An Obituary for Major Reno

by Richard S. Wheeler

  In that bureau, the case would come under the scrutiny of Judge Advocate General W. M. Dunn and Major Henry Goodfellow. In his mind’s eye, sometimes, Reno saw both officers reviewing the material kindly, an eye upon Reno’s long military career, which now spanned almost twenty-eight years from his arrival at West Point, and recommending something modest, like a year at half pay and a brief suspension.

  As the days of winter ticked by at Fort Meade, Reno grew more and more confident. Spring was just around the corner. Nothing terrible had befallen him and nothing would. Sherman himself had always admired Reno and thought well of him as a cavalry officer. Surely it would all smooth over.

  He heard rumors that all would be well and that was all he needed; on March 16, with winter ebbing and the sun burning holes in the snow, he wired the secretary of war rescinding his request to resign if he should face dismissal.

  On March 17, 1880, the adjutant general’s office issued the verdict: “By direction of the Secretary of War, the sentence in the case of Marcus A. Reno, Seventh Cavalry, will take effect April 1, 1880, from which date he will cease to be an officer of the army.”

  Reno learned of it on March 18, through a wire delivered by the adjutant.

  Out of the army.

  It hit him in the stomach. He read the flimsy, not believing it. Out of the army after twenty-eight years. It was the only life he had ever had.

  He stared out of the window upon the greening sward of the unfinished post, the rows of austere white buildings surrounding the parade. Mysterious, bleak Bear Butte loomed not far away, the holy place of the Sioux. The fort was the intruder in an alien land.

  He pulled a bottle off a shelf and poured himself a good dollop of bourbon in a tumbler, and downed it neat. It scolded its way into his belly and spread heat through him. Anger at first, fear, desolation, and ultimately loneliness. If he were separated from the only society he had ever known, the company of his fellow officers, he would be rudderless. He had always been solitary but still a part of a band of brothers, and now the brothers were abandoning him.

  He wondered whether there was any hope of reversing the decision, and knew he wouldn’t know until he saw the review papers. There would be assents or dissents all the way up the chain of command, agreeing or disagreeing with the court-martial judges. He would examine each. He would, if there was any hope at all, fight to reinstate himself. He was a cavalry major in the army and intended to stay a major in the army.

  He stepped into a fine spring morning, the air mild, the earth moist and soft and pungent in the coy sun. He could hardly remember so fine a morning. A few rotting snowbanks clung to the north sides of buildings. A mist of green faintly covered the brown turf. A breeze lifted the United States flag on its staff, and fluttered the regimental colors.

  He saw details at work, men in blue fatigues heading for the horse barns, policing the grounds, distributing firewood, forming into columns under the lash of gravel-voiced sergeants. He felt the pulse and rhythm of the fort ripple through him, the familiar chores, the drills, the hastening men, the indolent men, the bachelor men. No woman met his eyes and none would be visible until later, when the post store opened. He studied Fort Meade’s guard house, a small, neat building, one of the first erected, and he wondered who was within, and why, and for how long.

  He stood on his veranda, while fellow officers hastened by with averted eyes. The news must have careened through the post at once, maybe ahead of the moment Lieutenant Garlington, Sturgis’ adjutant, handed him the wire. He waved casually; no man waved back.

  He had been a pariah before, during his close quarters arrest; now he was an outcast. Colonel Sturgis managed never to encounter Reno at all. He had the freedom of the Officers’ Club, and found the atmosphere so oppressive and hostile that he did not go there for a drink or billiards or talk. Only Benteen had ignored the invisible wall and had visited with the major on occasion. But no man stopped at Reno’s quarters to say hello. There were no additional orders or requirements. He was there until April 1, and then he would leave. He had no duties and no liberties.

  The rest of March dragged by. Through Garlington Reno requested copies of the judgments of those who had affirmed the sentence of the court.

  “It will take some while, major. Maybe you should tell us where to send them,” Garlington replied.

