The Real Custer (43 page)

Custer had not lost his taste for taking risks. Over the next few months he would place himself in danger a number of times, meeting with Indians who might just as well have sought vengeance on him. “Yesterday a grand council was held near my tent,” he wrote Libbie. “All the head chiefs of the Apaches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Comaches, Cheyennes were present. I was alone with them except for an officer who took
stenographic notes.”
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He campaigned into the spring, trying to bring in the last of the recalcitrant bands. He talked Sheridan into allowing him to take a small force into what had been Cheyenne country at the headwaters of the Red River, not to fight but to negotiate. “At first I was inclined to disapprove Custer's proposition,” Sheridan recalled, “but he urged it so strongly that I finally consented, though with some misgivings.” Sheridan was concerned that Custer's appearing with “so small a party might tempt the Cheyennes to forget their pacific professions and seek to avenge the destruction of Black Kettle's band.”

Custer set out with a few officers, forty men, and intermediaries Yellow Bear and Little Robe. But after days of searching, Custer could not find the Indians he sought. He set out again with a much larger force, a column of 1,500 that the Cheyenne could not as easily ignore. Early reports from couriers promised success. Then the news turned grim. Major Ames at Fort Lyons was reported saying Custer was captured by Indians around March 10.
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Two weeks later, the
New York Times
reported that Custer was “corralled” by the Indians. Custer's men were “nearly without horses, and the impression prevailed among those best informed, that the General and his command were in a tight place.” He was supposedly waylaid by Kiowa under Lone Wolf and Satanta seeking payback for his imprisonment, Arapahos led by Little Raven, and Cheyenne out for vengeance after Washita. “One of the most terrible Indian wars that has yet been waged on the Plains will break out this spring,” the paper speculated.
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But none of this was true. The same day the
New York Times
reported Custer basically done for, he sent word to Sheridan his expedition had been a success.
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He had pressed his force swiftly across the Plains, outpacing the Indians, and eventually ran down a village of 260 lodges. Custer first thought to attack, but then learned that the Cheyenne held two white women, Mrs. Morgan and Miss White, and it would have been certain death for them if he just went in with guns blazing.

Custer rode up to the village with a small party, and Chief Stone Forehead, the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, came out to meet him. After a brief parlay they repaired to his lodge. Along the way Custer saw that the village was in a great state of excitement, ready for a fight. Among them were the Dog Soldiers, which one paper called “the most mischievous, bloodthirsty and barbarous band of Indians that infest the Plains.”
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This was another reason for caution; Custer did not think his weary men would be up to the fight.

Custer sat with the tribal chiefs and smoked a long sacred pipe. He describes the solemn ceremony in detail in
My Life on the Plains
from the perspective of a “disinterested observer” even though he was a central part of the proceedings. “A desire to conform as far as practicable to the wishes of the Indians,” he wrote, “and a curiosity to study a new and interesting phase of the Indian character, prompted me to obey the direction of the medicine man, and I accordingly began puffing away with as great a degree of nonchalance as a man unaccustomed to smoking could well assume.”
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Custer admits he almost got sick from having to smoke almost an entire bowl, but he persisted and the pipe made the rounds. Yet Custer failed to mention in his account that when the pipe returned to Stone Forehead, he tapped out the ashes from the bowl on Custer's boots, cautioning him that if he ever broke faith with the Cheyenne, he would become like those ashes.

Custer did not take long to wound Cheyenne pride. Later in the day, after returning to his camp, he took Chiefs Big Head and Dull Knife hostage and threatened to hang them unless the white hostages were released. “Only when the rope and tree were chosen did the Indians deliver up their captives,” the
New York Herald
reported.

Sheridan was exultant with Custer's performance in the campaign. He promised to press for a promotion for his young protégé and told Custer to take a long leave, “as long as you please.” Custer said that the campaign “taught the Indians that they are safe from us in no place, and
at no season, and also what some of our people may doubt, that the white man can endure the inclemencies of winter better than Indians.”
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He reported back to headquarters that he held “captive Cheyenne chiefs as hostages for the good behavior of their tribe, and for the fulfillment of the promise of the latter to come in and conform to the demands of the government.”

He concluded, “This I consider is the end of the Indian war.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CUSTER ON THE PLAINS

“H
ow many military men have reaped laurels from their Indian campaigns?” George Custer wrote, years after Washita. “Does he strive to win the approving smile of his countrymen? That is indeed, in this particular instance, a difficult task.”
¹
The press and politicians both exalted and condemned Custer for his role in the 1868–69 Indian campaign. But he may well have expected some official recognition for his achievements. He had succeeded where others had failed; he had validated the concept of winter war against the Indians; and he had forced many of the dissident bands onto the reservations. Moreover, he had, so he hoped, rescued his reputation from the missteps and mortification of the previous few years.

The timing seemed opportune. On March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant was sworn in as eighteenth president of the United States, and William
T. Sherman assumed Grant's former position of commanding general of the Army. Sheridan, coming off the successful Plains campaign, was promoted to lieutenant general, and moved into Sherman's former command of the Division of the Missouri. Sheridan had promised Custer he would do what he could to get him promoted, and given his patron's influence, George had every reason to expect good things. The stars appeared to be aligning two months later, when Colonel Andrew J. Smith retired from command of the 7th Cavalry to become postmaster of St. Louis. It was the ideal opportunity to elevate Custer both to the open colonelcy and to command the regiment he had led successfully into battle.

