The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer (19 page)

The forty-eight-year-old Connecticut native Alfred Howe Terry had briefly attended Yale Law School but withdrew after a year. He had, however, become fluent in French and German and decided to travel in Europe on an inheritance. In 1858, he became clerk of the New Haven County Superior Court, a position he held until the outbreak of the Civil War.

At that time, Terry became colonel of the Second Connecticut, a ninety-day militia regiment, which he commanded at the First Battle of Bull Run. He then recruited the Seventh Connecticut and led this regiment to share the capture of the important naval base at Port Royal, South Carolina, in November 1861. In April of the following year, Terry's regiment helped take Fort Pulaski, Georgia, which led to his promotion that month to brigadier general. In the fall of 1863, he assumed command of X Corps in the Army of the James, which operated against Petersburg and Richmond.

Terry participated in Major General Benjamin F. Butler's ill-fated attempt to capture Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in December 1864. When Butler was recalled, Terry replaced him and personally led the storming and capture of Fort Fisher in January 1865, which sealed off Wilmington, the last Confederate port on the East Coast.

For this accomplishment, he received the rarely awarded “Thanks of Congress,” a coveted citation published in the
Congressional Record,
and was promoted to major general of volunteers and brigadier in the regular army, as of January 15, 1865. He ended the war in the Carolinas as part of the Army of the Ohio under Major General William T. Sherman.

After the war, Terry remained in the army as a brigadier general and was given command of the Department of Dakota, which included Minnesota and parts of the Dakota and Montana Territories. He served on the commission that condemned the Sand Creek Massacre and was a member of the presidential Peace Commission, which negotiated the Medicine Lodge Treaties in 1867. He was transferred to the Department of the South to contend with Reconstruction in 1869 and returned to Dakota as department commander in 1872.

The general was somewhat of a walking contradiction. He was a strong advocate of Indian rights and a proponent of arming Indians with weapons for hunting purposes, which was a controversial position within the army. He opposed any intrusion by whites into the Black Hills region but nonetheless served as supervisor for Custer's Black Hills Expedition of 1874 and the subsequent Jenny Expedition of 1875. In an apparent conflict with Terry's personal beliefs, he was a member of the Allison Commission, which met with the Sioux at Red Cloud Agency in June 1875 and was unsuccessful in negotiating the sale of the Black Hills.

The Terry-Crook strategy called for three columns to converge on the Indians—whose exact location was unknown—and crush them within this three-pronged movement. General George Crook would command one column, which would march north from Fort Fetterman, Wyoming. The Montana Column would be led by Colonel John Gibbon and would march east down the Yellowstone River from Fort Ellis.

Gibbon was born on April 20, 1827, near Holmesburg, Pennsylvania, and during his childhood the family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. He graduated—with future generals Ambrose E. Burnside and Ambrose P. Hill—from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1847, ranking twentieth in his class. Gibbon was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Fourth U.S. Artillery and assigned to duty in Mexico after hostilities had ceased. He took part in operations against the Seminole Indians in Florida two years later and was promoted to first lieutenant in 1850.

From May 1853 to August 1854 he assisted in the removal of the Seminole from Florida to Indian Territory. His next assignment was as an artillery instructor at West Point, where he spent five years. While at West Point, Gibbon wrote the basic
Artillerist's Manual,
which was published by the War Department. Gibbon then served briefly in Utah and as captain of the Fourth U.S. Artillery at Fort Leavenworth until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Although three of his brothers chose to serve in the Confederate army, Gibbon remained with the North. He had been severely wounded at Gettysburg and thereafter walked with a decided limp. Gibbon was promoted to major general in June 1864 and assumed command of the XXIV Corps in January 1865.

After the war, Gibbon became colonel of the Thirty-sixth Infantry in July 1866 and colonel of the Seventh Infantry at Fort Ellis, Montana, in March 1869. Known to the Plains Indians as No Hip Bone or One Who Limps, he then commanded the District of Montana from Fort Shaw.

John Gibbon assumed command of the Montana Column on March 21, 1876, and marched from Fort Ellis on April 3, east down the Yellowstone River, with six companies of his own regiment and the Second Cavalry under Major James Brisbin.

