On July fifth he had completed his report to General Terry, writing at length about the disaster, and as a courtesy showed it to his staff who read it by the light of a lantern in his tent. They studied it with ill-concealed heat.
“Is that it? The whole report?” Benteen asked.
Reno nodded.
There was something malign about all this. The captains and lieutenants passed the pages back and forth, and then passed them to Reno abruptly.
“Anything wrong with it?”
Benteen responded. “It suits you.”
Reno dismissed them, wondering what sort of ill humor they were in. The dead. There was not a moment they weren’t all thinking about the dead on Custer’s hill, and those dead in Reno’s retreat and defense. He put it out of mind. There was no love lost between Reno and Benteen anyway, and if the captain didn’t like the report, too bad.
The report filled page after page with dense handwriting. He had wanted to write a report so definitive and complete that it would settle any issues that might erupt from the fight. He made a copy and sent an adjutant to the general’s headquarters tent with the report.
Terry soon summoned him.
“This is a most complete report, and I thank you, major. I have one question: did not your officers display gallantry in the course of this desperate struggle?”
“Most certainly, general. Especially Benteen. I believe I singled him out for gallantry.”
“I see,” he said. “Thank you.”
Reno was dismissed, and he hastened to his own tent, scratched a lucifer, lit his coal oil lamp, and reread his report. He had cited none of his fellow officers for conspicuous gallantry while under fire, though he did say that “during my fight with the Indians I had the heartiest support from officers and men, but the conspicuous services of Bvt. Col. F. W. Benteen I desire to call attention to especially, for if ever a soldier deserved recognition by his government for distinguished services, he certainly does.”
Irritably Reno snuffed the wick and settled into his bedroll. He had mentioned no other officer by name, and wasn’t persuaded that the others had done anything exceptional, though they no doubt thought they had. As for Weir, he had acted without orders and risked his company and the whole command.
He was damned if he would hand out a lot of malarkey.
That night, lying in his soldier’s bed—a piece of carpet on the hard ground—he relived the battle in his own mind: he had relived it every night since the fight, sometimes sipping from his flask, which he had refilled from riverboat stocks. He saw in his mind’s eye the advancing line of battle charging the village, the hundreds of enveloping warriors who were flanking him, his retreat to the woods, his envelopment there, and command to retreat to the bluff.
And that’s the part he saw in his mind’s eye over and over. The command disintegrated. His company commanders wrestled with panicked men. Their sergeants could impose no order. There was no rear guard. No lines formed to volley at the warriors driving into the flanks. He saw it over and over, and argued with himself in the darkness, with the strong smell of hot canvas permeating the air, and the hard earth under him. He asked himself what he might have done, what his company commanders and noncoms might have done, and he could come up with nothing different. The troops were flanked, the ford was in hostile hands, and the only way across that river took them up a steep and muddy bank.
The sipping failed to pluck the thorn from his heart, and he felt doomed to relive that disaster night upon night.
By day, he was busy restoring the command to fighting strength. Horses and men needed healing. He needed new arms, ammunition, field gear of all sorts, and especially horses and tack. By day, he did what he could do to defend the honor of the Seventh, which seemed to wallow in mortal embarrassment.
He nerved himself to write another, more emotional report directly to General Sheridan, dodging the protocol that requires that such things be sent up the chain of command. In it he took Colonel Gibbon to task for failing to pursue the village and crush it when Gibbon’s column was but a few miles from the battle field, and Gibbon’s own scouts had reported to him that the village was just ahead. If the campaign had failed, Reno wrote the general, it was because of Gibbon’s lassitude at a time when the great village was just pulling out, and within the reach of the Second Cavalry.
He hoped Sheridan would get the point: this failure to herd the hostiles into reservations could not be laid to the Seventh Cavalry alone.
Reno chafed under Colonel Gibbon; it showed in his every act, and he wanted it to show. His bloodied Seventh was being pushed about by an infantry commander whose column had not fired a shot in this desperate struggle. Gibbon, still fearing a surprise assault by hostiles, ordered Reno to send his scouts out wide, as vedettes, to protect the encampment on the Yellowstone, but Reno was so opposed to this, and so full of vitriol, that Gibbon finally had him arrested and charged him with insubordination.
General Terry dismissed the charges, but with a long, quiet stare at Major Reno.
“War and honor breed heat in soldiers, major,” Terry said. “We must rein ourselves in.”
Thus Reno was restored to his command of the Seventh Cavalry, and set about to rebuild his shattered regiment through those furiously hot days of August, when the command was choking on dust and horses constantly needed new pasture to recruit themselves.
The major wrote a report to General Stephen Vincent Benet, chief of ordnance, about the failure of the Springfield carbines. Six that he knew of in his battalion had failed in the heat of battle, in each case because the breech block failed to close, “and when the piece was discharged and the block thrown open, the head of the cartridge was pulled off and the cylinder remained in the chamber.”
