An Obituary for Major Reno

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Reno’s wounded were carried, one by one, down from the hilltop to a field hospital on the Hat operated by Dr. Porter and surgeons from the Montana Column. Flies swarmed, plaguing the doctors, maddening the stricken. A similar hospital had been improvised for the wounded horses and mules, and there the saddlers set to work on each trembling animal, cleaning wounds, scaping off hordes of black flies, packing the raw red flesh while the animals laid back their ears, screeched, bit, groaned piteously.

  Some troopers were detailed to bury Reno’s own men, those lost at the crossing of the Little Bighorn en route to the bluff. Reno rode his bay horse there, watched silently while his troopers laid their tentmates, their company mates, their messmates into the moist bottomland near the river. There was so much death that it numbed hearts and souls. Men shoveled impassively, looking no one in the eye.

  Men were silent that day, locked within their own thoughts, aware of the thin thread of fate that had detailed them to survive, rather than die, in the valley of the Little Bighorn River.

  There was something else hanging in the air: every man alive wondered by what virtue he had survived, and whether his very breath of life was a mark of dishonor among the gallant, brave dead. Whether the life he yet enjoyed was not a sign of cowardice rather than a sign of honor. It was not rational; they were fated to live because Custer had chosen the companies he wanted with him, and because Major Reno had sent them to that bluff where they held off thousands of the hostiles.

  And yet the feeling that weighed in each living survivor didn’t need to be rooted in reason; it flourished in the bosoms of the Seventh because honor had fallen upon the dead; honor and glory and esteem. The dead were magnificent soldiers, fighting to the last breath; the living … were only the living.

  Reno felt it and angrily pushed it aside. He pulled a fresh cigar out of his blouse, lit it, drew and exhaled a great blue cloud of smoke, the sweet scent of tobacco in his nostrils cleansing the stench of death. But it wasn’t just loose emotion floating through him; fellow officers from Gibbon’s column, from the Seventh Infantry and Second Cavalry, who had been helping to identify the dead officers of the Seventh, sometimes paused and stared at the living; at Reno, at French and Varnum and Hare and Moylan, at Wallace and DeRudio.

  Tom Weir, Custer’s close friend, glared, and Reno knew the man’s thoughts. He did not like what he saw in the faces of those fellow officers who wandered the fields, who did not congratulate him for saving the remnant of the command, who did not commend him for his tactical retreat to the only place where he could defend, for keeping the entire Seventh from perishing. No, they stared and said nothing, all except Terry, who that day had thrown an arm around Reno’s shoulder and walked with him.

  But even then, these walks were interrogations: where had Benteen been? Why was Benteen so slow? What were Reno’s orders? What were Benteen’s orders? What had Custer’s plan of attack been? Had Custer scouted the terrain? What did he know? Why hadn’t he waited for Gibbon’s column? Had he been discovered? When and how did Custer know?

  “I would like your permission to talk with your staff officers, major,” Terry said, always the soul of courtesy.

  “Of course, general. They will all have their reports.”

  Thus Reno often saw the general conferring with the living: with Benteen, with Varnum, with Weir, with French, with Hare and DeRudio and Wallace. Terry, the former lawyer turned military man, would not quit until he had a thorough knowledge of everything that had transpired those two terrible days.

  Surely some of them would tell Terry that because of Reno, men lived to fight another day; because of Reno, they were not drawn into the village, engulfed, and destroyed. Because of Reno, they were not flanked and destroyed from behind.

  Terry was sharing everything he learned with John Gibbon, the eagleeyed commander of the column from Montana, intended only hours earlier to be one of the jaws of Terry’s pincers.

  By the soft and melancholy evening of the twenty-eighth, the exhausted survivors had buried their dead in shallow graves that would not stay predators for long, but there was no time for more. Men nibbled at miserable field rations, beans and hardtack and bacon, drank coffee, and stared at misted horizons, half expecting the Sioux nation to reappear.

