The Real Custer (44 page)

“That is a new one to me,” Godfrey wrote. He had joined the 7th Cavalry in 1867 as a second lieutenant, fresh out of West Point. “Frequent visits and in camp gave me as fair opportunities to judge the home life and personal or family relations of his household as probably his critics had.” He said Libbie's devotion to George's memory, and the continued loyalty of their close friends and associates, argued otherwise. “In the old days of garrison life of a regiment,” Godfrey recalled, “there was an intimacy and inter-relation between families at different posts that was wonderful, and probably difficult for people outside to understand, and was often misrepresented.” He said that “there was not much that could be hidden for any length of time” and he “never had any reason to believe that the family relations were other than happy contentment.”

“On the march, in camp, in garrison, at great and small social functions of garrisons, in the home life, I've seen considerable of both Gen. and Mrs. Custer, and never discovered that their relations had cause for unhappiness,” Godfrey wrote. “They were always chummy and seemed in perfect harmony.”
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George, charismatic and naturally flirtatious, attracted the attentions of women wherever he went, particularly when Libbie was absent. He
wrote to his wife about his various innocent encounters with a candor that would shock contemporary husbands for the inevitable sharp questioning they would face later in the same circumstances. (“There is a beautiful girl, eighteen or nineteen, blonde, who has walked past the hotel several times trying to attract my attention,” George wrote Libbie during a trip alone to New York City. “Twice for sport I followed her.”)
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This frankness reflected George's ingenuousness and open nature but did nothing to quell stories of his wandering eye.

In September 1873, Custer attended a reunion of the Army of the Tennessee in Toledo, Ohio, to network with Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. In the receiving line after the banquet, “a certain familiarity grew up between the visitors and ladies,” and the girls started kissing the generals. This “opened an excellent opportunity for the fair belles of Toledo and the sunny daughters of the rural districts to kiss the president and some of the military heroes of the late war,” the
Toledo Commercial
reported, “and they took advantage of the opportunity.” Sheridan and Custer competed to see who could get the most kisses, and George, “whose position was on the left, made a brilliant charge, and for ten minutes kissed every lady that passed him.” According to the reporter's informal, tongue-in-cheek count, Custer won the contest 417–410, with President Grant coming in at 393, and Sherman with 297.
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Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
ran a full-page engraving of the scene entitled “The Generals Kissing the Girls,” with George accepting the attentions of a swooning maiden, a scandalized matron looking on.
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This event no doubt helped solidify George's public reputation as a ladies' man.

There were less innocent accounts of Custer's waywardness. One concerned a Board of Inquiry allegedly held late in the Civil War regarding a dozen or more prostitutes Custer had put on the Federal payroll, listing them as “mule skinners.” When it was uncovered, Custer was not punished but forced to repay the money. There was no finding that George personally availed himself of the women's services. The records
of the proceeding were made secret, but according to Harry S. Truman's friend Keith Wilson Jr., the president enjoyed looking through old classified documents in his spare time and “got a big kick out of reading about Custer's womanizing.”
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A better-known story of George's alleged waywardness concerned his relationship with a pregnant Indian woman captured at Washita named Meotzi, also known as Monahsetah or “Spring Grass,” daughter of the slain chief Little Rock. George called her “an exceedingly comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians.”
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Frederick Benteen said that Custer “slept with her all the time” in the winter of 1868–69 in camp and when she accompanied the campaign as a translator, and she was also allegedly intimate with Tom Custer. According to scout Ben Clark, Raphael Romero was put in charge of the rest of the captive squaws and sent them around to officers' tents every night.
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However, Clark's and especially Benteen's motives in telling these stories have been questioned, and there are no other such accounts. Cheyenne gossip attributed Meotzi's eventual son to George, but since the timeline made no sense (the baby was born in January 1869), Custer was then called the father of a purported subsequent child, of which there is no record. But it is likely that George could not father children in any case, due to sterility caused by gonorrhea he had contracted during his 1859 West Point furlough.
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And if he was up to something with Meotzi, he was not very circumspect; he mentioned her extensively in
My Life on the Plains
and even wrote Libbie about her at the time. And whatever the truth of George's relationships with other women, Libbie never sought greener pastures and never remarried after he was gone.

The Custers had no children, and George never showed any indication of wanting to be a father. At news of a mutual friend's new baby, he
wrote Libbie that he “pitied him and congratulated myself that it was his wife and not mine who was the victim.” He said he had “love enough for you but none to spare upon someone who I have never seen and don't want to see,” and who would give him “much more anxiety & troubles than pleasure. You are all I desire, let those who must then have children. You are my wife and my baby I ask for no more.”
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Perhaps George's unsympathetic attitude was a rationalization of his disappointment in being unable to have children, since he probably would have been a loving and caring father.