  Reno didn’t know. Harrisburg, probably. The Lochiel once again, for all he knew. The farm and the house on Front Street were still yielding rents; he might barely manage to live in the hotel.

  Then the first day of April arrived, and Marcus Reno was no longer a major in the United States Army. That day he would surrender his quarters, again to the adjutant, and depart. He pulled his three uniforms out of the armoire and packed them in a steamer trunk, along with the rest of his clothing, save for what he would carry in a black pigskin valise. He could no longer wear the clothing of a United States Army officer. He owned two suits, one gray, one black, and chose the gray. It fit tightly; he had put girth on his waist during his tour at Fort Meade. It would have to do. He stood before a looking glass, finding not a different man but an invisible one. As a major he was visible; now he looked no different from tens of thousands of other somewhat corpulent men who wore anonymous wrinkled suits and black derbies and went about their private business.

  He intended to hire Fanshawe’s rig to take him to Deadwood, and from there a stagecoach to the rails, and from there a long, rocking, tiring trip east. Beyond that the future was a blank. He had only one profession, and was trained in no other. But things weren’t entirely bad: Mary Hannah’s estate still sustained him to some degree. Cash wasn’t the immediate problem.

  He tugged at his collar, filled his flask, and slipped it into the bosom of his gray suit coat, stuffed a handful of panatelas into a breast pocket, and closed the brass-chased steamer trunk. Nothing of himself or his effects remained. He traveled light. A veteran army officer usually traveled light.

  He headed through the door and toward the post sutler’s store, where he could purchase a ride, but Frederick Benteen intercepted him.

  “Marcus, I’ve had a carriage harnessed. I’ll take you to Deadwood.”

  “That would be good, Fred. Are you sure … ?”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  Moments later, Benteen pulled up before Reno’s quarters, and the pair loaded the steamer trunk and valise into the boot of the carriage.

  “You got anything else to do?” Benteen asked.

  “Tell Garlington,” Reno said.

  He knocked on Garlington’s door, and Garlington opened.

  “I’m out,” he said. “Here’s the key.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Reno.”

  The door closed.

  Reno stepped into the swaying black buggy, and Benteen flapped the reins over the croup of the dray.

  A stab of anguish, terrible and knife-edged, shot through him, feeling so shocking that he could not bear to let his old friend see his face, so he turned aside, watched the troops at drill, watched the details at work, watched them grow smaller and smaller until they were invisible, and there was only the anonymous road.

  “It’s a hell of a fine day,” Reno said, and fired up a stogy.

  PART FOUR

  1889

  Being an Account of the Correspondent’s Quest

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE SHEER MASS OF OFFICIAL MATERIAL JOSEPH RICHLER LATHERED amazed him. For weeks he had dug into congressional files, pestered the Office of Military Justice, badgered congressmen, and bothered Reno’s last attorney, Scott Lord.

  Marcus Reno had not quit trying to return to the army after he was ejected. Before it was over, he had exhausted his inheritance, borrowed from that of his son, and died in penury, all because he wanted what he believed to be justice.

  Richler, dogged reporter that he was, had dug deep, and now he had the story of a life, but in the form of starchy correspondence, private memos, terse marginal notes, and carefully censored document
s with portions redacted.

  He asked himself why he did it, apart from a promise he had made weeks before to a dying man. He had no answer. He didn’t even like the man. But there were reasons. Some of it was his curiosity. Did Reno deserve his fate? Some of it was the contradiction: how could a man like Reno be so despised, have so many friends, be a loner, be sociable, conduct himself crudely, win the love of more than one woman, act recklessly, be accused of excessive prudence, scorn the opinion of others, yet curry every favorable notice he could? It was not enough to say Marcus Reno was a man of contradiction. He was plainly an enigma, a mystery, perhaps unfathomable.

  So the reporter found himself, with so many others, liking and disliking Reno, wanting him to win his honor back, guessing he wouldn’t, wishing Reno would have repented just a little along the way, thinking his critics were right, thinking his critics were scandalous and scurrilous.