  Men longed for a raging storm that would wash this land, wash their bodies, wash away the memories engraved on their souls. Some were mad, some weeping, some in a daze, some delusional, driven beyond sanity by what they saw, and Reno knew that some part of his command would be found unfit for service. Some sang to themselves. But most stared silently. Spoken words were very scarce that long June twilight.

  The Second Infantry was improvising litters and guarding the field. Each of the wounded would have to be carried to the Far West, Captain Marsh’s riverboat that would ascend the Bighorn as far as it would be safe to do so. The world awaited the awful news, which would arrive just in time for the hundredth birthday of the Republic. No time. Terry’s task was not done. There was a war on, and the hostiles had to be subdued. The Seventh would continue to fight, and its death toll would not prevent it from more service in the field.

  The staff officers of the Second Cavalry and Second Infantry clung to their own commands, and did not visit with the survivors, as if the remaining men of the Seventh might disturb their dreams or contaminate their vision. Reno had moved his base away from the hilltop and to the south—but still up above the valley of death—and as the twilight thickened his command collected there, each lost in a desolation beyond anything they had ever endured.

  Reno was edgy. There might be criticism. He knew well that the Seventh had been torn into factions by Custer and those who scorned him, and he knew that division would reappear worse than before, would tear at him. He was the commander of the Seventh now, for a while, while it remained in the field. And he would take the heat when senior officers, and Congress, and the president, inquired into every detail of what had transpired, and he would tell them that he was proud of everything he had done on that field of fire.

  Were the men grateful? Undoubtedly. They were alive, drawing breath. Their close friends were gone forever. Perhaps they would support him. Would his officers? What would French and Hare and Wallace and Moylan say? Godfrey? DeRudio?

  He lit a panatela, puffed twice, and threw it away. He paced the flat where his battered companies lay about in utter silence, stalked through twilight and then dusk.

  A few enlisted men smiled. None dared talk to him because they couldn’t without their sergeant’s permission. But no rule prevented a smile as they sat there. And some did smile, a greeting filled with thanksgiving and appreciation.

  “God bless you, sir,” said one.

  Heartened, Reno returned to his simple field tent and pulled out a pad of notepaper. It was time to write his report.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  RENO HEARD ABOUT THE PETITION FROM BENTEEN.

  “The sergeants are getting up a petition among the enlisted men. It seems they want the president to raise you to Custer’s rank, and me to your rank, and have us command the Seventh.”

  “I am honored,” Reno said.

  “Well don’t be. It’s humbug. Neither Sherman nor Sheridan will go along with it. Half those men can’t sign their own names anyway.”

  The major was touched. Some of the men in the command, especially the sergeants, knew that their lives had been preserved by Reno and Benteen, and that the Seventh might well have been demolished entirely if it had been in other hands. It was plain enough: if Reno had continued his charge he and his battalion would have been wiped out, like Custer. And then the triumphant warriors would have destroyed Benteen for good measure, and made off with the pack train, with all its ammunition. So they were doing what little an enlisted man could do.

  They were all busy: usable debris from the village and the hilltop defense was being burned to render it useless. Officers were recording the dead and the injured, or running scouts far and wide, to prevent more tr
ouble. At last Reno attempted a muster to determine his actual casualties. Even then, with all the first sergeants in Custer’s command dead, he could not be sure. But he reckoned 260 dead, 52 wounded. The Seventh had been cut in half.

  The wounded posed a dilemma. They could not be carried for more than short distances even by six or eight men handling a blanket. But Gibbon’s infantry officers were solving the problem, building litters from lodgepoles and horsehide peeled off of dead mounts. These could be hung from packsaddles between mules, and the wounded moved in relative comfort, without exhausting the cavalrymen.