The third column, commanded by Brigadier General Alfred Terry, included Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry and would march west from Fort Abraham Lincoln.

The first column to take to the field was one with eight hundred men commanded by George Crook, which set off in early March from Fort Fetterman, Wyoming Territory. They immediately encountered a savage adversary in the Wyoming winter but pushed north toward known hostile country.

On March 16, his scouts located a Sioux-Cheyenne village on the Powder River that consisted of about a hundred lodges, with perhaps as many as 250 warriors. Colonel Joseph Reynolds with six companies of the Third Cavalry—about three hundred men—was issued orders to attack the unsuspecting village the following morning.

At dawn, Reynolds' men charged into the unsuspecting village. They were met without much opposition and quickly routed the surprised warriors—losing four soldiers killed and six wounded in the process. The cavalrymen took control of the village and commenced destroying everything of value, including a large quantity of beef that the poorly supplied army could have used for themselves. This loss of provisions and lodges, however, was far greater to the Sioux people than the reported one killed and one wounded during the brief fight.

In early afternoon during a raging snowstorm, Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, who had been camped downstream, rallied the warriors and initiated a counterattack from the nearby bluffs.

Reynolds, perhaps panicking, ordered an immediate withdrawal, abandoning several dead soldiers and at least one wounded man. The soldiers also left behind the Indian pony herd, which was easily recaptured by Crazy Horse.

Crazy Horse (Tashunka Witco, Tashunca-Uitco, “His horse is crazy”) was born about 1842 on the eastern edge of the Black Hills near the site of present-day Rapid City, Sioux Dakota. His mother was a member of the Brulé band, reportedly the sister of Spotted Tail, and his father an Oglala medicine man. Crazy Horse's mother died when he was quite young, and his father took her sister as a wife and raised the child in both Brulé and Oglala camps.

Curly, as he was then called due to his light, curly hair and fair complexion, killed a buffalo when he was twelve and received a horse for his accomplishment. At about that time while residing in Conquering Bear's camp, he witnessed the 1854 Gratten affair—where an army lieutenant named John L. Gratten and his twenty-nine men were slaughtered after a Sioux warrior had killed a stray Mormon ox and Gratten went to arrest him for the alleged crime. Curly also had viewed the destruction of the Indian village at Ash Hollow caused by General William Harney's punitive expedition in response. Those experiences made an indelible impression on Curly and helped shape his militancy toward the white man.

Not long after the Gratten massacre, Curly sought guidance and underwent a Vision Quest by meditating on a mountaintop. He experienced a vivid dream depicting a mounted warrior in a storm who became invulnerable by following certain rituals, such as wearing long, unbraided hair, painting his body with white hail spots, tying a small stone behind each ear, and decorating his cheek with a zigzag lightning bolt. Curly's father interpreted the dream as a sign of his son's future greatness in combat.

The following year, Curly was said to have killed his first human. Curly was in the company of a small band of Sioux warriors who were attempting to steal Pawnee horses when they happened upon some Osage buffalo hunters. In the midst of a fight, he spotted an Osage in the bushes and killed this person, who, to his surprise, turned out to be a woman. It was not shameful in Sioux culture to kill a woman, but he was so upset that he refused to take her scalp and left it for someone else.

Curly proved his worth as a warrior when he was sixteen years old during a battle with Arapaho. Decorated like the warrior in his dream, he was in the thick of the fighting, scoring coup after coup, taking many scalps, but, to his dismay, was struck by an arrow in the leg. Curly wondered why he had been wounded when the rituals he had imitated from the warrior on his Vision Quest promised protection. He finally realized that his dream warrior had taken no scalps and he had. From that day forward, Curly would never again scalp an enemy.

He received a great tribute after that battle. His father sang a song that he had composed for his son and announced that the boy would now be known by a new name—Crazy Horse. Incidentally, that name was nothing special, rather an old, common name among the Sioux tribes.