  It was too much to comprehend.

  Richler knew he would write that obituary one way or another, write the most penetrating study he could manage, and he knew the Herald would feature it prominently. Even now, 1889, the year of the major’s death, anything new about Reno, or Custer, or the Little Bighorn, would excite public fascination.

  It wasn’t a task the newspaper had assigned him. He continued his day-to-day coverage of Washington and its politics, and he did it routinely. This was something else, an unscratched itch, a mass of questions without answers.

  He hardly knew where to begin, but at least this was not ancient history. Many of the survivors of the Little Bighorn lived. Many of the officers who knew Reno well still lived. But they were falling away fast, and Richler knew he could not delay long. If he wanted to redeem the honor of Major Marcus Reno, and he half-hoped he might, he would need to interview scores of men before their clocks reached midnight.

  Frederick Whittaker would not be among them. The novelist and accuser of Marcus Reno had died by his own hand in a bizarre manner. He had, over the years, gone half mad, embracing Spiritualism, becoming eccentric and starkly suspicious of everyone and everything. He had taken to carrying a revolver at all times, to defend himself against the ghostly legions of enemies stalking him.

  Then one May day, a few weeks after Reno’s death, Nadine spotted a story, clipped it, and handed it to Richler: Whittaker had stumbled on his stairway, caught his cane in the bannister, tumbled, and accidentally shot himself in the head. And so ended the career of the self-proclaimed “prosecutor of Major Reno.”

  “It fits,” he told her over supper.

  “How so, Joseph?”

  “The novelist, in his wild imaginings, thought Custer had been betrayed. By the end of Whittaker’s life, he thought everyone was betraying himself.”

  She smiled. Joe had an analytical mind, the sort that found connections in events. Baby dozed, so they could have a rare repast by themselves in their modest flat.

  “When are you going to write it?” she asked, toying with a napkin.

  “Not yet. I can’t fathom Reno. I don’t want to write until I do. Nothing about him makes sense.”

  “But the longer you wait …”

  “I’ve written the notice of his death, Nadine. The real summing up can wait. When it’s done, the Herald will publish something important, something worth a few columns, and not just a quick pass at a complex man.”

  “Did you like him, the time you saw him?”

  “How could anyone like Reno?”

  “I don’t think I would like him.”

  “I think I might have liked him some moments, but not others.”

  The baby squalled. She rose slowly, not wanting to be drawn away from the table and the husband she saw all too little of. Richler watched her go, his thin and unwell wife wrapped in gray, to see about an unwell infant. The doctors argued about what was wrong with her, and one diagnosis was as useless as the others.

  She lived through him; he brought her the only respite she had from humdrum domesticity in a cheap flat. He brought her the news, the gossip about famous men, the prestige and romance of being a correspondent for a great paper. He tried to share his days, his worries, his pursuits, with her.

  Sometimes she didn’t grasp the importance of a story or a man or a woman, and then he let it drop, let her do the dishes, stir a soup, change a diaper.

  Maybe someday she would want to join him; there were so many things he covered, from banquets to receptions to theater events, where she would be welcome. But she never had the wish, and that somehow disappointed him. She whiled away her life living vicariously through him. He sighed.

  The rolltop desk beckoned. He headed for his sanctuary in a corner of the parlor, a place she had learned to leave quite alone no matter how messy she thought it was. Here were his manila folders, jammed with papers and clippings and fair copies laboriously wrought from originals. He rolled up the oaken cover, settled into his creaking swivel chair, lit a kerosene lamp because the gaslight stretched too dim here for scholarly purposes, and set to work.

  This night he intended to string together, once and for all, the events that followed Reno’s dismissal from the cavalry.

  It seemed Reno had scarcely paused in Harrisburg before heading to Washington and the War Office to try to put his case in order. He had friends in Washington, better friends indeed than those within the Seventh, where the service rivalries and abrasions of lonely outposts had isolated Reno and finally turned him into an outcast.

