The Real Custer (39 page)

Late in the afternoon on June 7, thirteen more men “deliberately shouldered their arms and started off for the Platte,” Custer wrote, “in the presence of the entire command, in open day.”
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This bold action threatened the cohesion of the entire unit, and Custer determined that “severe and summary measures must be taken.” He ordered Major Joel
Elliot, Lieutenants Tom Custer, William W. Cooke, and Henry Jackson, and a few enlisted men to “pursue the deserters who were still visible . . . and then bring the dead bodies of as many as could be taken back to camp.”

The pursuers set out. Seven of the thirteen deserters had opened up a two-mile lead and got away. Three of the remaining six were shot and wounded, and the other three surrendered. All six were placed under arrest and hauled back to camp in a wagon. Custer at first said the wounded would not be treated, but half an hour later quietly instructed the surgeon to tend to them. One of the men, Charles Johnson, who was shot in the head and abdomen, subsequently died of his wounds. “The effect was all that could be desired,” Custer wrote. “There was not another desertion as long as I remained with the command.”
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The column resupplied at Fort McPherson, then moved up the Platte valley, passing abandoned ranches and numerous rough graves, “all that told of the fate of the poor mortals who had ventured to make a home on the Plains,” as Davis put it.
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Twelve miles up the valley, they made camp near Jack Morrow's ranch. A Sioux war leader named Pawnee Killer arrived unexpectedly with a half dozen braves, saying they “loved their white brothers” and wanted food and protection from the Cheyenne. Pawnee Killer promised Custer he would encamp quietly near Fort McPherson if permitted, and when he left, Custer gave him a supply of coffee, sugar, and hard tack.

General Sherman, who arrived the next day, was skeptical that Pawnee Killer could be trusted. He ordered Custer south to the headwaters of the Republican River to search for Indian bands, then encamp and await further instructions. Sherman had a high opinion of George; earlier that year he wrote his brother that Custer was “young,
very
brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer. He came to duty immediately on being appointed, and is ready and willing now to fight the Indians.” Sherman said he was “bound to befriend him.”
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Sherman
encouraged Custer to be ruthless with the Indians, but as the column moved up the river there were none to be found—except when they wanted to be.

At dawn on June 24, the troopers were “busy grooming and feeding our stock, at peace with all the world,” one of Custer's men recalled, when “suddenly came bang, bang, bang! and most unearthly yells.” They saw “hundreds of Indians, all mounted on fleet ponies, and coming for us with a vengeance.” The Indians wounded a sentry and attempted to drive off the cavalrymen's horses, “until the guard opened on them such a galling fire that they were obliged to retire.” Custer was impressed with the skill the Indians displayed in mounting their attack. “We had often heard of the high perfection of some of the Indian tribes in military evolutions and discipline, but here we saw evidences which went far to convince us that the red man was not far behind his more civilized brother in the art of war.”
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A truce was called, and Custer rode out with a half dozen men to talk to the leader of the war party. It was Pawnee Killer. He recognized Custer and asked him why he had left the Platte. Custer asked where Pawnee Killer's village was and why he was not near Fort McPherson as promised. Neither got a satisfactory answer. Pawnee Killer said his heart was good and asked for more sugar and coffee, and also some ammunition, none of which was forthcoming.

After the uncomfortable parlay, Custer rode back to his camp and ordered his men to make ready for a fight. They chased Pawnee Killer and his braves, but the Indians outran the cavalrymen, and Custer returned to camp. “This was the way they returned the favor” of the supplies, Custer's trooper wrote. “Pawnee-killer said it was a mistake, and Gen. Custer let him off scot free. The peace the old fellow wanted was a piece of our hair, I presume.”
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Later that day a small group of Indians returned and watched the camp from a nearby bluff. Captain Louis McLane Hamilton, grandson
of Alexander Hamilton, and, like his grandfather, handsome and ambitious, took a party of twenty men and rode after the Indians, chasing them eight miles from camp. But this was the same ruse that had fooled Fetterman; Hamilton rode into an ambush of three hundred Sioux. His group fought doggedly for an hour and somehow managed to get back to camp suffering no losses other than one horse.

Meanwhile, things were heating up elsewhere. One of Custer's supply trains, escorted by a detachment led by Lieutenants Samuel M. Robbins and William W. Cooke, fought a three-hour, fifteen-mile running battle with around eight hundred Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, suffering two wounded. And a detachment under Captain Barnitz got into a brutal, hand-to-hand scrape with a large group of Indians near Fort Wallace, losing some killed with many wounded.
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In the garbled way that news was sometimes passed along from the remote frontier, the
New York Tribune
, which was skeptical of the Plains campaign, reported that “there are no signs of a speedy end to the Indian war. Five thousand Sioux forbid white men to enter their country, the Utes threaten new disturbances, and it is reported that Gen. Custer has been overpowered and killed.”
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A British newspaper echoed this report, saying, “A large force of Indians had surrounded a small body of cavalry under General Custer, and killed the whole party.”
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The
St. Cloud Journal
responded to the false report: “If Gen. Custer had killed a pack of Indians the
Tribune
would have raised a fearful howl. This Indian worship is one of the most disgusting features of Eastern sentimentalism.”
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Sherman, long an enemy of the press, said that “journalists should endeavor to ascertain the truth before shocking the public with such terrible announcements.”
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Awaiting further orders from Sherman, Custer moved his command along the Republican, then overland to the Platte, then to Riverside Station, forty miles west of Fort Sedgwick. There he learned by telegraph that orders had been sent out with Lieutenant Lyman Kidder and a party of ten, guided by a friendly Sioux named Red Beard. Custer was ordered
to continue to Fort Wallace as originally planned; en route on July 12 near Beaver Creek, he found the mutilated remains of Kidder and his party. Red Beard had been scalped but the trophy left behind, a sign that it had been a Sioux ambush, probably Pawnee Killer's band.

