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March 30 - May 6, 2018
In the two years since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Custer had come to long for the battlefield. Only amid the smoke, blood, and confusion of war had his fidgety and ambitious mind found peace.
Like many Americans, I first learned about George Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn not in school but at the movies. For me, a child of the Vietnam War era, Custer was the deranged maniac of Little Big Man. For those of my parents’ generation, who grew up during World War II, Custer was the noble hero played by Errol Flynn in They Died with Their Boots On.
Custer’s transformation into an American myth had much to do with the timing of the disaster. When word of his defeat first reached the American public on July 7, 1876, the nation was in the midst of celebrating the centennial of its glorious birth.
In defeat the hero of the Last Stand achieves the greatest of victories, since he will be remembered for all time.
For while the Sioux and Cheyenne were the victors that day, the battle marked the beginning of their own Last Stand. The shock and outrage surrounding Custer’s stunning defeat allowed the Grant administration to push through measures that the U.S. Congress would not have funded just a few weeks before.
“I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle,” Sitting Bull said. “This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.”
A group of Native police were sent to his cabin on the Grand River, and at dawn on December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull, along with Crowfoot and Sitting Bull’s adopted brother Jumping Bull, was shot to death.
The massacre that unfolded on December 29 at a creek called Wounded Knee was seen by at least some of the officers of the Seventh Cavalry as overdue revenge for their defeat at the Little Bighorn.
But when does resistance to the inevitable simply become an expression of personal ego or, even worse, of narrow-minded nostalgia for a vanished past?
Custer’s published accounts of his exploits gave him a public reputation out of all proportion to his actual accomplishments—at least that’s what more than a few fellow army officers claimed.
Both Custer and Sitting Bull are often portrayed as grimly resolute in their determination to fight. But even as the first bullets were being fired upon his people, Sitting Bull held out hope that peace, not war, might be the ultimate result of the army’s appearance at the Little Bighorn. Custer had demonstrated a remarkable talent for negotiation and diplomacy prior to his last battle. The tragedy of both their lives is that they were not given the opportunity to explore those alternatives. Instead, they died alongside their families (a son and a brother were killed with Sitting Bull; two
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Forty percent of the soldiers in Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been born outside the United States in countries like Ireland, England, Germany, and Italy; of the Americans, almost all of them had grown up east of the Mississippi River. For this decidedly international collection of soldiers, the Plains were as strange and unworldly as the surface of the moon.
Just two years before, however, gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills by an expedition led by none other than George Custer.
Instead of an effort to defend innocent American pioneers from Indian attack, the campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne in the spring of 1876 was an unprovoked military invasion of an independent nation that already happened to exist within what came to be declared the United States.
Instead of a watercraft, a Missouri riverboat looked so much like a giant, smoke-belching insect as it lurched over the mud on two spindly legs that this technique of going where no riverboat had ever gone before became known as “grasshoppering.”
but grasshoppering meant that a riverboat was now something more than a means of transportation. It was an invasive species of empire.
Part Garden of Eden, part El Dorado, the Black Hills were a verdant and mountainous land of streams and lakes contained within a forbidding four-thousand-foot-high ridge of ancient rock covered in ponderosa pine.
Mysterious and remote (they were separated from the nearest American settlement by a hundred miles of desolate badlands), the Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux and—until Custer’s expedition—almost unknown to the whites, save for rumors of gold.
Over the next hundred years, more gold would be extracted from a single mine in the Black Hills (an estimated $1 billion) than from any other mine in the continental United States.
But by the summer of 1875 there were so many U.S. citizens in the region that the Grant administration decided it must purchase the hills from the Sioux. When the Sioux refused to sell, the administration felt it had no choice but to instigate a war.
But as Custer prepared to lead his regiment against the Sioux in the spring of 1876, he was suddenly ordered to Washington, D.C. A Democrat-controlled congressional committee wanted him to testify about corruption within the War Department of Grant’s Republican administration.
The president was outraged, and despite the impending campaign, he blocked Custer’s return to his regiment. Grant finally relented, but not without insisting that Custer’s superior, Brigadier General Alfred Terry, stationed at department headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, be named leader of the campaign to capture Sitting Bull,
Indeed, Terry, a courtly former lawyer from New Haven, Connecticut, and the only non–West Point general in the post–Civil War army, was so excruciatingly nice that it would more than likely drive Custer to distraction. At least that was the hope.
It was astonishing how far Grant had plummeted. After winning the war for Lincoln, he seemed on the brink of even greater accomplishments as president of the United States. With input from the Quakers, he’d adopted what he described as “an Indian policy founded on peace and Christianity rather than force of arms.”
