He arrived at Fort Harker early on the morning of July 19 and learned that Libbie had been sent safely to Fort Riley. He reported to Colonel Smith and asked permission to continue east. Smith, half-asleep and not knowing whether Custer was operating on orders from Sherman, allowed him to take the first morning train.
Several hours later George was reunited with Libbie. She closed her memoir, Tenting on the Plains, with a description of the scene, echoing the romance of her reunion with George in Richmond at the end of the Civil War:
After days of such gloom, my leaden heart one morning quickened its beats at an unusual sound—the clank of a saber on our gallery and with it the quick, springing steps of feet, unlike the quiet infantry around us. The door, behind which I paced uneasily, opened, and with a flood of sunshine that poured in, came a vision far brighter than even the brilliant Kansas sun. There, before me, blithe and buoyant, stood my husband! In an instant, every moment of the preceding months was obliterated. What had I to ask more?. . . There was in that summer of 1867 one long, perfect day.45
But at the end of the “long, perfect day,” George Custer received some alarming news. Colonel Smith had made inquiries regarding Custer’s journey and, finding he had no orders to leave his command at Fort Wallace, had Custer placed under arrest.
The Custer court-martial convened September 15 at Fort Leavenworth. The prosecutor was Captain Robert Chandler, judge advocate. Custer was defended by a West Point classmate, Captain Charles C. Parsons.46 The presiding officer was Colonel William Hoffman, an 1829 Academy grad, and seven other officers served on the court, including another Custer classmate, Captain Stephen Lyford.
Custer faced three charges with eight specifications, most importantly conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline, and absence without leave from his command. Conduct prejudicial included marching his men on “private business” (his search for Libbie). He was also taken to task for not returning for the bodies of the men killed near Downer’s Station or pursuing the Indians who killed them.47
Captain Robert M. West raised the additional matter of shooting deserters without a trial, since Charles Johnson, the man who had died from the wounds he received while being apprehended, had served in his company. He also said the prisoners were treated cruelly, being denied water in the heat and forced to ride tied up in rough wagons. Custer believed Hancock had prompted West to press this part of the case in order to shift attention from the fact that the Indian campaign had been a failure.
Hancock—known as “the Superb” for his Civil War exploits—was having trouble adapting to Plains warfare. The Indian Commission had held hearings at Fort Leavenworth shortly before Custer’s court-martial, and most of the testimony was negative. “It would have been far better for the interests of all concerned had [Hancock] never entered the Indian country with his soldiers,” Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas Murphy assessed. “Indians who at the time he got into the country were peaceable and well disposed towards the whites, are now fleeing with their women and children, no one knows whither, and what the final result will be is doubtful.”48 Given this backdrop, Custer and those sympathetic to his case thought he was being used as a scapegoat.
Custer pleaded not guilty to all charges and specifications, and the trial commenced. Many witnesses were called, including the officers involved in the events (including Tom Custer), some of the enlisted men, and the surgeon who treated the wounded men (who backed Custer’s story). Captain West, a spree drinker, was considered too volatile to be an effective witness, and the prosecution kept him off the stand. Generally the case came down less to the facts, on which many agreed, and more to whether Custer’s actions were justifiable.
Custer never took the stand but submitted a lengthy written statement, which sought to lend reasonable context to what happened. He argued he was out on the frontier commanding a relatively small force, unsupported by other units, with hostile Indians on the warpath. His command had already suffered many desertions, and a scheme was afoot for a mass break of perhaps a third of his force. Of the thirteen men who deserted on the day in question, over half got away. When the pursuers neared the remaining six, three of them dismounted and raised their carbines at them—actions not unusual in these cases, and meriting the use of deadly force in return. Three were wounded in the ensuing shootout, one seriously. The wounded were taken in wagons as opposed to ambulances because the ambulances were unserviceable. If faced with another such desertion, Custer said he would do the same thing. His determined action stopped desertions from the unit, at least for the time being.
