The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (49 page)

Dewey Beard was caught in the deadly crossfire. “I saw my friends sinking about me, and heard the whine of many bullets. I was not expecting this. It was like when a wagon breaks in the road.” In just a few minutes, eighty-three Minneconjou men lay dead. Since Forsyth had positioned his soldiers around the camp, they were firing not only on the Indians but on one another, and one of the casualties was Captain Wallace, who was later found, according to one account, with a bullet through his forehead.

Women, children, and the handful of men still left alive attempted to escape into the surrounding bluffs and canyons. Captain Edward Godfrey, another veteran of the Little Bighorn, led a detail of between fifteen and twenty soldiers in pursuit. Several miles from the battleground at a place called White Horse Creek, they came upon some Indians hiding in the bushes. Godfrey suspected that they might be women and children and called out, “Hau, Kola,” meaning “Hello, friend.” When there was no response, he ordered his soldiers to fire. The next thing they heard were “screams as from women and children.”

When Godfrey and another soldier went to investigate, they found a woman and two small girls “in their death struggles.” There was also a boy with his arms stretched out and his coat pulled over his head as if he had just fallen down. When the boy moved, the soldier shot him in the head.

Godfrey received the brevet rank of major after the engagement, but there were those in the highest ranks of the military who believed he’d committed an atrocity at Wounded Knee. One of those was President Theodore Roosevelt, who vowed that Godfrey would never receive a promotion under his administration. Roosevelt eventually relented, and Godfrey retired as a brigadier general.

In addition to Captain Wallace, a second Little Bighorn veteran of the Seventh Cavalry was killed that day. Gustave Korn was a blacksmith with I Company and the caretaker for Myles Keogh’s horse Comanche, by then the pampered mascot of the regiment. When Korn died at Wounded Knee, Comanche became despondent. His health declined, and on November 6, 1891, Comanche, famed as “the last living thing” found near Last Stand Hill, died at age twenty-nine.

I
n the early morning hours of July 6, 1876, Libbie Custer lay on her bed, unable to sleep in her home at Fort Lincoln. She, along with all the soldiers’ wives, had heard the blasts of the
Far West
’s whistle when the boat arrived at Bismarck, just a few miles up the Missouri.

Already, they feared the worst. Two days before, the families of the Indian scouts at the fort had received news “of a great battle.” But what the results had been, “no white man knew.”

At 7 a.m., a delegation led by Captain William McCaskey, the ranking officer at the fort, arrived at the front door of the Custer residence. As they waited, Lieutenant C. L. Gurley went to the back of the house to awaken the Custers’ maid, Marie, who was to ask that Libbie and her sister-in-law Maggie meet them in the parlor. As soon as Gurley knocked on the back door, Libbie threw on a dressing gown, opened her bedroom door, and saw Gurley walking down the hall to open the front door for the others. She asked the lieutenant why he had come to the house at such an early hour. Choosing not to reply, Gurley followed McCaskey and the others into the parlor, where they told Libbie and Maggie the terrible news. “Imagine the grief of those stricken women,” Gurley later wrote, “their sobs, their flood of tears, the grief that knew no consolation.”

The day was already quite hot, but Libbie began to shiver and sent for a wrap. She decided that as the wife of the regiment’s commander she must accompany McCaskey as he made the rounds of the garrison. There were twenty-six more wives who had yet to learn that they were now widows.

T
he
Far West
remained at Fort Lincoln until the following day. That morning, Libbie Custer sent a carriage to the landing with the request that Marsh visit with her and the other wives of the garrison.

A month and a half before, he and these same women had enjoyed an impromptu lunch in the cabin of the
Far West
. Since that time their world had irrevocably changed. In the months ahead Libbie became so despondent that her friends feared for her sanity. That fall, Custer’s best friend, the actor Lawrence Barrett, visited her at the home of Custer’s parents in Monroe, Michigan.

In one of the rooms, Libbie had re-created Custer’s study, complete with the animal heads and the photograph of Barrett that hung in its customary place above the desk. “I could almost fancy that [Custer] himself was about to enter,” Lawrence wrote his wife. “So thoroughly was the place embraced by his belongings.” Libbie admitted that she had considered suicide until the “presence” of her husband had told her “to live for those they loved.”

She’d since begun to cooperate with the author Frederick Whittaker, who was writing a book that would prove “her dear Husband was ‘sacrificed’—that Reno was a coward, by whose fault alone the dreadful disaster took place.” She was also waiting for “the proper moment” to demand a military investigation to clear her husband’s name. “I learned to estimate the true strength of Mrs. Custer,” Barrett wrote. “And to see what a wife she had been to him, sinking her own personality to push him forward.” Libbie insisted that she had no regrets—“that her life with him had been one of intense happiness—which could not last, she knew—that she would live upon the memory of it.”

But on the morning of July 7, the day the nation first learned of her husband’s death, Libbie was still in the throes of inconsolable despair. Marsh decided that he “could not bear the thought of witnessing [her] grief,” and declined the invitation.

L
ibbie spent the rest of her life playing out her grief and widowhood before a national audience. The Lakota and Cheyenne widows (some of whom had also lost sisters, brothers, children, and parents in the battle) were afforded no such stage or audience. In the years to come those who were not gunned down or otherwise mistreated during the incidents up to and including Wounded Knee lived out the rest of their lives on the reservations, where malnutrition, disease, and poverty replaced the variety and endless challenges of life on the plains.

