GREASY GRASS Chapter Seven

 

I ask you to witness the hilltop siege (above) during the morning of  Monday, 26 June, 1876. Laying flat behind their barricades the 300 plus survivors suffered few wounds. Several earned medals sneaking down to the river to collect desperately needed water for the rest.  Twice Captain Fredrick Benteen lead spoiling charges to break up groups of Indian snippers. By afternoon, the gunfire faded in intensity. About 7:00pm the Sioux and Cheyenne set fire to the sparse prairie grasses to cover their retreat westward to the Big Horn Mountains.  

Shortly after mid-day on Tuesday the survivors saw in the valley below (above, center) the approach of the Second Cavalry and 7th Infantry regiments.  These 450 men under Colonel John Gibbon had marched from the Idaho country. They were supposed to have been the anvil upon which Custer's 7th Cavalry hammer was to have crushed the hostile Indians.  Instead they were the recorders of the disaster.

Where once the great gathering had camped the western soldiers found two lodges containing Indian dead on the ground (Sioux) and on scaffolds (Cheyenne) under the trees along the river. The abandoned village also contained bloody cavalry clothing and dead cavalry mounts, brought back in a failed attempt to treat their wounds.  Private  Eugene Geant, of H Company, 7th Infantry, said he saw little evidence of white men "...except a very few bodies and some heads evidently dragged from a distance."

Meanwhile, Lieutenant James H. Bradley, head of Gibbon's scouts, stumbled upon Custer's graveyard first. "I was scouting the hills some two or three miles to the left of the column upon the opposite bank of the river...  when the body of a horse attracted our attention (above)...and hastening in that direction the appalling sight was revealed to us of his entire command in the embrace of death," At first glance he counted 197 bodies. 

The next day, Custer supporter Lieutenant Godfrey called Last Stand Hill (above) one of "...sickening, ghastly horror". Pvt. Eugene Geant, H Company, 7th Infantry, reported the bodies of more than 230 men, "mostly naked and mutilated in a horrible manner."   All of Custer's command had been stripped, scalped and mutilated, their dead white bodies bloating in the summer sun - Except, if we are to believe the white men, the corpse of Custer himself.  

On Wednesday, 28 June, 1873 Reno's command were assigned to bury the dead. They had few shovels, and graves for the enlisted were scrapped a few inches deep into the hard pan prairie with knives and axes (above). Some got little more than dirt thrown over their faces. A Second Cavalry officer admitted "A number were simply covered in sagebrush". The officers graves were  12 to 14 inches deep. 

The next day, Thursday, 29 June, the fifty wounded were loaded onto travois and began the journey to the Big Horn River, where the steamboat Far West waited. It set a record never equaled, by steaming  the 710 miles down the Yellowstone river to Fort Abraham Lincoln and Bismarck, North Dakota Territory in just 54 hours.  And then, on the first day of July, 1876, the Story of "Custer's Massacre" first reached the American public. 

Over some 10 hours of combat, out of the 650 American soldiers and civilians following Custer over that Wolf Mountain divide, 286 had died violently- 16 officers and 242 enlisted killed, (44% of the command) plus 1 officer and 51 enlisted wounded - for a total devastating 52% loss. 

The 210 men directly under the command of “General” Custer were dead within an hour after their first contact with the Sioux and Cheyenne.  Each dead officer left behind a family who would morn, often a wife and children thrown into the poverty of a small pension. The enlisted were usually young men, who left behind an emotional vacuum of lost potential and no pension. By definition, common soldiers were "cannon fodder". 

To the stone age Sioux and Cheyenne peoples it was the battle of the Greasy Grass. Indian casualties were 40 to 50 providers, where every death left grief and often starvation and death for the youngest and oldest surviving family members.  Within a year the independent Indian nations had been crushed, their treaty lands seized. According to the U.S. Censes, in 1870 there were 313,712 Indians in the United States. By 1880 that number had been reduced to 306,543, and, by 1900 to 237,200. 

Immediately after the battle the military judgments were fairly unanimous. President Grant, who had been elevated to the White House based on his record as a military commander, told a reporter, “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself,…(which) was wholly unnecessary – wholly unnecessary.” 

General Philip Sheridan, who had lobbied for Custer’s inclusion on the expedition considered the disaster primarily Custer’s fault. “Had the Seventh Cavalry been held together, it would have been able to handle the Indians on the Little Big Horn." 

In fact all the officers who had insisted that Custer was the answer to the Indian problem in 1876 were the most determined to blame Custer for the failure. And finally, General Samuel Davis Sturgis (above), overall commander of the seventh, whose son, James, had died on the Little Big Horn under Custer, reacted negatively to the suggestion that a monument be dedicated to the memory of “The American Murat”, The Boy General" Custer; “For God’s sake let them hide it in some dark valley, or veil it, or put it anywhere the bleeding hearts of the widows, orphans, fathers and mothers of the men so uselessly sacrificed to Custer’s ambition, can never be wrung at the sight of it.”

If there was going to be a hero rise from the Little Big Horn, logic said it should  have been Major Marcus Reno. Most of the men under Custer's second in command made it out alive, held together over three horrible days of combat and thirst.  Yet, within half a dozen years after the "Last Stand" the public thought of Reno as a coward.     

