The Real Custer (47 page)

Alexis so enjoyed Custer's company that he asked him to accompany his party for the rest of their tour. They returned to Kansas, then headed east to Louisville, where Libbie joined the group. They toured Mammoth Cave, then headed south, enjoying the scenery and social life in the cities along the Mississippi. “Alexis is not concerned with the outside,” Libbie wrote in her diary, “only with the pretty girls, with music, . . . [with] his eternal cigarette and in joking with his suite and with the General.”
³³
Alexis and his party ended their grand tour of the United States in New Orleans in March and boarded a ship for Russia. Alexis later wrote a memoir of his journey, expressing his gratitude to Custer and including a photo of them together in their hunting garb.
³⁴
“The picture still lingers in my mind,” Buffalo Bill recalled years later, “with young General Custer predominating the grand assemblage. He was the life and spirit, one might say, of the occasion.”
³⁵

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

BATTLE ON THE YELLOWSTONE

I
n the summer of 1873, Custer returned to the West as part of an engineering and surveying party to explore a route between Bismarck and Bozeman, up the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. The Northern Pacific, the planned second transcontinental railroad, was projected to lay 6,800 miles of track starting on the Great Lakes and terminating at Puget Sound. The effort was supposed to be financed through proceeds from a forty million–acre land grant authorized by Congress in 1864. Track laying only began in 1870, however, and after several false starts, the railroad began to make progress with the backing of famed financier Jay Cooke, whose investment house had made a fortune selling government bonds to underwrite the Union war effort.

Cooke energized the effort, and the railroad reached Fargo in the Dakota Territory by 1872. Nevertheless, there were still endemic managerial problems, terrain challenges, and periodic attacks by local
Indians. The railroad relied on Army escorts for its workers, and in the summer of 1873, ten companies of the 7th Cavalry under Custer joined a larger force of infantry to guard engineers and surveyors venturing deep into traditional Indian lands along the Yellowstone.
¹

The expedition set off on June 20, 1873, with 79 officers, 1,451 men, 353 civilians, and 7 scouts. Frederick Dent Grant, the president's son, went along as an observer. He was only three years out of West Point but had been frocked to the rank of lieutenant colonel to serve on Sheridan's staff. This caused some disquiet among Grant's critics—the
Chicago Tribune
called it “one of the most shocking instances of injustice and nepotism which has ever characterized the action of the President,” since Fred had done little in his career since graduating close to the bottom of his West Point class.
²
But he and George got along well during the expedition, exchanging Academy stories, no doubt of the “goaty” variety.

The Yellowstone expedition also reunited Custer with an old friend and rival. One afternoon he was resting when he heard someone asking which was General Custer's tent.

“Halloo, old fellow!” Custer said. “I haven't heard that voice in thirteen years, but I know it. Come in and welcome!” In walked the chief engineer of the survey party, his former schoolmate, companion, and battlefield adversary, Thomas L. Rosser.

Rosser had been in Fitzhugh Lee's command at the close of the Civil War. He had commanded Confederate forces on the first day of the Battle of High Bridge a few days before Appomattox, the last engagement Lee's army would ever win. The morning of April 9, 1865, Rosser led a successful charge through Union lines to the Lynchburg Road, and he and his men were still outside the pocket when the surrender took place. Rosser was among those cavalrymen “who took a professional pride in getting around the enemy,” Porter Alexander explained, “and could not resist the opportunity.”
³

There was some debate over whether the Confederate cavalry who had broken the noose around Appomattox were included in Lee's capitulation, and it was decided that only those in the immediate vicinity could be considered surrendered. Rosser stayed briefly in the field, then retired to his home near Hanover Courthouse. Weeks later, while en route from Richmond to Washington, Custer made a detour to pay Rosser a visit. He pulled up his command and sent a note to the door:

            
Dear Friend,

                
The house is surrounded. You can't get away. Come on out and surrender yourself.

                
Regards,

                
G.A.C.

After the war Rosser worked as a civil engineer on several railroads before being hired to head up the Northern Pacific project. “Fanny” and “Tex” renewed their friendship and spent many hours together reliving old memories. Captain Myles Moylan, whom Rosser had captured during the Civil War, also joined in the discussions. “We talk over our West Point times and discuss the battles of the war,” George wrote Libbie. They lay under the fly of Custer's tent on a buffalo robe, and it “seemed like the times when we were cadets together, huddled on one blanket and discussing dreams of the future.”
⁴

Professor William F. Phelps, who was along on the expedition and spent time with Custer and Rosser, described George as “of medium height, slender, slightly stooping, sharp featured, with a penetrating eye, large nose and long, light, curly hair resting almost upon his shoulders. In manner he is quick and nervous but singularly frank, sprightly and agreeable. In conversation his voice is usually high keyed and his style gay and rollicking.” Phelps said Custer was dressed in “light-blue army
pants tucked into high cavalry boots coming nearly to the knees, . . . with a dark blue round-about coat, unbuttoned and trimmed according to his rank, no vest, a blue flannel shirt, and collar turned upon a red necktie, and an immensely broad-brimmed black hat.” Phelps had expected more spit and polish and said, “Custer presented to my mind at the time anything but the picture of the ideal soldier.” But the “peculiarities of person, costume and manner were soon lost in the charm of the conversation and the exceeding interest of the occasion.” Phelps was more impressed with the six-foot-two Rosser, whom he described as erect, bronzed, calm, quiet, deliberate, firm, and thoughtful. “He is emphatically a man of power, and one well calculated to exert a commanding influence over others in whatever relation he may be placed,” Phelps wrote.
⁵