From Custer’s point of view, a “shoot to kill” order made sense under the circumstances. Peacetime executions for desertion were outlawed in 1830, but Custer’s defense produced orders, including from General Hancock, saying if men were caught in the act of deserting to “shoot them down when taken.”49 As for the charge of cruelty, it had to be put in context. This was still the era where being “branded a deserter” was not just a figure of speech. Tattooing and branding were legal forms of punishment until 1872—including being branded with the entire word “deserter.”50 The men could get over a bumpy wagon ride.
Custer also maintained that he was never absent without leave from his unit; he acted on his own discretion when temporarily without orders. And his team raised technical objections to the composition of the court, noting that four of its members were inferior to him in rank and another was a commissary officer he had censured for corruption.51 Equally problematic, Custer pointed out that Captain Lyford was one of his classmates and a close friend.
On September 26 Custer wrote with confidence, “The prosecution have examined about half their witnesses, including the most important. I would not hesitate to let my case go to the court on the evidence addressed by the prosecution. . . . Everything is working charmingly.”52 But Custer was in more trouble than he thought. The monthlong trial drew to a close on October 11, and after deliberating a few hours the court returned its verdict. Custer was found guilty on almost all the charges and specifications, except for those related to intentional cruelty. However, the court attached no criminality to his actions, and Custer was sentenced to be suspended from rank, command, and pay for one year.
Some, such as General Grant, thought Custer got off easy. Others, such as Sheridan, believed that he never should have been brought to trial. Libbie believed “the sentence is as unjust as possible. Autie merits acquittal.”53 For George himself, it was the low point in his career. With the 7th Cavalry drawn up in parade, Custer had to sit on horseback before the command as the orders of the court were read. He sat stiffly, showing no emotion, looking out at the horizon. He was a long way from the cheers of the Grand Review in Washington two and a half years earlier.
PART FIVE
REDEMPTION
The Seventh U.S. Cavalry Charging in Black Kettle’s Village at Daylight (Battle of Washita), from Harper’s Weekly, December 19, 1868.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WASHITA
Custer met the guilty verdicts with a brave face, but privately he was fuming. “All with whom I have conversed decree the sentence unjustly severe,” he wrote. “It is not sustained by the evidence.” But he asked Sheridan not to try to review the case or lessen the sentence, “as I will not accept it.”1 Libbie dismissed the affair as “nothing but a plan of persecution for Autie.”2
The court-martial was another blow to Custer’s reputation. One Michigan paper said that the trial “very materially changes our opinion of the man” and that it was “sufficient in itself to justify the dismissal of any officer.”3 Custer’s affidavit in defense was summarized and reprinted in various papers, but he did not have a deep well of support. His excesses in Texas in 1865 and foray into politics in 1866 had alienated many editors and politicians on both sides of the political divide who otherwise might have spoken up in his defense.
Sheridan, who took over command of the Department of Missouri from Hancock just as Custer’s
trial began, remained an important and durable Custer ally. He graciously let George and Libbie use his quarters at Fort Leavenworth while he was on leave, and the couple settled in for the winter.
“I have nothing to do but to kill time,” George wrote, “which I manage to do quite successfully.”4 It hardly seemed like punishment. Libbie’s cousin Rebecca Richmond, who visited the couple during this period, wrote in her diary that their time was taken up with singing, games, hunting, theater, hops, and parties.5 A typical entry, from January 3, 1868, read, “Armstrong and Libbie, Charles, Mary and I rode over to town this morning in the flanigan [carriage]. A bright, beautiful day but a trifle cooler than yesterday. . . . Sang as we rode, also ate an apple which was presented by an outrider, a cavalryman.” But then Rebecca notes, “This evening just before retreat, Gen’l Custer was arrested by two officers from town on a charge of murder.”6
Shooting the deserters still came back to haunt Custer. Captain West pressed the state of Kansas to charge Custer and William W. Cooke for the murder of Charles Johnson, the deserter who had been shot in the head and later died. Custer was implicated as an accomplice for giving the order to shoot and denying medical care afterward. Cooke was charged with pulling the trigger.