  General Terry dispatched couriers to find the Far West and report to Captain Marsh that the boat would be carrying many wounded and should be prepared to receive them. Then, without further waiting, he put the battered column into motion late on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth day of June, and it walked and dreamed and stumbled its way north from the fields of blood, leaving behind friends and colleagues.

  Tenderly, they led the valiant Comanche, sole survivor of the slaughter, in their midst, with great veneration and a wreath of wildflowers over its mane. Heaped upon the brow of that noble horse was the honor and glory of the Seventh Cavalry.

  The low sun glared through a summer haze, and men’s minds were lost upon distant shoals. A few turned back to look to the toothed and shadowed hills, and saw only flights of crows, while others discerned ghostly images in the haze, spirits of the dead, beginning their long and lonely walk through the land of ever-midnight.

  Reno, now under the command of Colonel Gibbon, rode in solitude. He had not been a sociable man since Mary Hannah’s death, and now he surrounded himself with invisible walls. The officers left him alone. He did not feel the hero, but he did hope for the command of the regiment.

  All his adult life he had been a soldier; the army was his home and his refuge. The esteem of his colleagues was his food and wine. The soldier’s ways were the ways of his heart, second nature now. The record he wrote for himself during the war of secession had been gallant and won him accolades from such men as Generals Sherman and Sheridan. Now, he knew his professional skill had spared the command further disaster. He felt proud. He had been a good and savvy soldier.

  The regiment was actually still under the command of Colonel Samuel Sturgis, whose son, that bright light, Lieutenant James G. Sturgis, lay unidentified, somewhere near Custer. But Sam Sturgis was not a field commander, and out in the field the regiment would be in the hands of the next ranking officer, who might be himself if he were promoted for gallantry here. Maybe out of all this grief that would come to him.

  At first he avoided thinking such things, but the sergeants certainly were, and the petition they were getting up addressed the issue, and so he too thought about a promotion as the weary column toiled down the Little Bighorn River.

  Reno was invited to ride beside General Terry.

  “Pull along beside me, major. I’ve been preparing dispatches about all this sad business. Here’s what I plan to convey in confidence to General Sheridan. As far as I can untangle all this, I believe George Custer labored under the idea that the Indians would scatter, and so divided his command to round them up before they did, and attacked before getting his men up. The result was destruction by detail … . That’s what I’ll say for the moment. You’re the senior surviving officer and I do not yet have your report, which I trust you are working on. Have you anything to add or subtract?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you endorse this view?”

  Major Reno picked his words carefully. “Sir, George Custer fought gallantly according to his lights.”

  Terry smiled. “You are a gentleman as well as an officer.”

  Reno fell back to his regiment feeling that there was more to the meeting than sharing the contents of a dispatch. And he felt he had successfully negotiated some shoals. The old divisions within the command were common gossip, especially the estrangement of Custer and Benteen.

  Gibbon, discovering that the wounded rested comfortably in their litters, pushed north deep into that June evening, wanting to make time. The entire command still faced the summer’s business of finding the hostiles and subduing them and bringing them to their reserves, and the disaster at the Little Bighorn did not alter the purpose or intention of the columns.

  They reached the Far West late in the night, having been guided by scouts who knew how to traverse the stygian darkness. The vessel was emblazoned with light to show the way. The amazing Captain Marsh had pushed the shallow-draft boat to the absolute limit of navigation at the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn Rivers, and there he waited and prepared for his suffering passengers.

  By lamplight, Reno discovered that the rivermen and the infantry guarding the boat had cut bountiful native grasses and laid them tenderly over the deck to receive the wounded, and in short order these suffering men were settled on the deck of the steamer, given better food and medical attention than they had in the field, and were comforted. Somehow the shadowed white boat lying in placid and shimmering waters seemed like a home to them all, an outpost of the world they had come from, with glass in its windows, railings around the decks, unseen flags hanging from masts that probed the night sky.

  General Terry would go with them. Reno and the Seventh would remain with Gibbon’s column and make their way to the Yellowstone, and a bivouac where they could be refitted for combat.

