in that summer of 1867 one long, perfect day. It was mine and, blessed be the memory, it is still mine - for time and eternity.” One is almost won over.

  But the fact was that her husband had deserted his command. The next day, a message from General Hancock came over the wire: Custer was under open arrest. Two months later, in Fort Leavenworth back by the Missouri, he faced seven charges. The one that really mattered was the abandonment of his command. His admirers (yes, there were quite a few) put it about that he was being made a scapegoat for General Hancock’s notably unsuccessful campaign. Be that as it may, he was found guilty on all counts and suspended from rank and pay for a year. In some disgrace, which they pretended to ignore, he and Libbie went home to Monroe. He began his memoirs.

  Back on the plains, through the iciest months of that winter, the Indians and the Army went into hibernation; it was too cold to do anything else. But with the spring the tribes were back on the warpath, more vigorously than ever. Within two months, along the Smoky Hill trail leading across Kansas towards the Rockies, they killed another 100 whites: soldiers and civilians. The unsuccessful Hancock was relieved. General Sheridan took over, and shifted his headquarters out to Fort Hays in mid-Kansas, to be central to the campaign he now planned. He knew who he wanted at the sharp end of those plans: he sent a telegram to Washington asking that Custer be reinstated, and another to Monroe. “General Sherman and myself, and nearly all the officers of your regiment, have asked for you. Can you come at once?” Given that Custer, the previous summer, had achieved no more than anyone else, one wonders what prompted Sheridan. Perhaps he remembered Custer’s manic energy in the Civil War. Perhaps he reckoned that the man would risk anything to rescue his damaged reputation. For Custer, it must have been very satisfying. One imagines him turning to Libbie: “See! They can’t manage without me.”

  He was in Fort Hays within a week. “How soon do I start?” is reported to have been his first question. He and Sheridan recognized that chasing Indians in the summer, when they were scattered and highly mobile, was a waste of time. So instead, they would hit them in mid-winter when they were clustered together, when the ponies on which they might escape were weakened by lack of feed, when the cold itself was immobilizing.

  In mid November the 7th Cavalry, nearly 700 strong, set off south from Fort Hayes. After 100 miles, it established a supply post called, appropriately, Camp Supply. Four days later, nearing the Washita River, the scouts picked up a confusion of trails in the snow which led toward what they judged must be a large encampment. Moving quietly through the hard-frozen night, Custer split his command into four in order to surround the village and stop its inhabitants trying to flee. At first light, on hearing the band strike up, each detachment was to attack simultaneously. There was no attempt to send scouts ahead to gauge the size or the geography of the village.

  Despite the fact that, with no reconnaissance, the attack was tactically haphazard, it was successful. Against a sleeping enemy, it could hardly be anything else. The main action through the village, with the troopers shooting or cutting down anyone who moved, was over in minutes. Custer counted the Battle of the Washita, as it came to be called, as a personal triumph. Estimates varied as to the number of Indian dead: some said 100 braves were killed, some said 200 or even more. A number of women and children were captured; given that Indians were always concerned for their families, these captives would be useful hostages against any subsequent trouble. The Cavalry’s casualties were light: one officer killed, one seriously wounded. There was some confusion as to the whereabouts of a detachment of troopers under the regiment’s second-in-command, a Major Elliott.

  What Custer did not know, because he had not bothered to find out, was that this village was just one of a string of large encampments scattered along the Washita valley. Again, estimates vary, but one calculation put the number of warriors within 5 miles at more than 3,000. Anyway, Custer was soon alarmed to see several hundred armed warriors lining a distant bluff; more were joining them. Uncharacteristically, he decided to withdraw, making apparent to the enemy t
he presence of his “hostage” captives. He later explained that he was low on ammunition. More likely, he realized that he had no idea of how many Indians might be lying in wait up or down the river. So for once, he was being careful. He may also have been worried about the safety of his supply train, which had been left some miles behind. Anyway, before moving out, he ordered that the camp be burned and the Cheyenne’s means of summer mobility be destroyed: their herd of 700 hundred horses was to be shot. He surely could not have been that short of ammunition.