While he didn’t know how many of the carbines failed Custer’s men, he did note that an Indian scout who had seen something of the Custer fight had spotted troopers kneeling over their carbines under fire, trying to get them to function; that afterward, burial details had found various instances where broken knife blades lay beside dead soldiers. It was a radical deficiency in the weapon, and one that needed immediate attention.
He sent that letter off with satisfaction: he loved the army, and wanted everything right, and wanted no soldier to be without a reliable piece in combat. He had acted diligently to alert the general command of a serious defect in the arms. Maybe some men would now be living if the defect had been known and corrected before the fight.
On July twenty-sixth, Terry moved the recuperating column to the mouth of the Rosebud where there would be fresh grass and where the command might soon engage the hostiles again. As the month of July slipped by, the command was resupplied, and a hundred and fifty recruits arrived on the Carroll to fill the depleted ranks of Reno’s Seventh Cavalry. But they were without mounts and green and knew little of riding, and until he could put them on horses, the Seventh would be part infantry. Still, those long lines of blue-bloused troops filled Reno with joy. He set about training them as cavalrymen, putting his top sergeants to work as instructors.
And still he relived that battle every night in his tent, when he was alone, when no one could dispute him. Under the starry skies over that arid prairie, he fought that fight, sometimes angrily, usually washing it away with whiskey.
Word came that the nation was in an uproar. The press, especially the powerful New York Herald, had front-paged the story, sent a man named O‘Kelly out to the camp on the Rosebud at enormous expense and effort, and was printing frequent dispatches about the battle, the morale of the troops—and more, the fractures and disputes among the officers, which O’Kelly had sniffed out and written up.
Still, that was of no concern to Reno. He was a soldier, and what appeared in newspapers was of little consequence.
It was called the Custer Massacre now, and every officer in the affair had come under national scrutiny. President Grant had called it a tragic blunder, entirely avoidable. General Sheridan had ascribed it to an exce
ss of zeal on Custer’s part. Still, there were those who wondered what Marcus Reno and seven-twelfths of the Seventh Cavalry were doing on a hilltop when Custer was meeting his doom.
Reno sure as hell had an answer to that: what they were doing was fighting for their lives against overwhelming odds. What they were doing was trying to reach Custer only to be driven back just before being engulfed.
All of this Reno ignored until one day O’Kelly showed him a letter published in a St. Paul newspaper, and the newspaper’s editorial response.
The letter was written by an old friend and West Point classmate of George Armstrong Custer, General Thomas Rosser, who had joined the Rebs and risen high in their army, and then had become a railroad man in the Twin Cities. After the war, Rosser and Custer had renewed the old friendship, refought the engagements, laughed, and slapped backs, no matter that during the conflict they had tried to kill each other.
The letter laid the defeat and the death of Custer’s whole command at the feet of Major Marcus Reno and his officers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JAMES O’KELLY OF THE NEW YORK HERALD WAITED WOLFISHLY WHILE Reno scanned the battered page torn from the St. Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer Press and Tribune. The newsman was fitted up for an elephant hunt, with a tweed hunting coat and canvas trousers and high-top boots and a huge slouch hat against the prairie sun.
The Confederate major general, Rosser, started civilly enough:
I am surprised and deeply mortified to see that our neighbor the Pioneer Press and Tribune, in its morning issue, has seen fit to adjudge the true, brave, and heroic Custer so harshly as to attribute his late terrible disaster with the Sioux Indians to reckless indiscretion …
But then the tone changed swiftly:
I feel that Custer would have succeeded had Reno, with all the reserve of seven companies, passed through and joined Custer after the first repulse. It is not safe at this distance, and in the absence of full details, to criticize too closely the conduct of any officer of his command, but I think it quite certain that Gen. Custer had agreed with Reno upon a place of junction in case of the repulse of either or both of the detachments, and instead of an effort being made by Reno for such a junction, as soon as he encountered heavy resistance he took refuge in the hills, and abandoned Custer and his gallant comrades to their fate.
Reno fought back his bile. Like most military commanders, he was used to being judged by armchair generals revising battles from the safety of their parlors, but Rosser was no armchair general.
“Well, what do you think?” O’Kelly asked.
“I think I will study on what General Rosser writes. I will also put it aside.”
Reno returned to the letter, while the reporter watched hawkishly, looking for a story.
It was expected when the expedition was sent out that Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were to do all the fighting, and superbly did a portion of them do it. As a soldier I would sooner today lie in the grave of Gen. Custer and his gallant comrades alone in that distant wilderness, that when the “last trumpet” sounds I could rise to judgment from my post of duty, than to live in the place of the survivors of the siege on the hills.
He read that, and again, and knew he too was a casualty of the battle of the Little Bighorn, for this was an attack on his honor, and the honor of his men, who would live in disgrace until the last trumpet, while only the gallant were lying in their graves. Rosser would rather lie in Custer’s grave than live in Reno’s shoes.
Marcus Reno felt the slap across his face.
He could correct the general’s facts. But there was no way any man could respond to the rest. His honor had been impugned. A soldier without honor was a walking dead man, a man to be shunned by the corps, by friends and strangers, by fellow officers.