The case was initially dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, since the incident took place in Nebraska. But a second attempt led to a court hearing at Fort Leavenworth, including testimony from Clement Willis, one of the deserters. As in the court-martial, however, witnesses were vague or conflicting on key aspects of the events, and one newspaper concluded that “there appeared little doubt but the officers would be acquitted.”7 On January 18 the judge dismissed the charges for lack of sufficient evidence.8 Custer retaliated by having West brought up on charges of drunkenness, garnering him a two-month suspension.
After the winter at Fort Leavenworth, the Custers went back to Monroe, where George spent time writing, fishing, tending to his horses, and on other pursuits. Meanwhile, after failing to bring about a military solution to the troubles on the Plains, the government sent a peace commission to try negotiating. Members of the commission included, among others, General Sherman, Brigadier General Alfred Terry, and old Indian fighter General William S. Harney, now retired, who had become an advocate for fair play with the tribes.9
In October 1867 at Medicine Lodge River, the commissioners met with the leaders of many of the southern Plains tribes, including Black Kettle of the Cheyenne, Satanta or White Bear of the Kiowa, and Ten Bears of the Comanche. The peace delegates opened with an apology for the burning of the village at Pawnee Fork that started Hancock’s campaign, an implicit admission that the entire effort had been a mistake. The Indians were willing to deal, and tribal leaders agreed to move south of the Arkansas River and to end raids into Kansas and other settled areas. This would clear the main route west for railroads and settlements. They also agreed to move onto reservation lands in exchange for food, periodic payments, guns and ammunition for hunting, and other forms of support. The series of agreements was known collectively as the Medicine Lodge Treaty.
Peace was made with the northern Plains tribes under the Treaty of Fort Laramie in February 1868. Under this agreement the forts along the Bozeman Trail were abandoned, and whites were banned from the Power River country. The government established the Great Sioux Reservation, which comprised all the land west of the Missouri River in the southern part of the Dakota Territory, including the Black Hills. In addition, hunting lands were reserved for the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho in Wyoming, Montana, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado. It was a victory for Red Cloud, who achieved all his war objectives—but only if both sides honored the treaty.
Hopes for a peaceful year on the Plains began to wilt as the new grass grew. Headlines in the summer told of Indian raids, rapes, kidnappings, burnings, scalpings, mutilations, and attacks on wagon trains and settlers. A lieutenant and five men from Fort Larned were ambushed and killed. The government responded by holding back the arms and ammunition promised to the Indians for hunting; the Indians saw this as a betrayal. “The hope which was cherished,” the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph opined, “that difficulties with the Indians on the Plains would be avoided during the present year, has proved delusive. The savage fondness for plunder and scalps has again been displayed. . . . It is as difficult for the bold spirits of the predatory tribes to restrain their murderous proclivities as it is for the hardened professional criminals of civilized life to become honest men.”10
One attack that gained national attention took place in October. Seventy-five Indians waylaid a large wagon train along the Arkansas River, heading from Kansas to Colorado. Four wagons were captured, some of the others were lit with flaming arrows, and the ox teams were run off. The Indian band swelled to around two hundred warriors, and a weeklong siege commenced. Eventually soldiers arrived and the Indians withdrew, but they took with them twenty-year-old Clara, wife of settler Richard Blinn, and their two-year-old son, Willie. A note found four miles away read, “Dear Dick, Willie and I are prisoners. They are going to keep us. If you live, save us if you can.”