  Elliott and his men did not come in to rejoin the column. Custer still made no effort to find them. Once again, as back at Downer’s Station, he was in a hurry: in this case, to get back to Fort Supply. Weeks later, 20 frozen and mutilated soldiers were discovered. In chasing after some Indians fleeing from the Washita, they must have been cut off and overwhelmed. Some of Custer’s officers never forgave him for what they saw as a second instance of his deserting his own men.

  But General Sheridan, now waiting in Fort Supply, was delighted when advance couriers brought him Custer’s news. At last, a real success. Two days later, he turned out to take the salute as the 7th Cavalry, with sabers drawn, paraded into the fort. One imagines that the Colonel was also well pleased. His critics maintained that his record at the Washita did little to demonstrate his prowess and, given that the Cheyenne were all asleep, a raw recruit could have directed the attack. That is probably putting it too strongly, and it is certainly not the way Colonel Custer would have seen it.

  On the contrary, he judged himself a thoroughly proven success as a fighter and conqueror of Indians - an attitude of over-confidence that goes a long way to explain the mind of the man in what follows.

  ***

  Early in 1873, there came the order that Custer had been hoping for: he was to take his regiment north to Dakota Territory, to guard surveyors who would be working on the alignment of the second transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific. This, he knew, was the country of the bad-tempered Sioux. Well, he would show them...

  Nearly five years earlier, in the protracted aftermath of the Fetterman disaster, the US had no alternative but to negotiate. Under the second Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868 (the first had been aborted two years before, after that dramatic exit by Red Cloud), the government had been forced to abandon its forts along the Bozeman Trail and, moreover, it had been forced to recognize that the Sioux had rights over all the land stretching west from the middle Missouri to a line well beyond the Black Hills. This vast tract of land, into which all white incursions were now banned, came to be known as the Great Sioux Reservation. It was to the ill-defined northern reaches of this vast expanse that Custer was now sent to protect the incursion of those surveyors.

  Now, a short digression: in the second half of the nineteenth century, Washington’s Peace Commissioners journeyed West to negotiate any number of treaties with the tribes. In “touching paper”, the problem on both sides - whether in the deserts of, say, New Mexico and Arizona or on the high plains of Wyoming and Montana - was always the same: neither side was in a strong position to deliver that which it had just guaranteed. The government might promise to hold off trespassers from some vast tract that it had just patronizingly “recognized” as Indian land, but it knew that it would seldom be able to enforce its side of the bargain, even if it wanted to. The tribal leaders, for their part, might agree that whites traveling (or settling) outside the treaty boundaries would not be molested. But, given the frequency of white trespass, the tribes did not have the collective discipline (or will) to hold back their hotheads from revenge. Nor, just as importantly, did the tribes have leaders in the hierarchical, white man’s sense of the term. So, for example, when Red Cloud sulkily agreed to that second Fort Laramie treaty, there were any number of Sioux far away in the Powder River country who would have denied that Red Cloud, or anyone else, had their agreement to “touch paper” on their behalf. In short, there was a developing schism between the “reservation” Sioux (the Friendlies) who had grudgingly begun to appreciate the power of the whites, and their cousins out in the back-country (the Hostiles). So whatever the whites might write on those bits of paper that they called “treaties”, the Hostiles would have felt no inhibitions about attacking anyone who came too close. In any case, the idea that anyone could own land, let alone “trade” the stuff, was a concept wholly outside their culture. Land was something across which the buffalo roamed; the Indians hunted and depended on the buffalo; the whites were destroying the buffalo. Simple. Except, of course, it was not simple - as history and a number of lawsuits still being brought, even today, by the Native Americans will confirm.

