The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer (29 page)

The night passed without incident, other than one act of bravery. Captain Thomas McDougall, who had been slightly wounded in the fighting, snuck away from the perimeter and retrieved the body of Second Lieutenant Benjamin H. Hodgson, which he buried on Reno Hill.

On the morning of June 27, a long, winding column of blue could be observed approaching from the south. The Terry-Gibbon Column, following rumors that Custer had engaged the Indians, was about to make contact with the survivors of Reno's beleaguered command.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn had come to an inglorious end—but was far from concluded in the minds of the public or future historians.

 

Fourteen

Bodies on the Field

It had been at about 9:00 on the morning of June 27 while leading an advance guard of mounted infantry attached to the Montana Column with General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon that First Lieutenant James H. Bradley came upon a horrible sight. Bradley had the dubious distinction of being the man who discovered the more than two hundred bodies of Custer's command lying where they had fallen on the field. He dispatched a messenger to take word of this tragedy back to the main column.

Bradley then resumed his march looking for additional bodies and happened upon Reno's command on the hilltop. Those troops who had endured two days pinned down by hostile Indians were relieved and elated to be rescued. They also were informed at this time about the fate of Custer's command, a shock that certainly dampened their spirits.

The entire outfit moved from the hilltop four miles north to a more defensible position in the valley not far from the abandoned Indian village. They then visited the scene of Custer's defeat. By that time, the more than two hundred mutilated bodies—along with many horse carcasses—had been decomposing in the summer heat for two days.

First Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey described the scene as they approached: “We saw a large number of objects that looked like white boulders scattered over the field … and it was announced that these objects were the dead bodies.” He added that “many faces had a pained, almost terrified expression.”

Captain Thomas Weir exclaimed: “Oh, how white they look! How white!”

First Lieutenant Francis M. Gibson sadly said, “It was the most horrible sight my eyes rested on.”

Captain Frederick Benteen looked down at the body of George Armstrong Custer—the man he had enjoyed tormenting and slandering for so many years—and said with emotion: “There he is, God damn him; he will never fight anymore.”

After all of the cavalrymen had been killed, their bodies had suffered further indignities. The Sioux and Cheyenne women, and perhaps a number of children and older men, had descended on the field to mutilate the bodies, quite a few beyond recognition. The extent of the mutilation has been a subject of debate, with many eyewitnesses claiming that there was very little and an equal number taking the opposite view that it was widespread. This disparity of opinion could be explained by the fact that each troop was assigned a different area of the field to bury the dead and certain portions may have received the brunt of the post-death violence.

The acts of mutilation that have been documented include dismemberment of arms, legs, hands, fingers, and penises; decapitation; scalping, lacerations, and slashes from butcher knives, tomahawks, and axes; crushing skulls with stone mallets; and multiple gunshots and arrows fired from close range. The field was said to have been littered with hands, heads, feet, and legs that had been severed.

Those men lying facedown were likely killed by Cheyenne, a tribe that may have believed that it was bad luck to leave an enemy facing the sky. The ones with a slashed thigh indicated the manner in which the Sioux traditionally marked a dead enemy. The Indians even went as far as to mutilate some of the dead horses. For unknown reasons, the names had been cut out of the few items of clothing, an undershirt or pair of socks, not stripped from the bodies and taken away. Everything of value—money, watches, rings, photographs, et cetera—had been stolen from the dead cavalrymen.

Captain Tom Custer had been singled out for perhaps the worst treatment and was identified only by tattoos on one arm. Godfrey wrote that Tom's body was:

lying downward, all the scalp was removed, leaving only tufts of his fair hair on the nape of his neck. The skull was smashed in and a number of arrows had been shot into the back of the head and in the body … the features where they had touched the ground were pressed out of shape and were somewhat depressed. In turning the body, one arm which had been shot and broken, remained under the body; this was pulled out and on it we saw “T. W. C.” and the goddess of liberty and the flag. His belly had been cut open and his entrails protruded.

