The Real Custer (51 page)

“At the time we Oglalas had no thought that we would ever fight the whites,” Chief Low Dog said. “Then I heard some people talking that the chief of the white men wanted the Indians to live where he ordered and
do as he said, and he would feed and clothe them.” The very idea of being dependent on the government offended Low Dog. “Why should I be kept as a humble man, when I am a brave warrior and on my own lands?” he said. “The game is mine, and the hills, and the valleys, and the white man has no right to say where I shall go, or what I shall do. If any white man tries to destroy what is mine, or take what is mine, or take my lands, I will take my gun, get on my horse, and go punish him.”

Months later Senator William B. Allison, the Iowa Republican who had been at the failed September 1875 conference at Red Cloud Agency, pleaded with the Senate to reach an agreement with the Sioux in regard to the Black Hills. He cautioned that “unless some action be taken soon by Congress to treat with these Indians . . . a general Indian war would take place.”
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But by then the war was already upon them. “Gen. Custer intended to make a conquest of the new country and it is likely that he has succeeded,” one editorialist wrote at the start of the gold rush. “Swarms of gold hunters are now collecting in the frontier towns, waiting for the spring break up, when they will invade the Black Hills. It is painful to contemplate the change which will be wrought in the peaceful country of the Sioux.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

GRANT'S REVENGE

O
n February 1, 1876, Secretary of the Interior Chandler informed Secretary of War Belknap that since Sitting Bull's followers had not come to the reservation, they were to be considered hostiles and “turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper under the circumstances.”
¹
He washed his hands of whatever might happen next. “This wasn't a fight instituted by the Army for glory going purposes, or anything of that kind,” Captain Frederick Benteen wrote, “but rather, 'twas a little gentle disciplining which the Department of the Interior . . . had promised would be given the Indians if they, the nomads of the tribe, declined to come in to agencies in the Spring.”
²

Sheridan envisioned three columns converging on the Indians somewhere east of the Bighorn Mountains. He intended to overcome the Indians' advantage in mobility by gradually reducing the area in
which they could evade his forces and presenting them with increasingly poor options. If all went as planned, the Indians would either be forced into a battle they could not win, or surrender and return to the reservations under armed escort.

However, Sheridan's plan had several drawbacks. The columns would operate on exterior lines, separated by vast distances, making it difficult to communicate and coordinate movements. They would not know how many Indians they faced, or where they were. If one column made contact with the enemy, it would have to herd the Indians toward the other forces, not knowing exactly where those forces were, and hoping the Indians did not move in another, unexpected direction. Worst of all, the plan assumed the Indians would not do what any conventional military force would do in this situation: engage each column separately and defeat them in detail.

If the Indians did not know the war was coming, it was not for lack of press coverage. The
Bismarck Tribune
's November 20 headline, “Winter Campaign against Sitting Bull,” announced the coming conflict even before Chandler set his deadline. Operational details followed: a December report said that the Army “will carry on concerted movements from two sides, and if they once get an opportunity will make it very interesting for the warriors.”
³
In February the
New York Times
ran a front-page story outlining most of the campaign plan, with Custer and Brigadier General George Crook moving from the east and south respectively, to “join their forces and attack Sitting Bull in the Powder River country, which is west of the Black Hills, and about one hundred and fifty miles east of the Big Horn Mountains.” The article estimated Sitting Bull's force at six hundred to one thousand warriors.
⁴
Later reports bumped this number up to 1,500.
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A Wisconsin paper predicted that soon they would hear “that Sitting Bull's convictions have undergone a radical change, and, if he survives the heroic treatment to which he
will be subjected that he has concluded to abandon war, go into the agricultural business and raise corn and potatoes for a living.”
⁶

The first attempt was made in early spring. A column of eight hundred men set out in March under George Crook, Sheridan's roommate at West Point, who had been a Corps commander under him in the Civil War. Crook had fought successfully against the Apaches and was well regarded on the frontier. The Indians referred to him as Gray Fox.

Crook's force, ten companies of cavalry and two of infantry under Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds, were accompanied by a host of scouts, civilian drivers, and 85 wagons pulled by 892 mules. They moved slowly over icy trails and through snow storms, enduring bitter cold. Eventually they located an Indian village near the Powder River, which they thought was Crazy Horse's. In fact it was a Cheyenne band under Old Bear and Two Moons moving away from the more warlike groups because they did not want their people involved in whatever conflict was coming. They fought an inconclusive battle on March 17. Reynolds's men burned the village before leaving, and some of the teepees, packed with ammunition, exploded. The expedition achieved little, and Crook court-martialed Reynolds for leaving wounded men on the field.

