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 7:00 pm the Sioux and Cheyenne set fire to the sparse prairie grasses to cover their retreat westward toward the Big Horn Mountains.  

Shortly after mid-day on the next day, 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 had the great gathering had camped the western soldiers found just two lodges, both  containing Indian dead on the ground (Sioux) and on scaffolds (Cheyenne) under the trees along the river. The abandoned site 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, was the first white man to stumble upon Custer's graveyard. "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...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. Geant,  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 painful bouncing 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, enlisted 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 just  237,200. 

Immediately after the battle the military judgments were 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,” which might have been largely written by Libby.

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 in public.

Reno was eventually forced to ask for and received 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.

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. (To that point most historians had assumed the native warriors 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 - 

GREASY GRASS - Part One

 

I invite you to stand atop the rim of the Wolf Mountains in southern Montana while  36 year old Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer scans the western horizon.  Hidden to his eyes, 15 miles distant in the middle horizon (above) campfire smoke rises from Sioux and Cheyanne lodges in the valley of the Little Big Horn river.   His Indian scouts can see the smoke clearly, but Custer remains blind  to his fate.

It was about 6:00am local time, Monday, 25 June 1876. Finally, in frustration, the half Crow, half white scout Mitch Bouyar warns Custer (above),  "General, I have been with these Indians for 30 years, and this is the largest village I have ever heard of."  One of the Crow scouts, White Man Runs Him, had no doubts about the Indian numbers;  "There were camps and camps and camps," he said.

Resting below the ridge were the 650 officers and troopers, 36 scouts and civilians of the Seventh Regiment of the United States Cavalry.  Sergeant and cobbler, 25 year old Charles A. Windolph of "H" company remembered,  "None of us had much sleep for several days, so we were glad to lie down and grab a rest." The men had spent 18 of the last 24 hours in their saddles, pushing to catch up to what the army figured to be about 400 native American lodges.  Windolph added, "When daylight came...we made coffee, but the water was so alkaline we almost gagged on it."

A 21 year old private in "M" troop, William Clemons Slaper (above),  noted that the forced march the night before "had much to do with the worn condition of our horses...the grazing had been poor for several days, and...there was little, if any, grain for our horses..."

When Custer returned from The "Crow's Nest" he told his officers it was his intent to rest his men and horses for the day, while scouting out the Indian camp, and then on 26 June to launch his assault. But within minutes that plan changed.

A trio of troopers had been dispatched to recover a box of hardtack lost off a pack mule. In backtracking they stumbled upon a 10 year old Lakota Sioux boy named "Wicohan" (or "Deed" in English) exploring the rations (above). They shot the boy to silence him. He was the first human to die this day.  Two other Sioux teenagers, Brown Back and Drags the Rope,  managed to avoid the soldier's shots in their rush to give warning.

When told of this Custer decided the attack must be made before the Indians could escape.  As Sergeant Windolph (above) wrote, "It was around 8 o'clock when we got orders to saddle up. We marched about ten miles, when we were halted in a sort of ravine. We'd been told to make as little noise as possible and light no fires (and that) There'd been no bugle calls for a day or two." 

About noon they crested the divide on the ancient path used by Sioux and Cheyenne called the Lodge Pole Trail,  and followed a small stream into the valley of the Little Big Horn, The regiment was then  divided into three. Forty-one year old contentious Captain Frederick William Benteen (above) rode along the south bank of the creek, leading 125 men (companies D, H and K).  

On the north bank the front of the column was lead by 41 year old Major Marcus Reno (above),  in command of 140 men (companies A, G, and M). 

Custer followed on the north bank, with the main body of 225 men, divided into 2 battalions; 32 year old Captain George Yates (above) was in command of companies E and F.... 

...while 36 year old  Captain Myles Walter Keogh (above) lead Companies C, I and L. 

Bringing up the rear was 31 year old Captain Thomas Mower McDougal (above) leading company B, which guarded the 150 pack mules, carrying 15 days of hardtack rations and 50 rounds of additional ammo per soldier.  As added security, five men from each of the remaining 10 companies were assigned to guard the Pack Train.   

The river and presumably the Indian camp, were still hidden by bluffs along the Little Big Horn. So Custer ordered Benteen to angle his command to the left, to see if there were any hostiles to the south. Custer did not want to be surprised by an attack on his rear.  And within a few moments Benteen's 125 men disappeared into the rolling stirrup high dry brush. 

After a few hundred yards, looming up from the undulating terrain, appeared a single Sioux tepee. Inside lay the dead body of a man. To insult his spirit, the scouts promptly set the tent on fire, producing a column of grey smoke, which now marked the regiment's appearance and progress.