The reason the army lost this second battle of the Little Big Horn was that their enemy was even more ruthless and relentless than the Sioux or the Cheyenne. She was a five foot four inch Victorian widow with blue-gray eyes and chestnut hair. Her name was Elizabeth Bacon Custer (above). And in this engagement she left no survivors - beginning with Marcus Reno.

Having dismissed Custer to cover their own behinds.  the army also dismissed his 34 year old widow. Barely a month after her husband had died amid the Montana scrub brush, “Libby” Custer (above) was forced to leave Fort Abraham Lincoln. As a widow Libby had no right to quarters on the post, and so lost the social support of her Army life and fellow wives and widows. Her income was immediately reduced to the widow’s pension of $30 a month; her total assets were worth barely $8,000, while the claims against Custer’s estate exceeded $13,000. And then, in her hour of need, Libby received support from an unexpected source.

His name was Frederick Whittaker. A Civil War cavalry hero in his own right, shot through the lung at the Battle the Wilderness, after the war he scratched out a living as a writer of pulp fiction and non-fiction for magazines of the day, “…about the best of its kind”. He had met Custer during the Civil War, and the General’s death inspired him to write a dramatic eulogy praising the fallen hero in Galaxy Magazine, where Whittaker referred to Custer’s “natural recklessness and vanity”. But Libby saw past that, and seduced the ex-lieutenant. Libby provided Whittaker with the couple’s personal letters, access to family and friends, war department correspondence and permission to use large sections from Custer’s own book, “My Life on the Plains.”

What emerged, just six months after Little Big Horn, was “A  Life of General George A. Custer”. It was pure pulp,  filled with inaccuracies and excessive praise for Custer, but it was also a best seller. “So fell the brave caviler, the Christian soldier, surrounded by foes, but dying in harness amid the men he loved.”

This time Whittaker saw no faults in Custer. Instead the blame was laid elsewhere. Whittaker wrote; “He could have run like Reno had he wished...It is clear, in the light of Custer’s previous character, that he held on to the last, expecting to be supported, as he had a right to expect. It was only when he clearly saw he had been betrayed, that he resolved to die game, as it was too late to retreat.” http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.Whittaker (Sheldon and Company, New York, 1876).

Most professional soldiers admitted that Whittaker had gotten it very wrong. But those same officers now withheld their criticism of Whittaker to avoid being attacked for having insisted on Custer commanding the cavalry in 1876, and to avoid being forced to also criticize Custer's widow. 

Reno was eventually forced to ask for and receive a Court of Inquiry (not a Court Martial) on his conduct at Little Big Horn, which cleared his name and revealed the character of the people Whittaker had relied upon for his version of the battle. But it made little difference to Libbie Custer or Whittaker and his publisher, who declared the Inquiry a whitewash.

The first who jumped on Libby's bandwagon was Edward Godfrey, who had been a Lieutenant at the Little Big Horn and a Custer “fan”.  His 1892 “Custer’s Last Battle” was unequivocal. “...had Reno made his charge as ordered,…the Hostiles would have been so engaged… that Custer’s approach…would have broken the moral of the warriors….(Reno’s) faltering ...his halting, his falling back to the defensive position in the woods...; his conduct up to and during the siege…was not such as to inspire confidence or even respect,…” 

Elizabeth Custer went on to support herself comfortably by public speaking and by writing three books; “Tenting on the Plains”, "Following the Guidon” and “Boots and Saddles”.  She was such a good writer that many believe she was the true author of her husband's "My Life on the Plains". In each of her books her "Audie" was idolized and lionized. 

In 1901 she managed to squeeze out one more, a children’s book, “The Boy General. Story of the Life of Major-General George A. Custer”: “The true soldier asks no questions; he obeys, and Custer was a true soldier. He gave his life in carrying out the orders of his commanding general… He had trained and exhorted his men and officers to loyalty, and with one exception they stood true to their trust, as was shown by the order in which they fell.” 

By the time Libby died, in 1933, at the age of ninety-one, her version of the Battle of the Little Big Horn was set in the concrete of the printed page.

These attacks on Reno continued for most of the 20th century. The 1941 movie staring Errol Flynn as Custer, displays Libby's view as well as any tome, echoed even by respected historians such as Robert Utley who in the 1980’s described Reno as "… a besotted, socially inept mediocrity, (who) commanded little respect in the regiment and was the antithesis of the electric Custer in almost every way.”

So for over a century Marcus Reno was reviled and despised as the coward who did not charge as ordered, instead, pleading weasel-like,  that Custer had not supported him as promised. It would not be until Ronald Nichols biography of Reno, “In Custer’s Shadow” (U. of Oklahoma Press, 1999) that Reno received a fair hearing.

About the same time the Indian accounts of the fight began to finally be given a serious consideration by white historians, including the story told to photographer Edward Curtis in 1907 by three of Custer’s Indian scouts. The trio said they watched amazed as Custer stood on the bluffs overlooking Reno’s fight in the valley, a story supported by some soldiers in the valley fight who reported seeing Custer on the bluffs. (Most historians had always assumed they were lying.)

One of the scouts, White Man Runs Him (above), claimed to have scolded Custer; “Why don’t you cross the river and fight too?” To which the scouts say Custer replied, “It is early yet and plenty of time. Let them fight. Our turn will come.”

And it did. But it sure was a long time coming.

- 30 -