The extent of Tom Custer's abuse has caused some to believe that Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face made good on his threat to cut out Custer's heart and eat it as revenge for the Indian's 1875 arrest.

Libbie Custer, Tom's sister-in-law, believed that the Sioux warrior had indeed made good on his promise. She wrote: “The vengeance of that incarnate fiend was concentrated on the man who had effected his capture. It was found on the battlefield that he had cut out the heart of that gallant, loyal, and lovable man, our brother Tom.”

A drunken Rain-in-the-Face at one point admitted to killing and mutilating Tom Custer when he told reporters at Coney Island in 1894: “The long sword's blood and brains splashed in my face.… I leaped from my pony and cut out his heart and bit a piece out of it and spit it in his face.” Rain-in-the-Face's startling confession was likely nothing more than a flippant response to the badgering of sensationalism-seeking reporters.

Captain Frederick Benteen, who examined Tom Custer's body on the field, swore that the heart had not been removed, and there exists no evidence to suggest that Rain-in-the-Face cut out, ate, or in any other way disturbed the heart or any other body part of Tom Custer. Mutilations were normally reserved for the boys, women, and old men. The warriors would have already left the field to celebrate by the time that took place. And with respect to cannibalism—it was just as repugnant to the Sioux as it was to the white man.

Another myth surrounding the revenge of Rain-in-the-Face has been debated for years—that he killed George Armstrong Custer. In fact, there was a good chance that Rain-in-the-Face had remained with the pony herd that day and did not even set foot on the field of battle. The warrior who killed Custer remains unknown, although many later bragged about being the one.

The naked body of George Armstrong Custer, from all accounts, had not been mutilated or at least not badly cut up. He was found in a seated position leaning against and between two troopers, his face said to be wearing the expression of a man who “had fallen asleep and enjoyed peaceful dreams.”

Custer was found with two wounds—a bullet hole in front of the left temple and another in the left breast. Sioux chief Gall said in 1886 that Custer was not scalped “because he was the big chief and we respected him,” which seems ludicrous. Gall and the others had no idea until long afterward that they had been fighting Custer, thinking instead that it had been General George Crook, whose troops had attacked a week earlier on the Rosebud.

Cheyenne Kate Bighead also fabricated a popular story. She later stated that Custer had not been mutilated out of respect for their tribal sister Mo-nah-se-tah, who they believed had gained Custer's affection while working as his translator following the 1868 Battle of the Washita. Kate contradicted herself in saying that the women thrust a sewing awl into each of Custer's ears to “improve his hearing,” because he had not heard when he had smoked the pipe with them in 1867.

Some scholars have speculated that Custer's body had indeed been mutilated, and the truth was deliberately withheld out of respect for the feelings of Libbie Custer. This certainly could be true, but there can be no doubt that his body was not mutilated beyond recognition. He was easily recognized by a number of the men, as were other bodies. Perhaps the mutilation was a selective process rather than widespread. There were those troopers who swore that some bodies on various parts of the field had barely been touched. In addition, if he had been mutilated, some witness, especially Captain Frederick Benteen, would have considered it his duty to report it later.

There were about forty bodies lying in the grass in the vicinity of their commander. In addition to Tom, family members included nephew Arthur “Autie” Reed and brother Boston. Brother-in-law Jimmy Calhoun was farther south along the ridge at a location that would become known as Calhoun Hill. His body was identified by a distinctive dental filling.

The man who had written Custer's last message and was considered a close family friend, First Lieutenant William W. Cooke, also died alongside Custer. Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg claimed that he scalped the whiskers from one side of Cooke's face and presented the unusual scalp to his wary grandmother, who discarded it two nights later at a dance. The body of another dear friend of the Custers, George Yates, was found downslope from that of Custer. Twenty-two-year-old Second Lieutenant William Van Wyck Reily, a graduate of the Naval Academy whose father had been lost in the China Sea while Reily was an infant, had been assigned temporary duty from Company E as second-in-command of Captain George Yates' Company F. Reily's body was found near that of Yates on Custer Hill.