Colonel David S. Stanley of the 22nd Infantry regiment led the Yellowstone expedition. Stanley was an 1852 West Point graduate and, like Custer, a wartime major general. Stanley fought in the West, and his heroism at the Battle of Franklin in 1864 would be recognized with the Medal of Honor in 1893. Lieutenant Charles W. Larned wrote that Stanley “seems to be very much liked and impressed me favorably when I met him. Large, handsome and dignified.”
⁶

But Stanley and Custer did not get along. Custer is a “cold blooded, untruthful and unprincipled man,” Stanley wrote his wife. “He is universally despised by all the officers of his regiment excepting his relatives and one or two sycophants. . . . I will try, but am not sure I can avoid trouble with him.”
⁷
Custer's view of Stanley was a mirror-image. “General Stanley is acting very badly, drinking, and I anticipate official trouble with him,” George wrote Libbie. “I should greatly regret this, but I fear it cannot be avoided.”
⁸

Despite Stanley's fondness for whiskey, he did not want to risk having spirituous liquors available in the field and ordered Fred Grant to find
all the alcohol stores and have them destroyed. “Not a drink was left in the camp an hour after the order was issued,” the
Boston Globe
reported. “The infantry sutler lost six barrels and the cavalry sutler seven.”
⁹
Or so the reporter thought. Custer noted that Fred Grant was “greatly mortified” by the order, which would have cost their sutler, Augustus Baliran, thousands of dollars. So while waiting for the wagons to reach them, Fred announced he was going to take a nap and that he hoped “the Sutler will have anything of the kind hidden before I come to inspect.” Custer and other teetotaling officers helped conceal the barrels until Stanley had a change of heart and rescinded the order. “Never were temperate officers so well supplied with intoxicants,” George observed.
¹⁰

Stanley sought to keep Custer contained during the expedition and ordered him to stay back with Rosser and his engineers, advancing slowly while the infantry pushed forward to the Yellowstone. The rear was an unaccustomed position for Custer, and an illogical place for the more mobile cavalry, so he decided to push forward anyway. “Custer having been given a little tether must needs throw off Stanley's shackles altogether and start off with heels-in-the-air on his own hook,” Larned noted in his diary.
¹¹

One day, rather than assisting the baggage train over the Muddy River, he pressed out into the van, sending a note to Stanley requesting rations and forage. “After a march of eleven miles with considerable delay on account of the heavy condition of the prairie from hard rains,” Larned noted, “an orderly courier from Stanley overtook our ‘flaxen haired' chieftain presenting him with a
billet doux
to the effect he should halt on the spot.”
¹²
Stanley angrily told Custer not to act without orders again.

Custer “was just gradually assuming command,” Stanley wrote, “and now he knows he has a commanding officer who will not tolerate his arrogance.”
¹³
The incident became a national news story, exaggerated in the retelling. The
Dubuque Herald
reported that “the gallant Gen. Custer
was, for some reason not present known, placed under arrest by Gen. Stanley while on the march through the wilderness. Custer marched in the rear one entire day. The event created much excitement.”
¹⁴
The
Boston Globe
embellished the story, saying that “a stir was created on the Yellowstone expedition by the arrest of General Custer by General Stanley, I did not learn true cause of the arrest, but Custer marched in the rear of his command one whole day before he was released. Custer's men denounced the arrest as an act of tyranny, while Stanley's men sustained their commander.”
¹⁵

But relations between Custer and Stanley soon settled down. After the colonel asserted his authority and Custer assented, Stanley grew more conciliatory. He named a brook they discovered Custer's Creek as a gesture, and he also allowed Custer's cavalry to forge out ahead of the column on scouting missions, which George led personally. Stanley wrote that in the days following the incident, Custer “has behaved very well, since he agreed to do so, went ahead every day to look up road and select the best camps.”
¹⁶
Custer was looking for more than just campsites, however; if there was action to be had, he would find that, too.

The railroad route ran close to Indian lands, if not right through them. Article XVI of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie stipulated that “the country north of the North Platte river and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains shall be held and considered to be unceded Indian territory, and also stipulates and agrees that no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the same; or without the consent of the Indians, first had and obtained, to pass through the same.” It is unclear where the northern terminus of the unceded lands was—probably at the Yellowstone by Sioux reckoning. The unceded lands were understood to be places where Indians could hunt game if they wanted or needed to. But the area became a haven for dissenters who refused to settle on the reservation and who continued to practice the traditional ways of life. Around three thousand Sioux and
four hundred Cheyenne settled in this area, the former led by the Hunkpapa chief Sitting Bull.

“The country was comparatively unknown to any but our Indian guides,” a reporter wrote. It was hard and monotonous going, with “extensive swells and billows of land, rolling away to the infinite distance; the same broken, cheerless buttes rising barren and treeless,” though areas close by the rivers were greener and dotted with copses of woods. “This was the supposed region of the buffalo and where he is the Indian may be found living upon him for subsistence, and either roaming openly in defiance or lurking in ambush.” The previous year a surveying party was attacked by Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors at Pryor's Creek near Pompey's Pillar.
¹⁷
Bloody Knife, the half-Sioux, half-Arickaree scout, predicted that they would meet some opposition in the Tongue River area. Seasoned plainsman Charley Reynolds said, “Probably the first that we know of Indians around us will be when someone straggling behind the column is found with his hair gone.”
¹⁸