Instead, the 7th Cavalry became part of Custer's extended family. Tom Custer was in the regiment, and George lobbied unsuccessfully for a commission for their young brother Boston. Bos later accompanied the unit on several expeditions as a civilian. Handsome Lieutenant James Calhoun—the shy “Adonis” of the regiment—met George's sister Margaret in 1870, and they were married two years later. Captain Myles Moylan married Calhoun's sister Charlotte. Fred Calhoun, James's brother, married George's niece Emma Reed, and Custer tried but failed to have him transferred to the unit. It was common for families to accumulate in regiments in those days, since under the old system an officer would sign on with a unit and stay with it for most if not all his career. Custer said service on the frontier amounted “almost to social exile,” so it was natural for officers to take a romantic interest in their colleagues' eligible visiting sisters and cousins. Other friends and favorites of his included George W. Yates (who was from Monroe), Thomas B. Weir, and Algernon E. Smith.

George did not play favorites with regimental members of the “Custer Clan.” He would even discipline brother Tom if it was warranted. But there was some resentment of what Lieutenant Charles W. Larned referred to as Custer's “royal family” and the perception of favoritism. Libbie called the officers of the 7th Cavalry “a medley of incongruous elements,” among whom Custer had his critics and detractors.
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“Custer is not making himself at all agreeable to the officers of his command,” Larned wrote at Camp Sturgis, Yankton, Dakota, in 1873. “He keeps himself aloof and spends his time in excogitating annoying, vexatious and useless orders which visit us like the swarm of evils from Pandora's box, small, numberless and disagreeable.”
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Custer “wears the men out by ceaseless and unnecessary labor. . . . We all fear that such ill advised and useless impositions will result in large desertions when the command is paid off, as it will be tomorrow morning.” Larned said that “Custer is not belying his reputation—which is that of a man selfishly indifferent to others, and ruthlessly determined to make himself conspicuous at all hazards.”
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Edward S. Godfrey recalled that “Gen. Custer in matters of discipline gave little or no attention to the enlisted men” but rather “held his officers responsible” for the infractions of the men and would punish whole units. Godfrey said that “those who sympathized with his principal aim, discipline, were at first dumbfounded and then outraged.”
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Colonel Sturgis's periodic returns to the 7th were met with joy, according to Larned, “for how long no-one knows . . . perhaps only for a few days—any time would be a relief.” Sturgis said, “Custer was not a popular man among his troops, by any means. He was tyrannical, and had no regard for the soldiers under him.”
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One of Custer's most important critics was Captain Frederick William Benteen, a Virginian who had sided with the Union during the Civil War and fought bravely at Pea Ridge, Vicksburg, and other battles in the West.
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He ended the war the commander of the 138th Colored U.S. Volunteers, and after was assigned to the 7th Cavalry as a captain. “I've been a loser in a way, all my life,” Benteen wrote, “by rubbing a bit against the angles—or hair—of folks, instead of going with their whims; but I couldn't go otherwise—'twould be against the grain of myself.”
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His contrarian spirit was certain to clash with Custer's ego, and the two quickly developed an enduring enmity. Benteen took Custer to task for,
as he saw it, abandoning Major Elliot at Washita. In 1873, during the Yellowstone expedition, Custer disallowed a request for emergency leave so Benteen could visit his desperately ill daughter, who later died. But Custer was not the only person with whom Benteen had bad blood; his private letters revealed him to be “a man of monumental vindictiveness and cancerous bitterness toward almost all his old comrades.”
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Living in the West brought Custer in frequent close contact with Indians, especially the friendly tribes and bands that congregated near the forts, often for protection from the more warlike groups. “It is pleasant at all times, and always interesting, to have a village of peaceable Indians locate their lodges near our frontier posts or camps,” he wrote. “The daily visits of the Indians, from the most venerable chief to the strapped pappoose, their rude interchange of civilities, their barterings, races, dances, legends, strange customs, and fantastic ceremonies, all combine to render them far more agreeable as friendly neighbors than as crafty, bloodthirsty enemies.”
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Custer studied the people of the Plains and wrote accounts of their daily life and culture. He learned some of their sign language but mostly communicated through intermediaries, often mixed-race tribal members with a foot in both cultures. He forged good relationships with his scouts, often Osage, Delaware, Crow, and Arikara, frequent victims of larger and fiercer tribes, who worked with the Army against their traditional enemies. He respected the scouts and their innate knowledge of the Plains, and they generally liked and respected Custer. His Indian nicknames included Long Hair, Creeping Panther, and, after Washita, Son of Morning Star.

Custer's interest in Indian ways was partly intellectual but also practical. He needed to understand them to live among them, pacify them, and if necessary fight them. He was far from the stereotype later ascribed
to him of a brutish Indian killer motivated by scorn and hatred. This is not to say he was without prejudice: Custer was a product of his times and had the predispositions of a white soldier, and he was also a believer in American civilization and progress, which in those days was synonymous with taming, settling, and harnessing the frontier.

Custer wrote that “in studying the Indian character,” he was “shocked and disgusted by many of his traits and customs.”
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He critiqued the myth of the “noble savage,” which had been a staple of Western literature since the seventeenth century, and described Indian life as he observed it. “Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him,” he wrote, “transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him, in his native village, on the war path, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the ‘noble red man.'” Custer said that the white men on the Plains saw the Indian “as he is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a savage in every sense of the word.” He added that the Indian was “not worse, perhaps, than his white brother would be similarly born and bred, but one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert.”