The Real Custer (45 page)

Nevertheless, Custer said that among the Indians he found “much to be admired, and still more of deep and unvarying interest.”
²⁵
He said that Indian life, “with its attendant ceremonies, mysteries, and forms, is a book of unceasing interest. Grant that some of its pages are frightful, and, if possible, to be avoided, yet the attraction is none the weaker.” He believed that the Indian was a unique type of person possessing an enduring attraction. “Study him, fight him, civilize him if you can,” Custer wrote, “he remains still the object of your curiosity, a type of man peculiar and undefined, subjecting himself to no known law of civilization, contending determinedly against all efforts to win him from his chosen mode of life.”
²⁶

Challenges arose from the Indians' sense of nationalism. “The Indians have a strong attachment for the land containing the bones of their ancestors,” Custer wrote, “and dislike to leave it. Love of country is almost a religion with them. . . . there is a strong local attachment that the white man does not feel, and consequently does not respect.”
²⁷
This attachment to the land set up the fundamental conflict, since settlers, miners, and industrialists coveted the fields and the mineral wealth of the West. But Custer did not want perpetual war on the Plains. “I have yet to make the acquaintance of that officer of the army who, in time of undisturbed peace, desired a war with the Indians,” he wrote. “On the contrary, the army is the Indian's best friend, so long as the latter desires to maintain friendship.”
²⁸

Custer believed that the most enduring friendships with the Indians were based on interest. In dealing with any tribe, the whites had to first demonstrate that they could not be driven away, but then to act fairly and “observe strict justice in all dealings” with them. Indians “are naturally cruel to each other as well as to the whites,” Custer said. “It is their nature.” Achieving greatness through committing “acts of barbarity” was an idea “instilled into the Indian's mind from his birth to his death.” Hence, force was needed to meet the Indians on their own terms and to make them “respect the whites and comprehend the power of the government.” But Custer noted that even when an Indian submitted to government power, “he keenly feels the injustice that has been done him, and being of a proud, haughty nature, he resents it.”
²⁹

Like many if not most Army officers, Custer believed many of the Indian problems on the Plains were caused by whites, particularly corrupt bureaucrats in the Indian Bureau. A vast and expensive Federal apparatus was erected to manage the reservation system, which became, as it was said, a means for whites to use Indians to rob both whites and Indians. Graft, influence peddling, and kickbacks were common. Federal payments to the tribes became targets for private traders and those in
government-mandated monopolies who sold overpriced food, clothing, and tools, not to mention whiskey, rifles, and other things that made life difficult for the soldiers. Custer summed up his skeptical view of Indian agents with an anecdote from a tribal chief, who asked him to “see the Great Father and make a statement of their wrongs.” Custer said he would do what he could, and maybe the government would send a new agent. “‘No,' said the chief, ‘we don't want a new agent. Agents come here poor and get rich in a few years. This one has everything he wants. If a new one comes we will have to make him rich also.'”
³⁰

Custer criticized the reservation system for its effect on Indian character. He contrasted the Indian “where Nature placed him . . . the fearless hunter, the matchless horseman and warrior of the Plains,” with the denizen of the reservation, “grovelling in beggary, bereft of many of the qualities which in his wild state tended to render him noble, and heir to a combination of vices partly his own, partly bequeathed to him from the pale-face.” Subjected to a life shaped by white civilization, the Indian loses that which defined him and made him who he was; as Custer said, “He fades away and dies.”
³¹

The Indians' natural identity was what Custer most admired about a people whom fate had made his enemies. “If I were an Indian,” he wrote, “I often think that I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains, rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.”
³²
To Custer, the renegades, the Indians who kept far from the reservations, the bands who would follow Sitting Bull into the wilderness to live the traditional way of life and await the white cavalrymen, represented freedom. They were motivated by the same spirit that animated him, the thirst for life, adventurous and unbounded. He saw them as he saw himself—fearless hunter, matchless horseman, and warrior of the Plains.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE GREAT BUFFALO HUNT

I
n the winter of 1871–72, Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia, the twenty-one-year-old fourth son of Tsar Alexander II, arrived for a grand tour of the United States. Diplomatic visits of this level were rare in the American interior, and at the time Russia was well regarded, if mysterious.
¹
The duke was greeted with acclaim in every city he visited, across the Northeast, throughout the Great Lakes, and into the Midwest. Crowds turned out to see the handsome, young Russian royal, and local politicians rushed to be seen with him. “Alexis fever” broke out; during his visit to West Point, one newspaper reported, “by some happy combination of circumstances the company included an extraordinarily large proportion of very beautiful ladies.”
²

Alexis met with President Grant and other political leaders in Washington, and during a White House dinner Sheridan suggested the grand duke take a trip to the American West to participate in a buffalo hunt.
Alexis agreed, and Sheridan notified George Custer, then on temporary duty in Kentucky, that he would be master of the hunt.
³

The Custers were the couple of choice to entertain visiting politicians and other dignitaries on the frontier. They gave their company a taste of the open Plains, seeing and meeting actual Indians and witnessing the pageantry of the cavalry drill. For the Custers it was an opportunity to maintain their links to the East and reinforce George's celebrity status. Custer's natural sense of showmanship, and personal charm, guaranteed a memorable time.