Colonel John Gibbon—known to the Indians as “White Whiskers”—meanwhile left Fort Ellis in Montana in early April with six companies of the 7th Infantry and four troops of the 2nd Cavalry under Major J. S. Brisbin. They were to patrol the north bank of the Yellowstone River and intercept the Indians, whom Crook was supposed to be driving north. But the expected fleeing bands never materialized, and according to Lieutenant John F. McBlain, Gibbon's column “had used up all the rations it had taken with it, had drained all the Montana posts, and had contracted for meats and hard bread, long before there was any apparent movement in the south.”
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A third column was supposed to have been led by Custer from Fort Lincoln around the same time but was delayed.
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George had been summoned to Washington to participate in a political drama then unfolding that would culminate in the impeachment of the secretary of war.

Republicans had dominated in the 1866 midterm election, and after Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency in 1868, the GOP—then known as the Gallant Old Party—had firm control of the government. But economic hard times caused by the Panic of 1873, along with resurgent support for Democrats in the South as Reconstruction waned, turned the 1874 congressional election into a rout. Democrats picked up ninety seats in the House, taking control of the body with a 69-seat, 61 percent majority. State legislatures sent a net of nine new Democrats to the Senate, though they still only held twenty-eight of seventy-six seats. But controlling the House was enough. With their newly won subpoena power, Democratic committee chairs began a series of high-profile hearings taking aim at members of the Grant administration and striking at its chief vulnerability, corruption.

“As the end of the Presidential term approaches the influence of the incumbent wanes,” an English observer wrote, “especially in such an official place-seeking society as that of the national capital. The motto in the scramble is— ‘Every man for himself.'” The assault on the Grant administration had become “callous and reckless, ready to sacrifice anything for the power that bestows the place. The telegrams now daily reaching Europe from Washington show that the House Democratic majority is determined to crush the Executive.”
⁹

Grant was never the direct target of the investigations, but they touched those closest to him. A group found skimming taxes on whiskey
shipped from St. Louis, dubbed the Whiskey Ring, was said to include Grant's trusted private secretary, Orville E. Babcock, who had served with him through the war. Grant remained loyal to his friend, but even though Babcock was found not guilty in his trial, he resigned under a cloud.
¹⁰
Grant's brother Orvil, with whom he was not close, was also implicated in wrongdoing.

Custer was called to testify before the House Committee on Expenditures in the War Department, in an investigation of Secretary of War William Worth Belknap. The committee chairman Hiester Clymer, Pennsylvania Democrat and Belknap's former roommate at Princeton, was looking into allegations of kickbacks, bribery, and other corruption in the government-controlled system of post traderships. Sutlers were traditionally appointed by officers in the various commands, but after 1870 the appointments were centralized in the office of the secretary of war and became a matter of political patronage. Suspicions were aroused by the lavish lifestyle Belknap maintained in Washington—far too expensive for a public servant earning $8,000 per year. Evidence had been uncovered that Belknap and his wife had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in return for rights to Army post traderships in Indian territory.

For a serving Army officer, stepping into this partisan struggle was highly impolitic. By 1876, however, Custer was more openly affiliated with the Democrats. He praised George McClellan in his Civil War memoirs then being serialized in
Galaxy
, abandoning his earlier caution. Many remembered his support for Andrew Johnson in 1866, and during the 1868 election, when Grant ran against former New York governor Horatio Seymour, the
New York Citizen
put Custer on a list of Democrat generals, along with McClellan and Winfield Scott Hancock.
¹¹
In 1872, Custer attended a meeting in Louisville called the “Straight Out Democratic Convention,” a group of dissident Democrats unhappy with
the party endorsing Liberal Republican party nominee Horace Greeley for president. Custer was also known as a favorite of, and sometimes anonymous reporter for, the anti-Grant
New York Herald
.

By the time Custer was called to testify, the anti-Belknap campaign was already well under way. The House Committee on Military Affairs, chaired by Democrat Henry B. Banning of Ohio, had concluded its investigation, and Belknap resigned on March 2, 1876, the morning the committee report was read, in an attempt to limit the damage to the administration. However, the issue was too politically advantageous for the Democrats to let go, and after another round of hearings the House voted unanimously to impeach Belknap, even though he was no longer in office.
¹²

Custer testified that it was a common belief in the Army that the secretary was in league with the corrupt traders at Army posts and in Indian reservations. He said that Robert C. Seip, the appointed post trader at Fort Abraham Lincoln, engaged in price gouging, and when officers went five miles off post to purchase items at reduced cost, Seip threatened to use his high-level connections to have them punished. Seip and Alvin C. Leighton were subcontractors for retired Brigadier General John M. Hedrick and Washington attorney and Belknap friend E. M. Rice, who between them received one-half to two-thirds of the trading post's profits. Custer said that “out of his profits of $15,000 [Seip] only received $2,500; he said he did not know, but he understood a portion of it went to the Secretary of War.”
¹³
Seip in his testimony confirmed the legal business relationship with Hedrick and Rice, but had no knowledge of payments to Belknap.
¹⁴