  The next noon, after those troopers had been settled as gently as possible on that deck and Terry’s staff was stowed aboard, the general turned to Marsh, and spoke with gravity: “Captain, you’re about to start on a trip with fifty-two wounded men aboard. This is a bad river to navigate and accidents are likely to happen. I ask of you that you use all of your skills, all of the caution you possess, to make the journey safely. Captain, you have here the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier here who’s suffering from wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder.”

  Major Reno listened quietly. He concurred with Terry in ways he could never give voice to. He shook hands with the general and hastened down the gangway to the grassy shore.

  Then they were off. Black smoke billowed from the twin stacks of the riverboat; it shuddered and the great wood and strap-iron paddle splashed deep into the flowing river. The boat would be going with the current, which would speed its passage but make maneuvering more difficult and dangerous.

  The remnant of the Seventh quietly watched the riverboat chatter and thump away, round a bend and vanish, until only the smoke from its chimneys announced its distant passage. An odd quiet hung in the air. With the Far West out of sight, the wilderness closed in again, and men searched horizons warily for signs of the hostiles.

  Gibbon’s adjutant arrived: “Sir, Colonel Gibbon desires that you mount your column at once; we will cover all the ground we can for the Yellowstone.”

  Reno passed word along, and he watched his weary, grubby men mount their horses and line them up.

  That evening, after they had bivouacked in a wooded flat on the Bighorn River, Benteen sought Reno in his tent.

  “They’ve entrusted it to me,” he said, handing a document to the major.

  It was the enlisted men’s petition. Reno pulled on his spectacles and studied it. It was addressed to His Excellency the President and the Honorable Representatives of the United States.

  Gentlemen:

  We the enlisted men the survivors of the battle on the Height of the Little Big Horn River, on the 25th and 26th of June 1876, of the Seventh Regiment of Cavalry who subscribe our names to this petition do most earnestly solicit the President and Representatives of our Country, that the vacancies among the Commissioned Officers of our Regiment, made by the slaughter of our brave, heroic, now lamented Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, and the other noble dead Commissioned Officers of our Regiment who fell close by him on the bloody field, daring the savage demons to the last, be filled by the Officers of our Regiment only. That Major M. A. Reno, be our Lieutenant Col
onel vice Custer, killed: Captain F.W. Benteen our Major vice Reno, promoted. The other vacancies to be filled by officers of the Regiment by seniority. Your petitioners know this to be contrary to the established rule of promotion, but prayerfully solicit a deviation from the usual rule in this case, as it will be conferring a bravely fought for and justly merited promotion on officers who by their bravery, coolness and decision on the 25th and 26th of June 1876, saved the lives of every man now living in the Seventh Cavalry who participated in the battle, one of the most bloody on record and one that would have ended with the loss of life of every officer and enlisted man on the field only for the position taken by Major Reno, which we held with bitter tenacity against fearful odds to the last …

  Marcus Reno was never so moved. He peered up at Benteen. “This is one of those things a soldier never forgets, never in all of his days, a remembrance that will be with me when I go to my grave. A gift from the regiment.”

  “They wanted to send it with Terry, but didn’t get it signed until now. There are two hundred thirty-six signatures.”

  “I am honored to accept it. Tell them I will keep it close upon my person and dispatch it at Fort Pease. And, captain, extend to them my personal, profound gratitude and esteem. They are brave men, every one.”

  PART THREE

  1876

  Being an Account of Reno’s Fall from Grace

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  RENO AND HIS BATTERED SEVENTH CAVALRY WERE CAMPED ON THE Yellowstone, licking wounds, awaiting reinforcements and provisioning, along with General Terry’s command and the Montana Column under Colonel Gibbon. The two steamers plying the river, the Far West and the Josephine, were shuttling between the bivouac and Fort Abraham Lincoln, bringing men and supplies.