As the troopers cleared the penultimate line of bluffs the clear cool waters of the Little Big Horn river appeared in the distance (above).  Thirty year old Lieutenant William Winer Cooke, Custer's adjutant, now delivered new orders.  Reno was  told his men were to cross the river and advance upon the Indian village with "...as rapid a gait as I thought prudent and afterward to charge." Reno was assured he would be "...supported by the whole outfit."  After riding with the major for a few minutes, Cooke cheerfully bade Reno good luck and returned to Custer.  It was about 3:00pm, local time.  The hottest part of the day.

 Reno's horses were so tired and thirsty he had trouble keeping them moving across the stream, and there was a 10 minute delay reforming on the western, valley side. Already the soldiers could see dust rising around the Indian camp, indicating the "hostiles" had been alerted. 

As the battalion formed up again, 30 year old French born "A" company Sergeant Stanislas Roy,  saw Colonel Custer leading the main body across the bluffs east of the river, to the right.   He heard troopers around him shout,  "There goes Custer." German born 23 year old Private Henry Petring heard the shout as, "There goes Custer. He's up to something, for he's waving his hat!"  

After setting his men at a trot toward the village about 2 miles up the valley, Reno sent the 47 year old interpreter, Fredrick Francis Gerard, back to inform Custer (above) that the Indians were not running away, but were in fact coming out to fight.  Gerard then returned to Reno's command, which had covered about half the distance to the village. 

Reno began with his command in a column of fours, but then shifted to two companies in a line across the flats, their right flank close to the brush along the river bank and the third company in reserve. But as they continued the number of Indians visible increased. Reno said later, "I saw Indians passing...behind my left flank." When he glanced backward, Reno saw no sign of either Custer or his men, 

But 29 year old Irish born Private Dan Newell again saw Custer 2 miles away on the eastern bluffs high above the river (above), and shouted bitterly to his comrades, "There he goes! Look at him. And we here, a fighting"  Reno ordered "M" company, in reserve, to swing out to the left of his line. Now he had no reserves. 

The village they were approaching consisted of circles of tepees, called lodges, pitched close together in a season of plenty.  Each lodge was occupied by a family group.  Smaller wickiups sheltered 3 to 4 young bachelor warriors each. The southern circle, closest to Reno's assault, were the Hunkpaps Sioux band, then the Sans Arc, the Brule, the Minneconjou, the Santee and the Oglala bands - about 700 lodges in all. 

Just north were the Cheyenne circles, another 500 to 600 lodges - all told three times the number the army expected. Estimates today suggest the village was occupied by as many as six to seven thousand people, with a third of them boys and men of fighting age - perhaps as many as 2,000 warriors.

There had been rumors all morning of soldiers being seen over the Wolf Mountains, but, in the words of the Oglala warrior  Low Dog, "I did not think anyone would come to attack us, so strong as we were."  In fact, running on foot across the difficult terrain  Brown Back had delivered the warning of the approaching soldiers just moments after Reno crossed the river. 

According to the 29 year old respected Cheyenne warrior Low Dog (Ishaynishus in Cheyenne) (above) "We thought,  all we thought was to dance all day. I went to water my horse at the creek...and then took a swim myself. I came back to camp afoot. When I got near my lodge I looked up the Little Horn towards Sitting Bull's camp. I saw a great dust rising. It looked like a whirlwind. Soon Sioux horsemen came rushing into camp shouting, "Soldiers Come! Plenty white soldiers!" I ran into my lodge and said to my brother-in-law, "Get your horses; the white man is coming. Everybody run for horses." 

Panic and anger sent the population scrambling. Women and old men hurried to gather children and the elderly, rushing them up stream or to the cover of the river bank or the higher ground to the west. Some warriors ran back and forth, gathering weapons, putting on war paint, and raising dust to obscure the vulnerable village, while most ran a quarter mile to the west, to recover their ponies hobbled on a grassy terrace. 

About half a mile south of the first tepees, and with still no sign of Custer, Reno called the command to halt. He explained later that he believed if had continued to charge the village, all his men would "still be in the valley to this day". 

Private William Slaper noted "Our horses were scenting danger before we dismounted, and several...became unmanageable and started straight for the open among the Indians, carrying their helpless riders with them. One of the boys, a young fellow named Smith of Boston, we never saw again, either dead or alive." And the horse carrying 26 year old Private Henry James Turley from Troy, New York,  also bolted.   "M" company Sergeant John Ryan watched Turley disappear into the swirling dust cloud, adding, "That was the last I saw of him".  Ignoring those unlucky fellows, Reno order his command to dismount and form a skirmish line about 300 yards from the first tepee circle.   