In the end, he had been powerless to stop the American push for more. Not that he had tried very hard or refused to let his own administration participate in the pillage, but it must have been sad and infuriating to see America’s celebration of its centennial come down to this: the rude, derisive silence of several thousand people withholding their applause.
When his men began to desert wholesale for the goldfields to the west, Custer overreacted and ordered some of them shot.
At one point, Custer abandoned his regiment and dashed to Libbie, covering more than 150 miles on horseback in just sixty hours.
He was court-martialed and sentenced to a year’s unpaid leave.
Instead of striking a blow against the hostiles, Custer had unwittingly killed one of the few Cheyenne leaders who were for peace.
More troubling, as far as Custer was concerned, was the publication of an anonymous letter in a St. Louis newspaper that accused him of abandoning one of the regiment’s most popular officers, Major Joel Elliott, to an unspeakable death at the hands of the Cheyenne.
By the end of the year, peace had come to the plains of Kansas, concluding one of the most remarkable and, if such a thing is possible when it comes to Custer, little-known periods in his career.
In the early 1870s, the twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry were recalled from the West and scattered throughout the Reconstruction South, where they assisted federal marshals in combating the rise of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Of all the rooms in this newly built Victorian home, Custer’s favorite was his study. During the winters he often spent almost the entire day holed up in the little room, poring over Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy or a biography of Napoleon.
During the Yellowstone campaign, Custer had learned the art of taxidermy, and the walls of his study contained the heads of a buffalo, an antelope, a black-tailed deer, and the grizzly bear he’d bagged in the Black Hills.
“I used to think that a man on the brink of mania, thrust suddenly into such a place in the dim flickering light, would be hurried to his doom by fright,” she wrote. “We loved the place dearly.”
Custer did not drink; he didn’t have to. His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in ways that went far beyond alcohol’s ability to interfere with clear thinking.
Custer had subsequently recanted in writing what had been one of the centerpieces of his testimony in Washington.
He might attempt to cast himself as the noble truthsayer victimized by an implacable tyrant, but as was now obvious to Terry, no one had done more to undermine Custer’s career than Custer himself.
All spring the wives of the officers and enlisted men had been haunted by a strange, seemingly unaccountable sense of doom.
As the regiment splashed triumphantly into the garrison, the band, conducted by five-foot two-inch Felix Vinatieri, a graduate of the Naples Conservatory of Music, struck up “Garry Owen,” a rousing Irish tune made popular in the Civil War and the regiment’s particular song.
In addition to his younger brother Tom, recently promoted to captain, there was his brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, and Custer’s twenty-eight-year-old brother, Boston, who was entered into the regimental rolls as a civilian guide. Accompanying Custer for the first time and serving as a herder was his eighteen-year-old nephew, Harry Reed. Reed and his uncle shared the same nickname of “Autie,” which dated back to Custer’s first attempts to pronounce his middle name of Armstrong.
After their marriage, she began to learn that her new husband had his quirks. Despite being a wild-eyed warrior, he seemed to be always washing his hands. He also brushed his teeth after every meal, and even carried his toothbrush with him into battle.
“In years long numbered with the past when I was verging upon manhood, my every thought was ambitious—not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great. I desired to link my name with acts and men and in such a manner as to be a mark of honor, not only to the present but to future generations.”
Geographically speaking, the Yellowstone was one of the least known rivers in the United States. Terry and Custer’s map of the region dated back to before the Civil War and was full of inaccuracies.
Marsh even ventured twelve miles up the Bighorn, where the channel became so clogged with mud that it was generally assumed he could go no farther. But as Marsh would prove almost exactly a month after leaving Fort Lincoln to rendezvous with Custer, it was in fact possible, given proper motivation, to take a steamboat another thirty miles to the Bighorn’s confluence with a river called the Little Bighorn.
By the 1770s, the Teton Sioux had overrun the Arikara, or Ree, on the Missouri River and made it as far west as the Black Hills, where they quickly ousted the Kiowa and the Crows.
“These lands once belonged to [other tribes],” the Oglala Black Hawk explained, “but we whipped those nations out of them and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of Indians.”
Lakota’s religious beliefs told them that the true source of the buffalo was not of this world, but beneath it, inside the earth.
The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm.
Sitting Bull was much more than a brave warrior. He was a wicasa wakan: a holy man with an unusual relationship with the Great Mystery that the Lakota called Wakan Tanka.