Instead, both went to Samuel Sturgis. Sturgis was an 1846 Academy graduate and wartime volunteer brigadier general with a commendable though not stellar combat record. A complicating factor in the new arrangement was a misunderstanding between Custer and Sturgis in the summer of 1865, which they had papered over. Sturgis's receiving the command Custer wanted reawakened the resentment.

To escape the indignity, in June 1869 Custer requested appointment as commandant of cadets at West Point. It would be a dream assignment both for Custer and the cadets, and Libbie would enjoy life on the post, especially as wife of the second-ranking officer at the Academy. But that assignment went to Emory Upton, who as a cadet in Custer's day had been persecuted for his abolitionist beliefs and then gone on to serve bravely in the Civil War. Upton was a noted military intellectual who literally rewrote the book on infantry tactics based on his wartime experiences. In 1870 Custer, disappointed at losing out to Upton, reportedly threatened to resign.
²

Custer's frustration at not attaining additional rank and responsibility is understandable given the commands he held during the war and what he achieved with them. On the other hand, he was still the highest-ranking member of his West Point cohort. Of the thirty-four graduates
of the Class of June 1861, nineteen were still serving at the end of 1870, and of them, seventeen were captains. One of them, Joseph C. Audenreid, served as an acting colonel as an aide to General Sherman. Peter S. Hains was the only major, promoted in 1870. Of the rest of the class, three had left the service for civilian life, and three resigned after graduation to fight for the Confederacy. Nine were dead—four of wounds received in battle, two from other causes, and three, O'Rorke, Cushing, and Woodruff, killed in action at Gettysburg.

From that perspective, Custer was excelling in his Army career. Furthermore, he was the deputy commander of a cavalry regiment that frequently saw action, rather than a garrison commander in the East, a staff officer pushing papers in the War Department, or, like Major Hains, superintending engineer of the 5th Lighthouse District.

Despite his misgivings, Custer stayed in the West with the 7th Cavalry and made the best of it. Sturgis, like his predecessor, was often on detached duty, leaving George in command. He reinvented himself for the West, fully embracing his public identity as a frontier warrior. The Boy General in blue making mad charges against the rebels was replaced with the buckskin-clad frontiersman, vanquisher of the Indian and the buffalo. The new image was much like the old—dashing, warlike, romantic. And he kept the red cravat.

Custer's makeover was not superficial; he took well to the Plains, with its wide-open spaces, boundless opportunities for riding and hunting, and an appealing sense of adventure. He stalked the game the region provided, accompanied by his loyal hounds. “Although an ardent sportsman, I had never hunted the buffalo up to this time,” Custer wrote of his first pursuit of the bison. He was eager to try it. During a lull in the Hancock expedition, he went off by himself on a hunt and found a lone buffalo, the first and largest he ever saw. Custer stalked the animal, and when he and his dogs emerged from concealment in a ravine, the beast “set off as fast as his legs could carry him.” The chase continued for miles,
until the bison, with George's pistol pressed in its side, “suddenly determined to fight, and at once wheeled, as only a buffalo can,” to gore Custer's horse. His mount, Custis Lee, a favorite of Libbie's that he had ridden in the war, veered wildly to avoid the attack. George grabbed the reins with both hands, and “unfortunately as I did so,” he wrote, “my finger, in the excitement of the occasion, pressed the trigger, discharged the pistol, and sent the fatal ball into the very brain of the noble animal I rode.” Custer was thrown to the ground. The bison broke off the attack and departed. The dogs ran up and “with mute glances first at the dead steed, then at me, seemed to inquire the cause of this strange condition of affairs.” Custer set off on foot, and fortunately a detachment of cavalrymen found him before the Sioux did. It was an inauspicious start to a successful period as a buffalo hunter.
³

Custer was the informal chief huntsman for his regiment, helping keep the larders stocked with fresh meat. He was an amateur naturalist, keeping live animal specimens on post and sending others to zoos in the East. He also saved fossils from rich western beds that he forwarded to scientists. And he took up taxidermy, a useful art to while away the winter months.

Libbie was with George whenever possible, in established posts or tented encampments, at all times except during active operations. The two enjoyed each other's company on long rides and quiet evenings, as well as at the many social events they attended with the command or on trips back “to the states.” Libbie adapted well to life on post and in camp. She was gracious in her important though informal role as the commander's spouse, and patient with their hardships. The couple faced some financial difficulties; George dabbled unsuccessfully in land ventures in Kansas, and the Bacon estate, which was supposed to support Libbie's mother, turned out to have been mismanaged by its executor and was in a shambles. Their cook and companion, Eliza, who had been with the couple through many challenges during the Civil War and after,
departed late in 1869. The loneliness of the Plains had gotten to her, and as she explained to Libbie, “You's always got the ginnel, but I hain't got nobody.”
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But Libbie kept a good attitude over the years, seeming to relish the challenges the couple faced. “How we have managed to preserve the romance . . . after nine years of married life and all our vicissitudes,” she wrote in the summer of 1873. “Though we have had our trials, you have the blessed faculty of looking on the sunny side of things. Dear Autie, you are the richest of men.”
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Yet, years after George was gone, a Navy officer opined to Brigadier General Edward S. Godfrey that “Custer was a brave man but a brute to his wife.”