As they had been trained, every fourth trooper took the reins from his three compatriot's horses and retreated thirty paces. The other three spread out to form a skirmish line, each man eight to twelve paces apart. That  reduced them to 105 guns, with 35 men holding the horses.  That produced a battle line from the trees westward about 200 feet - a city block - out into the valley with their left wing hanging loose.  Just before the troopers began their slow steady fire with their single shot "trap door carbines, 23 year old Irishman, Private John Donahue, usually serving in K troop, remembered seeing Custer's battle flags to his right. The skirmish line was intended to keep the enemy at a distance. And it had worked a decade earlier against Confederate Infantry.   

The range of 300 yards, plus the tendency of the soldiers to over shoot their targets, meant relatively few casualties were inflicted on either side. The woman Moving Robe said later "the bullets shattered the tepee poles".  But the thousands of rounds also killed two wives and three children of the Hunkpapa leader Gall (in Lakota, Phizo) (above). Standing just a few feet away, the 5 foot 7 inch tall barrel chested warrior was consumed by grief and anger. He sent one of his surviving sons to fetch his pony from the herd, grazing a quarter mile across the valley, while he prepared his "medicine".  A small fire was started to burn herbs, and Gall sang his prayers. He had decided that this day he would fight only with his hatchet, up close and aiming to inflict pain and mutilation before delivering death. 

Each trooper carried on himself and his horse 100 rounds for his Model 1873 "trap door" single shot carbine, and it was expected they would fire 12 to 15 rounds a minute. This meant the skirmish line could, at best, only be held for little more than 30 minutes. Second Lieutenant Luther R. Hare said that as soon as the skirmish line had formed, "400 to 500 Indians came out of a coulee...400 yards in front of us".  Reno had never fought plains Indians before, but the failure of this tactical formation was clear to him within 15 minutes.  

Second Lieutenant Charles C. DeRudio (above), a 45 year old  Italian born revolutionary gadfly, who escaped from Devil's Island after having attempted to murder French Emperor Napoleon III, made the obvious observation that, "I saw we would have been butchered if we had gone 500 yards further". 

Within those 15 minutes Reno's men had expended about half their ammunition, and yet  "I saw Indians passing...behind my left flank",  most of those still on foot. Clearly they were seeking to capture the trooper's horses   In response Reno ordered the horses holders to pull back into the tree line along the river. Then he ordered his skirmish line to also withdraw into the trees.

As the troopers reformed their skirmish line with their backs to the river, Sergeant John Ryan saw his friend, 26 year old Miles F. O'Hara (above), shot by Indians who were working their way through the bushes.   O'Hara had been promoted to sergeant just before the expedition left Fort Abraham Lincoln. 

Seeing this, Ryan warned his commander,  32 year old Captain Thomas Henry French (above) that there were "....Indians in our rear".  But the normally cool headed officer assured the sergeant "Oh, no. Those are Custer's men."  They were not.

Within half an hour, and certain now that Custer was not coming to help, Reno ordered his men to remount their horses. As the Major himself did so, the 36 year old Arikara (or Ree) scout Bloody Knife (above) rode up beside him. 

Bloody Knife's mother had been captured by a Hunkpapa warrior who fathered him. But the Sioux treated he and his mother as outcasts.  He was taunted and tortured by his fellow children, among them young Sitting Bull and Gall.  When he reached 16 summers Bloody Knife (above) and his mother returned to her family, but years later he came back for a visit and was almost killed by Gall.

Now Bloody Knife (above) leaned forward to say something to Reno when an errant shot exploded in the man's head, covering the Major's face and eyes with bits of the scout's brains, blood and skull. Stunned, Reno shouted the command to dismount, and did so. For a few minutes Reno was in a state of shock. When he had recovered enough he shouted again, "Mount up", and then, "Any of you men who want to make your escape, follow me!" 

"Just at that moment", remembered Sargeant Ryan, "one of those Indians fired and (24 year old) Private George (Gustave) Lorentz (above) was shot, the bullet striking him in the back of his neck and coming out his mouth. He fell forward on his saddle and dropped to the ground".  Ryan now admitted, "The best thing we can do is cut right through them."

Lieutenant Charles Albert Varnum (above), the 27 year old son of retired Union Major John Varnum,  and who was in charge of the 35 scouts attached to the 7th cavalry, remembered, "When we came out of the woods there were a great many Indians...working their Winchesters on the column".  

And with Indians now mounted and running alongside the soldiers, civilian interpreter, Gerard, noted, "The Indians picked off the soldiers at will. It was a rout..." 

                        - 30 -