Throughout the ensuing years, Crazy Horse had built a reputation among his people as a crafty, fearless warrior. He participated in many successful raids against traditional Indian enemies and the occasional small party of whites traveling through Sioux country but had not yet faced the might of the United States Army. In 1865, that would dramatically change when an endless stream of whites—gold seekers headed for Montana—flooded the Bozeman Trail and the army garrisoned several forts to protect them.

In 1866–67 during what became known as Red Cloud's War, Crazy Horse was instrumental in rallying his fellow warriors and displaying an almost mythical courage and tactical craftiness. Due to Red Cloud's leadership and the efforts of Crazy Horse, Hump, Gall, and Rain-in-the-Face the army finally admitted defeat and negotiated a treaty to end hostilities.

Crazy Horse, however, refused to “touch the pen” to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, disdained the reservation, and chose instead to freely roam traditional Sioux hunting grounds and wage war against the Crow and Shoshoni. It was said that during this time of wandering he married a Northern Cheyenne woman, which gained him friends and followers from that tribe. His interest in a certain Lakota Sioux woman, however, would nearly cost him his life.

Crazy Horse, who had gained the reputation of being introverted and eccentric, had ten years earlier vigorously courted Black Buffalo Woman, Red Cloud's niece. At that time, however, she had spurned Crazy Horse in favor of a warrior named No Water. Gossip spread that Crazy Horse had continued to visit Black Buffalo Woman when her husband was away. In 1871, Crazy Horse convinced her to run away with him. No Water was incensed and set out on the trail, finally finding the couple together in a tepee. He shot Crazy Horse, the bullet entering at the nostril, fracturing his jaw, and nearly killing him. Crazy Horse gradually recovered from this serious wound. Black Buffalo Woman returned to No Water but some months later gave birth to a sandy-haired child who suspiciously resembled Crazy Horse. The Sioux warrior licked his romantic wounds and in the summer of 1872 married Black Shawl, who would bear him a daughter, They-Are-Afraid-of-Her.

The military had been encroaching on Sioux buffalo-hunting grounds for some time, and when George Armstrong Custer's Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 served as escort for the Northern Pacific Railroad survey crews it has been said that Crazy Horse may have participated in the violent opposition.

The discovery of gold during Custer's Black Hills Expedition the following year brought hordes of miners into that sacred Sioux region that had been promised them by the provisions of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Negotiations by the United States government to buy the land angered Crazy Horse and other free-roaming Sioux. The bodies of many miners—not scalped, which was Crazy Horse's custom—began turning up in the Black Hills. Although no direct evidence exists, it has been widely speculated, even by his own people, that Crazy Horse was the one behind these brutal acts.

Another incident occurred about this time that had a profound effect on Crazy Horse. He was out fighting Crow Indians when his daughter died of cholera. The village had moved about seventy miles from the location of the burial scaffold on which lay They-Are-Afraid-of-Her. Crazy Horse tracked down the site and lay for three days beside his daughter's body.

The United States government had issued the edict that all Indians in the vicinity of the Yellowstone River Valley report to the reservation by January 31, 1876, or face severe military reprisals. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and others, however, ignored the demand and remained free.

Now, in the middle of the night and in the midst of a raging snowstorm Crazy Horse had come to the rescue of his people on the Powder River, recapturing the pony herd and salvaging whatever he could of the village.

General George Crook was furious with Colonel Reynolds for not holding the village. When the command returned to Fort Fetterman on March 26, Crook filed court-martial charges against Reynolds, who was subsequently found guilty of neglect of duty. Reynolds was punished with a one-year suspension from duty, which was eventually commuted by his former West Point classmate, President U. S. Grant. Reynolds, however, would be quietly retired on disability the following year.

On May 29, Crook, with a column consisting of fifteen companies of cavalry and five of infantry—more than one thousand men—once again departed from Fort Fetterman as a part of General Alfred H. Terry's three-pronged approach designed to close in around the hostile Indians. Crook reached the head of the Tongue River near the Wyoming-Montana border on June 9 and established a base camp on Goose Creek while waiting for about 260 Shoshoni and Crow who wanted to take part in the campaign against their traditional enemies.