First Lieutenant Algernon E. “Fresh” Smith had assumed temporary command of the Gray Horse Troop when the Seventh Cavalry marched out of Fort Lincoln. Smith had been severely wounded in the shoulder during the Civil War while leading a charge in the January 1865 assault on Fort Fisher, North Carolina. He had been hospitalized for two months at that time and had limited use of his arm for the remainder of his life. Smith could not even put on his own coat without assistance.

It has been theorized that during the opening stages of the Little Bighorn battle Smith's troop had been deployed down Medicine Tail Coulee to probe the Indian village. The company was apparently forced to retreat and subsequently annihilated, the bodies later buried in Deep Ravine, where they have thus far eluded detection. Smith's body, however, was the only one of his company found on Custer Hill, which has led to speculation that he, along with several other officers, had been wounded and taken to that location for medical treatment or had been responding to officer's call by whoever was in command at that time.

Also found on Custer Hill were the remains of assistant surgeon Dr. George E. Lord. The doctor had become ill on the march up the Rosebud on the Seventh Cavalry's approach to the Little Bighorn valley and halted some distance behind the column to rest. He straggled to Custer's camp the night of June 24 and was too weary and sick to eat. At that time Custer advised Lord to remain behind with the pack train but the doctor refused. It has been speculated that Lord had been brought to that location on the ridge to tend to the wounded, perhaps even George Armstrong Custer. Dr. Lord's surgical case was discovered in the abandoned Indian village.

Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant John J. Crittenden came from a well-known family. His namesake grandfather was governor of Kentucky, a three-term United States senator, and United States attorney general. John's father, Thomas, was a lawyer who served as an aide to General Zachary Taylor at the Mexican War battle of Buena Vista and rose to the rank of Union major general in the Civil War. An uncle, George B., became a major general in the Confederate army.

With his father's influence, John Crittenden was assigned service with the Seventh Cavalry in May 1876. He was second-in-command of Calhoun's Company L and his mutilated body was found at the southern end of Battle Ridge. His father requested that his son be interred where he fell, which made him the only officer buried in a marked grave on the field. On September 11, 1931, however, his remains were exhumed and reinterred with full military honors in the nearby Custer Battlefield National Cemetery.

Most estimates of Indian losses that day make the case that only thirty or forty were killed. As Custer once pointed out, the Indians invariably endeavored to conceal their exact losses. The only Indian casualties that were found after the battle consisted of eight bodies located in two lodges—five in one, three in the other—within the abandoned village. These dead warriors were dressed in their finest clothing and were lying on scaffolds.

Few Indian participants offered an opinion with respect to casualties. Red Horse did later say that “the soldiers killed 136 and wounded 160 Sioux.” It would stand to reason that the allied Indians likely lost that many and perhaps more.

On June 28, 1876, while the remnants of Major Marcus Reno's command were occupied with the unenviable task of burying the dead from Custer's command, Colonel John Gibbon stood on the battlefield and scribbled a message in his notebook. “General Custer's command met with terrible disaster here on the 25th,” he wrote. “Custer, with five companies, were so far as we can ascertain, completely annihilated.… Roughly stated the loss of Custer's command is about one-half, say 250 men.”

The dispatch most likely would have been written above the signature of General Alfred H. Terry, the highest-ranking officer present. Gibbon tore the pages from his notebook and ordered scout H. M. “Muggins” Taylor to carry the message without delay to Captain D. W. Benham at Fort Ellis, near Bozeman, Montana, which was the closest telegraph station.

Taylor, who has been described as a gambler and professional hunter, embarked upon a circuitous route to the fort and on the evening of July 2 arrived in Stillwater, Montana, now present-day Columbus, too exhausted to continue his mission. He presented himself at the general store, owned by William H. Norton and Horace Countryman, and related the news of Custer's fate. Norton, apparently a stringer for the Helena
Herald,
interviewed Taylor and quickly wrote a story that his partner, Horace Countryman, would deliver to Helena.