Sheridan said that Clara was kept alive “to gratify the brutal lust of the chief, Satanta.” Satanta, a signatory of the Medicine Lodge Treaty, was a noted Kiowa warrior with a dramatic flair. During the 1867 campaign, Hancock had been so impressed with the chief after meeting with him that he gave him a U.S. Army jacket with the rank of major general, a yellow sash, and plumed hat. A month later Satanta’s men raided Fort Dodge and drove off the garrison’s horses; the chief raised the plumed hat as he rode away.11
In another, longer letter in November, Clara wrote that the Indians told her, “When the white men make peace we can go home.” She urged, “Do all you can for me. Write to the peace commissioners to make peace this fall. For our sakes do all you can and God will bless you. . . . I am as well as can be expected, but my baby is very weak.”12 The letter was sent to Colonel William B. Hazen of the 38th Infantry regiment, on special Indian duty at Fort Cobb. (This was the same Hazen who had arrested Cadet Custer in June 1861 for the fistfight incident the day before graduation.) He was involved in negotiations for Clara’s release; the deal at that point stood at five ponies for the woman and her son. He forwarded the letter to Sherman, who sent it to the secretary of war, who used it to lobby Congress to keep up the fight against the Indians.
To many Americans the continued violence on the Plains seemed to violate the letter and spirit of the peace treaties. However, that was open to interpretation. Indians understood treaties differently than whites, and some bands could rightly claim not to be party to agreements they did not sign, even if others in their tribe did. And there were generational conflicts in the bands that agreed to the terms. The young men with something to prove were vexed by the old chiefs telling them to abandon the ways of the warrior. “The Indians feel that they are rich when at war and poor while at peace,” noted Theodore R. Davis, who rode with Custer on the Hancock expedition. “There are many old chiefs who prefer peace, but the young men are invariably for war. The chiefs cannot control the ‘bucks,’ who take the war-path as naturally as the quail does the bushes or the young ducks to the sedge.”13
Such nuances did not impress General Sherman, who wrote to Secretary of War John M. Schofield, “All the Cheyennes & Arapahoes are now at war. Admitting that some of them have not done acts of murder, rape, etc., still they have not restrained those who have; nor have they on demand given up the criminals as they agreed to do. The treaty made at Medicine Lodge is, therefore, already broken by them.” Sherman said that “after a reasonable time given for the innocent to withdraw, I will solicit an order from the President declaring all Indians who remain outside of their lawful reservations to be outlaws, and commanding all people—soldiers & citizens—to proceed against them as such.”14
After the failure of Hancock’s wandering expedition the previous year, the Army experimented with other tactics. At the end of the summer of 1868, Sheridan organ
ized a fifty-four-man mobile force of experienced frontiersmen commanded by brevet Colonel George A. Forsyth, his former chief of staff during the Shenandoah Valley campaign. The concept was to send out a light mobile force without baggage trains, carrying their supplies and ammunition with them, to match the Indians’ mobility and fight them in their own manner.15 But this increased mobility came at the expense of firepower; even if Forsyth found the Indians, his men could not bring on a decisive fight.
In any case, they did not have to track down the enemy—the Indians came looking for them. On September 17, after two weeks in the field, Forsyth’s group was waylaid on an island in the Arikaree River in Colorado by Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under the command of Roman Nose. The Army troops were quickly pinned down and surrounded. They fought a three-day siege, eating meat from their fallen horses and drinking muddy river water. By the time a relief party arrived, they had suffered six men killed (one of them, Beecher, gave his name to the island) and fifteen wounded. Forsyth was severely wounded and reported dead, but he recovered. The Indians lost an estimated ten to thirty, including Roman Nose, who died charging the soldiers on horseback.16 Custer later called it “the greatest battle on the plains.”17 But other than killing Roman Nose, the Battle of Beecher Island only showed the limits of trying to fight Indian style.
So Sheridan turned to a new strategy. The Indians lacked the capacity and inclination to campaign in the winter. The signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty in October underscored the traditional pattern of Indian warfare, with intervals of peace in the winter followed by renewed activity once the grass reappeared in the late spring. In the summer of 1865, Major General Grenville M. Dodge laid out the logic of striking the Indians off-season, observing that the Indians on the warpath were “not making any provisions for winter; are not hunting, planting, laying in meat, or in any way providing for the future as they usually do. The consequence will be that we will in the fall and winter have them at great disadvantage.”18
The Real Custer Page 26