Major Reno knew he must respond, and must do so with all civility, and with such power that Rosser, and those whom Rosser spoke for, would change their minds. Here was the crisis of his career, here was the cloud upon his life. Honor. Here was the deadly danger to an old soldier.
“Well?” asked O’Kelly.
“I will write General Rosser and supply you with a copy for publication,” Reno said. “May I keep this tear sheet?”
“Long as I don’t need it,” the reporter said. “When’ll you have this ready?”
“When I’m ready to release it. Good day, sir.”
Something boded ill about all this. The gallant Custer lay in his grave, and fault would be found. How casually Rosser had assumed that Reno could “pass through.” Pass through what? And where? And how? Reno half wished the sonofabitch had been in command and had seen for himself.
If Rosser wanted the honor of dying along with the whole regiment, he could have found it. And if he took the whole regiment with him to the lonely grave he thought so highly of, that would only mean that the Sioux and Cheyenne would have gotten another three or four hundred carbines, a few hundred saddled horses and mules, and an entire pack train loaded with ammunition, and would have been in fine shape to take on Gibbon’s and Crook’s columns.
Reno stuffed a long yellow cigar into his mouth and went back to work. He had 150 recruits to turn into soldiers in a few days, and then he would be off to war again. Each day brought fresh troops, horses, and supplies, along with several infantry companies under Nelson Miles and fresh officers drawn from numerous regiments. It was the busiest of times.
But after retreat that evening, he invited Benteen to his tent, turned up the wick on the coal oil lamp, and showed the Rosser piece to the captain.
“This attacks us both,” he said. “If Rosser wants to fight it out in the public prints, I will meet him in that venue. I would welcome your help.”
“Major, the dead Custer will have his partisans forever, and you won’t change a single mind. But let’s get it down for the record and hope sanity prevails.”
“I hate like hell to have to explain myself. I’m on the defensive.”
Benteen was studying the letter. “‘Pass through,”’ he said, and laughed. “Make a junction! Jesus Christ. He had me riding to hell and back looking for stray villages.”
“I can handle Rosser,” Reno said.
Benteen looked skeptical.
“But I would welcome support from you. An interview with the Herald man.”
“I will do it.”
Reno studied Rosser’s accusations for the next few days, and finally settled down to work at his small field desk, writing by the light of his coal oil lamp after the day’s drill was done.
The important thing was to confront Rosser’s notion that Custer had given orders to Reno to make a junction somewhere; something that Rosser had invented out of thin air.
“The only official orders I had from him were about five miles from the village, when Colonel Cooke, the regimental adjutant, gave me orders in these words: ‘Custer says to move at as rapid a gait as you think prudent, and to charge afterward, and you will be supported by the whole outfit.’
“No mention of any plan, no thought of junction, only the usual orders to the advance guard to attack at a charge.”
The major patiently described his charge, his retreat when he was about to be overwhelmed and surrounded, the woods fight, the ascent to the bluffs, the arrival of Benteen and McDougall, and the defense of the command on the hilltop.
“As you have the reputation of a soldier, and, if it is not undeserved, there is in you a spirit that will give you no rest until you have righted, as in you lies, the wrong that was perpetrated upon gallant men by your defense of Custer …”
He drafted a copy of his long letter, added the Rosser letter published in the St. Paul paper, and addressed a note to General Terry:
Sir,
I have the honor of submitting to you as a courtesy a public attack upon my conduct at the recent battle, penned by General Rosser, CSA, and my response.
Respectfully,
Marcus Reno, Major, Seventh Cavalry
With that, he sent his adjuta
nt off to General Terry’s headquarters tent, and turned down the wick of his lamp.
Not until the evening of the next early August day, did the commanding general summon Reno.
“Come in, come in,” he said, waving the major to a camp stool. The tent was large but spartan, its furnishings all business. The general had a folding cot. A single lamp, hung from a pole, threw light into the corners.
Alfred Terry had that quality about him of a polished lawyer, for that was what he had been before the Civil War gave him a new calling. Somehow he was at home not only on the field of battle, but in wars of rhetoric, and now he smiled at the major.
“I appreciate being made privy to this correspondence,” he said. “We’ve been so occupied with this campaign I hardly had a moment to study it all day. You know what generals do? We wrestle with quartermaster men. That is our primary occupation.”
Reno smiled. It was Terry’s way of putting Reno at ease.
“General Rosser is writing from a great distance,” Terry said. “He admits it. Your response is certainly appropriate and to the point.”
“I hope it changes his mind, sir.”
Terry shook his head. “This is the kind of battle I know something about, major, because of my years as an attorney. I’m afraid that you’ll discover that this won’t change his mind at all. When a man means to hang you, it doesn’t much matter what you say in your defense; he’ll take your statements and consider them more meat to pluck from your bones, pick them apart into fine slivers and then attack the details. You’d be most fortunate to change his mind one iota, and I thought I would just caution you that this tragedy is charged with high feeling, and men determined to hang you are going to find ways to do it, no matter what defense you raise.”
An Obituary for Major Reno Page 13