  In Washington, apparently, he had begun the business of obtaining the entire body of court-martial records, including the opinions of the reviewers. He had, as well, presented himself as a native son of Illinois, and asked two of its congressional delegation to sponsor a bill restoring him as a cavalry major. Indeed, Representative James Singleton and Senator David Davis did place the private bill into consideration, and the committee chairmen swiftly requested records from the Department of War.

  Richler had copies of the court-martial material, and saw at once why Reno was brimming with optimism. General Terry and his judge advocate, a certain Major Barr, had recommended leniency, arguing that the punishment scarcely fitted the triviality of Reno’s offenses. General Sherman had agreed. But the top men in the Department of Military Justice had overruled the rest, and President Hayes had firmly sustained the dismissal.

  Reno’s initial efforts in Congress came to nothing; no bill was reported favorably out of committee in 1880, and there the case seemed to die.

  What was hurting Reno was not just this final collection of charges, but a string of them running back several years. And hurting him more, plainly, was that no congressman wished to be known as a supporter of a man who had dishonored womanhood with his unwanted attentions. That was the prickly, unspoken thing. Richler made a note of it.

  Reno was not a man to rest on his oars, so he had peppered the War Department for documents, commendations, citations, anything that might help his cause, and the department reluctantly supplied him with some, told him to consult congressional committees in possession of other documents.

  He had rented a flat on Indiana Avenue in Washington, from which entrenchment he could conduct his campaign. He wrote the new Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln, explaining that he had been done in by “prejudice entertained against me” emanating from the judge advocate general.

  That struck Richler as a reckless thing to say, and a mark against Reno. It was also a clue to the former major’s state of mind. He was seeing enemies and betrayals, just as the crazed novelist Whittaker was discovering enemies under every rosebush. But there was something dogged in Reno’s attack. This was a full assault, employing every person he could enroll in his cause, every scrap of paper, every argument he could muster.

  Plainly, it was costly. Reno had hired a fancy New York lawyer, Scott Lord, to shepherd his private bill through Congress and perhaps deal with the administration. He had done this, apparently, on the advice of Lyman Gilbert, who had declined to handle the matter. Richler wondered whether Re
no’s old friend, and his son Ross’s legal guardian, was dancing a slow two-step away from the notorious former major.

  So Reno had ventured to New York and found the welcome mat out at Lord, VanDyke and Lord—for a price, no doubt. Scott Lord was well situated to handle the case, being at once the brother-in-law of President Hayes, and at the same time a Democrat, able to deal with Hayes’ successor if the Democrats should win the election. They didn’t: Garfield won narrowly, only to succumb to an assassin’s bullets, and Reno found himself dealing with Chester Arthur, who had no military background. And also with Robert Todd Lincoln, son of another slain president, and a man not easy to persuade, judging from the correspondence in Richler’s files.

  Richler again studied the whole case, the repeated efforts to put Reno back into the cavalry, the bills offered in each session of Congress, the diligent and genuinely heartfelt efforts by Scott Lord, for a price, always a price, and saw how it all came to nothing.

  And how Reno began selling off large pieces of the estate, lots mostly, and borrowing money. What a remarkable thing, Richler thought: the man cared so much about honor that he was willing to impoverish himself. And did so.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  ALL THOSE EFFORTS TO REVERSE THE COURSE OF MILITARY JUSTICE came to nothing. All those efforts to have Congress enact a private bill, reinstating Marcus Reno, also came to nothing.

  And in the background, Libbie Custer, engaged and bitter, watched hawkishly over the reputation of her husband, quietly fought any effort to rehabilitate Reno, and wrote elegiac tributes to her dead warrior.

  Richler pored through packets of letters, studied official documents, examined Scott Lord’s very able pleadings—which were largely based on technicalities—and knew that he was examining a lost cause. Reno’s reputation had been buried long before his body, and nothing short of divine intervention could resuscitate it. Richler felt a certain pity for the man. Reno had been stable enough before the Little Bighorn; indeed, far more stable than most officers, including Custer.