Alexis arrived in America just in time to see the vanishing West. The plains were changing, and the frontier of old was giving way to civilization and order. The expression “the Wild West,” first popularized in the 1830s, paradoxically grew more common as the West became less wild. By the 1870s most of the country had been surveyed and mapped, and with maps came boundaries. The West was being tamed and contained. Railroads brought settlers and commerce. Barbed wire enclosed vast tracts of land. The remaining Plains Indian tribes were being herded onto reservations. Yellowstone National Park was founded in March 1872 in an effort to preserve some of the dwindling wilderness. The
Witchita Eagle
editorialized, “Here, where five years ago the buffalo had scarcely disappeared, and Texas herds roamed at will, great fields of wheat of brightest green now greet the eye, and young orchards and forest trees are growing finely. Thus is the wilderness tamed. Thus are new empires formed.”
⁴
Poet John Greenleaft Whittier wrote of the march of progress,

            
Behind the scared squaw's birch canoe,

            
The steamer smokes and raves;

            
And city lots are staked for sale

            
Above old Indian graves.
⁵

By the 1870s, whites who wanted to experience the romance of buffalo hunting had to hurry. An 1859 travel guide to the Plains noted that the “monarch of the prairies” was fast disappearing. “Not many years since they thronged in countless multitudes over all that vast area lying between Mexico and the British possessions,” Captain Randolph B. Marcy noted, “but now their range is confined within very narrow limits, and a few more years will probably witness the extinction of the species.”
⁶

The bison herds had more than a few years left from when Marcy wrote, but in 1872, buffalo killings increased dramatically. A combination of factors were to blame. Railroads brought easier access to the hunting grounds as well as more reliable means of shipping bison products back east. Rifles, produced by Sharps, Remington, and the Springfield Armory, became more accurate and less expensive. Industrialization increased demand for bison hide to make tough leather transmission belts to run machines. There was a fad for Indian-made buffalo robes, and bison tongue and marrow were delicacies in high demand. Bison bones were used for fertilizer, and bison heads for decoration. Buffalo hunting seemed to be an easy way to make quick money, and hunters, sportsmen, and others descended on the Plains.

“The buffalo melted away like snow before a summer's sun,” Lieutenant Colonel Richard Irving Dodge wrote of those days. “Congress talked of interfering, but only talked. Winter and summer, in season and out of season, the slaughter went on.”
⁷
In May 1872 an estimated thirty thousand bison were killed, mostly for their hides, and sold for two dollars apiece. At the end of that summer, one newspaper noted that “as the bison are driven into narrow limits their destruction becomes greater, and it is highly probable that the animal within the next thirty years will become entirely extinct.”
⁸
Two years later the killing dropped off because there were hardly any bison to be found. “Comparatively few buffalo are
now killed, for there are comparatively few to kill,” Dodge wrote. “In October 1874 I was on a short trip to the buffalo region south of Sidney Barracks. A few buffalo were encountered, but there seemed to be more hunters than buffalo.”
⁹

It was not just white hunters who were destroying the buffalo herds. Indians, particularly the Sioux, were lured by the demand for buffalo robes and began killing with abandon. Dodge noted that after the Pawnee retreated to a reservation and relinquished their previous hunting grounds, “the Sioux poured into this country” and “made such a furious onslaught on the poor beasts, that in a few years scarcely a buffalo could be found in all the wide area south of the Cheyenne and north and east of the North Platte.”
¹⁰
Over the peak years of slaughter, 1872–74, an estimated 4.4 million bison were killed—3.2 million by whites and 1.2 million by Indians.
¹¹

European hunting parties were common on the Plains, since there was no sport like it to be had in their home countries. “Hundreds of the best shots from all over this country and Europe,” an observer wrote, “were on hand to take a farewell hunt before the shaggy bison became extinct.”
¹²
Not just bison but antelope, elk, wolves, bears, coyotes, and other game fell to the avid hunters.

Alexis was not the first European aristocrat the Custers had encountered on the hunt. In December 1866, the Russian prince Nicholas Ouroussoff, Count Montaigne of France, and some English nobles visited Fort Riley seeking buffalo. Libbie noted in a letter to Rebecca Richmond, “Prince Qusosoff nephew of the Saar of Russia (the small dictionary don't say Sar so I cant spell it) has been on a buffalo hunt. He visited us and so we found his highness the Prince quite like other dutchy boys. The English party of noblemen have not returned I think.”
¹³
The
Junction City Union
reported that the Englishmen had enjoyed “fair luck in hunting the bison and extra good luck in not seeing ‘ye savages.'”
¹⁴
One report had it the prince killed thirty buffalo, and altogether his party accounted for 150 “of our noble American bison.”
¹⁵
Later, in 1869, an Irish peer named Lord Waterpark visited Fort Riley. The hunts were not just for show; during one outing someone was gored, a few dogs were killed, and Libbie was almost taken out by charging a buffalo.
¹⁶

Alexis and his party arrived at Omaha on January 12, 1872. There were a number of Russian notables along, including Vice Admiral Posslet, commander of the Russian fleet. They brought a vast number of servants—“almost as many servants and valets in the retinue of the Russians as there were troopers in the expedition” by one report. Among the Americans were General Sheridan; his brother Colonel Michael V. Sheridan; Sheridan's aide and Custer's former inspector general in Texas, Major James W. Forsyth; Colonel George A. Forsyth, hero of Beecher Island; General Ord commanding the Department of the Platte; Colonel Innis N. Palmer, commander of the 2nd Cavalry; and Dr. Asch of Sheridan's staff.