  But back to Custer: one can reasonably say that the rights and wrongs of his assignment in Dakota Territory that summer would not have concerned him in the least. But to the Sioux, the railroad surveyors and their military guardians were in direct violation of that earlier treaty. There were several sharp engagements, and lives were lost. On one occasion, Custer extricated his command from what might have become an encircling ambush by resorting to the Civil War tactic he had always trusted and understood: the full-blooded charge. The Indians broke and fled. To Custer, it would have been confirmation yet again that, when subjected to a bold and direct attack, the Hostiles would always turn, run and scatter.

  At the end of the summer, the regiment returned 300 miles east to its recently completed home by the Missouri river; Fort Lincoln had been built right on the edge of the treaty lands. Again, Libbie and the other wives joined their husbands. For the Custers and their immediate entourage, the winter must have passed easily. They kept open house: their guests included Captain Tom Custer (a younger brother), Boston Custer (a civilian and his youngest brother) and Lieutenant Calhoun (his brother-in-law, married to Custer’s sister). And beyond the family circle, favored officers would join them for musical evenings, charades, cards and, when the weather allowed, rides and picnics on the prairie. Between times, Custer busied himself on what his wife called his “literary work”: articles about army life for newspapers and for Galaxy magazine, a New York monthly.

  With the coming of spring, the regiment began preparing for what would be known as the Black Hills Expedition. There had long been rumors of gold “in them thar hills”. And as the government was anxious, as always, to bolster its treasury, it could not allow a likely source of national wealth to stagnate. Never mind that the Black Hills were, by treaty, in the heart of the Sioux domain and that they were especially sacred to the tribe. So, perhaps to ease its conscience, the government put it about that it was mounting an expedition of “geographic exploration”, a mere mapping party. Anyway, whatever it was labeled, in early June, with the band playing their Colonel’s favorite tunes, “Garry Owen” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me”, he led his column out of Fort Lincoln. In addition to ten companies of the 7th Cavalry, there were two companies of infantry, three of the new Gatling machine guns, an artillery piece, 100 Indian scouts, four journalists, two miners, a geologist, a cartographer, a botanist and a photographer - over 1,000 men in all; plus, it is said, one woman: Calamity Jane. Custer’s orderly later said that “she did not smell good”. Supporting the column were 100 supply wagons and a large herd of “beeves”. All this to do some mapping?

  Four weeks later, they found gold - of course. Some of Custer’s more opportunistic troopers immediately formed themselves into joint stock companies. Custer sent off a dispatch: “...gold among the roots of the grass”. Well before the expedition was back in Fort Lincoln, the nation had the news, and miners were on their way. By the following spring, the trickle had become a continuous stream. The Sioux boiled. The army made several half-hearted attempts to turn back the rush. But within 18 months there were 6,000 people around a place that is still called Custer, and at least as many again were prospecting elsewhere in the hills. (During the decades ending in the early 1950s, the nearby Homestake Mine became the most productive gold mine on the continent.)
r />   The Thieves’ Road was what the Sioux called the path first opened by Custer. A worried government sought a way out of its treaty obligations; it sent its Commissioners west once again, to buy the Black Hills. After all, only the year before the US had bought the whole of Alaska from the Russians for less than $8 million. So now, for the Black Hills, they were offering what they judged to be an overly generous $6 million. But the “reservation” Sioux (the Friendlies), in a series of irritable meetings with the Commissioners, made it clear that the offer was not nearly enough. In any case, when the Hostiles out in the Powder River country heard what was going on, they let it be known that they were against any kind of a deal for their hills. Indeed, under the young Crazy Horse and the older Sitting Bull, they were prepared to go to war if necessary. Indeed, they might go to war anyway.

  In the end, the government justified what it called “the annexation” of the Black Hills by claiming that the Sioux, particularly those who had certainly been responsible for a number of minor raids, had obviously not been keeping their side of that earlier treaty. General Sherman bolstered that thinking. “Inasmuch as the Sioux have not lived in peace”, he wrote, “I think Congress has a perfect right to abrogate the whole of the treaty...” The Indian Bureau agreed. Of what it called “certain wild and hostile tribes”, the Bureau wrote, “The true policy is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection.” The Army could hardly wait.