W
hittaker’s biography of Custer appeared in the fall of 1876. As Libbie had hoped, the book depicted Reno as both a coward and a traitor. To clear his name, Reno requested a court of inquiry into his conduct during the battle. In the winter of 1879, a military court convened at the Palmer House in Chicago, Illinois.

Over the course of almost a month, dozens of witnesses testified before the court. Their statements provided a wealth of information about the battle. But the statements also skirted the issue of blame. The rancor many of the officers had expressed about Reno’s actions during the battle had begun to cool—especially when General Sheridan made it clear that he wanted no disclosures during the proceedings that might reflect poorly on the U.S. Army. By January 1879, the officers of the Seventh had closed ranks. In the end, the judges refused to condemn Reno, but they also refused to exonerate him.

By that time, Reno had lost himself to drink. In addition to the court of inquiry, he endured two humiliating courts-martial, one for making illicit advances toward the wife of a fellow officer, another for peeping through the bedroom window of Colonel Sturgis’s teenage daughter. He was dismissed from the service, and in 1889 he died of complications after surgery for throat cancer.

Frederick Benteen also fell victim to a career-ending court-martial. With Custer gone, it was General Crook’s turn to become the object of Benteen’s scorn. After the two clashed, Benteen did as he’d done after the Washita and fed an unflattering story to the press. Unlike Custer, who had let it pass, Crook was unwilling to tolerate such blatant insubordination, and Benteen had no choice but to retire.

He returned to his home in Atlanta, where he spent much of the next decade trading letters with a variety of correspondents, most of whom wanted to know more about Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Benteen obliged with a series of gossipy and vituperative letters (the writing of which he once compared to “a goose doing his mess by moonlight”) where he made plain the tortured depths of his obsession with Custer. To Theodore Goldin, another veteran of the battle, he admitted that he had felt no sorrow upon viewing the dead bodies of Custer and his circle of relatives and friends. “The Lord, in His own good time had at last rounded the scoundrels up,” he wrote, “taking, however, many good and innocent men with them!”

Benteen despised Custer, but he was powerless to prevent the general’s reemergence as a Great American Hero. The rapid ascent of Custer’s posthumous reputation was not without some initial resistance. Terry’s supposedly private letter to Sheridan blaming Custer for the disaster was published in the summer of 1876 when the document accidentally fell into the hands of a newspaper reporter. Later that year, President Grant publicly claimed that Custer had unnecessarily sacrificed his battalion. One of Custer’s most vociferous critics was the Seventh Cavalry’s own commander, Colonel Samuel Sturgis, who’d lost his son in the battle. “[T]hat he was overreached by Indian tactics, and hundreds of valuable lives sacrificed thereby,” Sturgis said of Custer, “will astonish those alone who may have read his writings—not those who were best acquainted with him and knew the peculiarities of his character.”

But none of these naysayers could match the righteous indignation of Libbie, who dedicated the rest of her long life to making sure her beloved Autie was remembered in the most positive light. In addition to ensuring that the battle’s unofficial historian, Custer’s former lieutenant Edward Godfrey, wrote nothing that might compromise her husband’s reputation, she published her own books about her experiences in the West. The Custer that emerges from the pages of her three reminiscences is boyish, brave, patriotic, and charming. But there was another force contributing to Custer’s rise as an American hero: the myth of the Last Stand.

In the late nineteenth century, with the help of Buffalo Bill Cody’s tremendously popular Wild West Show, which often ended with an earsplitting reenactment of Custer’s demise, the perpetually thirty-six-year-old general became the symbol of what many Americans wanted their country to be: a pugnacious, upstart global power. Just as Custer had stood fearlessly before overwhelming odds, the United States must stand firm against the likes of Spain, Germany, and Russia. Now that America had completed its bloodstained march across the West, it was time to take on the world.

As Custer, or at least the mythic incarnation of Custer, remained center stage in the ongoing drama of American history, those who’d managed to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn were left with the aftermath of the general’s controversial leave-taking. Some, like Edward Godfrey and Peter Thompson, attempted to reconstruct, as best they could, what had happened on June 25, 1876. Others, like Frederick Benteen, insisted that it no longer mattered: “ ’tis a dead, dead issue,” he wrote Goldin, “stale, flat, &c.” But as both of them knew perfectly well, that had not prevented Benteen from writing compulsively about the man he loathed above all others.

One spring day in Atlanta, Benteen attended a lecture entitled “Reno, Custer, and the Little Big Horn.” “The lecture abounded in compliments to me,” he wrote Goldin, then added, somewhat unconvincingly, “but really . . . I’m out of that whirlpool now.”

F
our years after Custer’s death, Grant Marsh returned to the Little Bighorn with three slabs of granite perched on his riverboat’s bow. The following winter the stones were dragged by sledge across the frozen river, and in the summer of 1881, the summer Sitting Bull surrendered at Fort Buford, the stones were assembled into a monument on Last Stand Hill.

EPILOGUE

Libbie’s House

A
t the corner of Cass and West Seventh streets in Monroe, Mich-igan, sits the two-story, three-bedroom house in which Libbie Custer was raised. In 1999, the house was bought by Steve and Sandy Alexander. Alexander is known as the country’s foremost Custer reenactor. Bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to the general, he has spent his life researching every conceivable aspect of the Custer biography and has become a fixture at the reenactments staged each year near the battleground. He can quote long passages of the general’s prose; he has studied the many photographs; he has a uniform for each stage in Custer’s multifaceted career. With an endearing humility, he has somehow managed to inhabit the personality of one of America’s most famous egomaniacs. As his Web site proclaims, “Steve Alexander
is
George Armstrong Custer.”