The next day Custer arrived at Fort Wallace. He had expected to find Libbie there to greet him. But there was no word from her, and he learned that a flash flood on the Smoky Hill River at Fort Hays where she was last staying had taken nine lives. (In fact Libbie had a harrowing experience and narrowly escaped being swept away, not that he knew.) This was too much for him. After learning that the civilians from Fort Hays had been evacuated further downstream to Fort Harker, Custer assembled a group of seventy-five officers and men led by Captain Hamilton, and on July 15 they set out.

Custer drove his men mercilessly, 150 miles in fifty-five hours. The weather was hot and the way dangerous. “The Indians swarm along the route,” one report noted, “and are bolder and more determined than ever before.”
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Near Downer's Station some of Custer's men who had lingered to the rear a few miles were attacked by a band of Cheyenne, and two were killed. Custer refused to take the time to send back a party to retrieve the bodies of the dead.

He arrived at Fort Harker early on the morning of July 19 and learned that Libbie had been sent safely to Fort Riley. He reported to Colonel Smith and asked permission to continue east. Smith, half-asleep and not knowing whether Custer was operating on orders from Sherman, allowed him to take the first morning train.

Several hours later George was reunited with Libbie. She closed her memoir,
Tenting on the Plains
, with a description of the scene, echoing the romance of her reunion with George in Richmond at the end of the Civil War:

            
After days of such gloom, my leaden heart one morning quickened its beats at an unusual sound—the clank of a saber
on our gallery and with it the quick, springing steps of feet, unlike the quiet infantry around us. The door, behind which I paced uneasily, opened, and with a flood of sunshine that poured in, came a vision far brighter than even the brilliant Kansas sun. There, before me, blithe and buoyant, stood my husband! In an instant, every moment of the preceding months was obliterated. What had I to ask more?. . . There was in that summer of 1867 one long, perfect day.
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But at the end of the “long, perfect day,” George Custer received some alarming news. Colonel Smith had made inquiries regarding Custer's journey and, finding he had no orders to leave his command at Fort Wallace, had Custer placed under arrest.

The Custer court-martial convened September 15 at Fort Leavenworth. The prosecutor was Captain Robert Chandler, judge advocate. Custer was defended by a West Point classmate, Captain Charles C. Parsons.
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The presiding officer was Colonel William Hoffman, an 1829 Academy grad, and seven other officers served on the court, including another Custer classmate, Captain Stephen Lyford.

Custer faced three charges with eight specifications, most importantly conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline, and absence without leave from his command. Conduct prejudicial included marching his men on “private business” (his search for Libbie). He was also taken to task for not returning for the bodies of the men killed near Downer's Station or pursuing the Indians who killed them.
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Captain Robert M. West raised the additional matter of shooting deserters without a trial, since Charles Johnson, the man who had died from the wounds he received while being apprehended, had served in his company. He also said the prisoners were treated cruelly, being denied water in the heat and forced to ride tied up in rough wagons.
Custer believed Hancock had prompted West to press this part of the case in order to shift attention from the fact that the Indian campaign had been a failure.

Hancock—known as “the Superb” for his Civil War exploits—was having trouble adapting to Plains warfare. The Indian Commission had held hearings at Fort Leavenworth shortly before Custer's court-martial, and most of the testimony was negative. “It would have been far better for the interests of all concerned had [Hancock] never entered the Indian country with his soldiers,” Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas Murphy assessed. “Indians who at the time he got into the country were peaceable and well disposed towards the whites, are now fleeing with their women and children, no one knows whither, and what the final result will be is doubtful.”
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Given this backdrop, Custer and those sympathetic to his case thought he was being used as a scapegoat.

Custer pleaded not guilty to all charges and specifications, and the trial commenced. Many witnesses were called, including the officers involved in the events (including Tom Custer), some of the enlisted men, and the surgeon who treated the wounded men (who backed Custer's story). Captain West, a spree drinker, was considered too volatile to be an effective witness, and the prosecution kept him off the stand. Generally the case came down less to the facts, on which many agreed, and more to whether Custer's actions were justifiable.

Custer never took the stand but submitted a lengthy written statement, which sought to lend reasonable context to what happened. He argued he was out on the frontier commanding a relatively small force, unsupported by other units, with hostile Indians on the warpath. His command had already suffered many desertions, and a scheme was afoot for a mass break of perhaps a third of his force. Of the thirteen men who deserted on the day in question, over half got away. When the pursuers neared the remaining six, three of them dismounted and raised their carbines at them—actions not unusual in these cases, and meriting the use of deadly force in return. Three were wounded in the ensuing
shootout, one seriously. The wounded were taken in wagons as opposed to ambulances because the ambulances were unserviceable. If faced with another such desertion, Custer said he would do the same thing. His determined action stopped desertions from the unit, at least for the time being.