The Real Custer (58 page)

The “walking soldiers” were Terry and Gibbon's column, approaching from the north. They had made good time on their march up the Yellowstone, covering the almost sixty miles from the Rosebud to the Bighorn in two days. But after crossing the river and heading south, the going got rough. “Those who participated in that march will not soon forget it,” McBlain said, noting that Terry called it “one of the severest tests in the way of marching to which American soldiers had ever been put.” But they doggedly pressed up the Bighorn seeking to close the trap on the Indians.

The first information they received about Custer's column was early on the morning of June 26, when Lieutenant James H. Bradley of the 7th Infantry and his scouts chased several Indians up the Little Bighorn valley. They eventually revealed themselves to be Crow scouts sent with Custer from Gibbon's command. They told an implausible tale of Custer's attacking the Indian village and then the “soldiers were shot down like buffalo.” Terry and Gibbon dismissed this as “the imaginings of panic-stricken and cowardly Indians.”
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As the column moved up the western bank of the Little Bighorn, they spotted a column of smoke ahead. Terry and Gibbon assumed that Custer had hit the Indian camp and was burning it. It seemed preferable to the story the Crow scouts told. Scouts set out to make contact with Custer but soon returned, reporting a large force of Indians to their front. But they were breaking up their encampment, readying to seek safety west in the Bighorn Mountains.

On the twenty-seventh, Lieutenant Bradley and some scouts cautiously made their way into the abandoned village site. The first sign they found of the fight was buckskin coats belonging to Lieutenants James G. Sturgis and James E. Porter, “blood-stained and with numerous bullet holes in each,” McBlain wrote, and a glove belonging to Yates. Three burned human heads hung by a wire on one pole; on another was a man's heart. A white trapper named Ridgely allegedly being held hostage by the Indians at the time of the battle later told the tale of seeing cavalrymen taken prisoner and burned alive, though many today believe the story was a hoax. Two Moons and Little Knife told more credible stories of torturing prisoners.
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Then the first bodies turned up—Lieutenant Donald McIntosh and Charley Reynolds. “Tosh” McIntosh, a Canadian half-Indian, had been dragged from his mount during Reno's retreat. He was mutilated and unrecognizable but was identified by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant
Francis Marion Gibson in Reno's battalion, who noticed some sleeve buttons his sister had given her husband before leaving Fort Lincoln. There were also three lodges “filled with dead Indians, scaffolds here and there holding others, and evidences of hurried departure, [which] carried with them proofs that the killing was not altogether one-sided.”
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The rest of the column began to arrive at ten that morning. They continued through the encampment site heading toward Reno Hill. Away to the left, Charles F. Roe noticed some dark objects scattered on the hillside across the river, which he assumed were dead buffalo.

Some of Reno's men who had hidden for two days in the woods at the south end of the village emerged as the column drew near. The rest of the survivors watched the column approach from the hilltop. “Can you imagine what a relief it was, and how grateful we felt when we saw these troops coming to succor us,” Captain Francis M. Gibson wrote, “absolutely taking us right out of the jaws of death, and such a horrible death.”
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Some of the men on Reno Hill had supposed the relief column was led by Custer, who had abandoned them as he had Elliot at Washita, and was now returning. Others wondered aloud about Custer's impending court-martial for once again deserting his command.

But Terry met the survivors with tears in his eyes; he knew where Custer was. While Terry's troops had been examining the grisly discoveries in the abandoned Indian village, a scout rode up saying he had discovered a small group of dead soldiers further to the south. A second scout arrived telling of fifty dead troops. Then a third came in reporting two hundred corpses on the hill across the river. McBlain observed, “Now was the truth of the report brought us by the Crows made apparent.”

Captain Gibson called the carnage on Battle Ridge “the most horrible sight my eyes ever rested on.”
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Charles F. Roe wrote his wife, “The battle field Kate was awful, awful—dead men & horses in all directions. Everyone of the bodies stripped, scalped and mutilated.” In his diary he called it “the most terrible sight ever witnessed.”

“It makes one heartsick to look over the battle ground and see the poor fellows,” Lieutenant John Carland, Company B, 6th Infantry, with Gibbon's command wrote, “some of them with their entrails cut out, others with their eyes dug out and heart laid across their face. They even stooped to cut their pockets to get their money and watches.”
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Pat Coleman and some others went across the river to search for a member of their company and “could not recognize him. All of them were scalped and otherwise horably [
sic
] mutilated. Some had their heads cut off, others arms, one legs. [The Indians'] hatred extended even to the poor horses they cut and slashed them before they were dead. . . . Oh, what a slaughter. How manney [
sic
] homes are made desolate by the sad disaster.”

Journalist Mark Kellogg's scalped, sun-bloated body was found near the river below Last Stand Hill and was identified by his boots. Nearby was a pouch with notes for the story he never wrote. He was the first AP reporter to die in battle. Kellogg's last dispatch to his editor read, “By the time this reaches you we would have met and fought the red devils, with what result remains to be seen. I go with Custer and will be at the death.”

It was a family tragedy for the Custers; brothers George, Tom, and Boston were dead, along with Autie Reed, brother-in-law James Calhoun, and George's Scottish wolfhound, Tuck. Calhoun perished on the hill that bears his name. Boston Custer and Autie Reed died together near the foot of Last Stand Hill. Tom Custer was found severely mutilated near the hilltop. He could only be positively identified by a tattoo of liberty, the flag, and his initials, spotted by Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey, who had served with him in the 21st Ohio in 1861.
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Hunkpapa Chief Rain-in-the-Face was said to have made good on his threat and cut Tom's heart out and paraded it through the Indian village on a pole. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized the event in verse, using poetic license to make it George Custer's heart that the chief “uplifted high in the air as a ghastly trophy, bore.”
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Rain-in-the-Face
later described the event in bloody detail but recanted the story on his deathbed. He said he had simply taken credit for what he was being credited with.
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In fact, Tom's heart was not cut out by anyone.

George Custer was found near Tom, naked and “as white and clean as a baby,” according to Dr. Porter. He was wounded in his left breast and left temple. His body was propped at an angle formed by two of his men laying across each other, his arm across the top of them, the small of his back touching the ground, his head lying in his right hand as if in thought, smiling. “There he is, God damn him,” Frederick Benteen said, standing over Custer's body, “he will never fight anymore.”
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“Every one of them were scalped and otherwise mutilated but the General he lay with a smile on his face,” Pat Coleman wrote. “The Indians eaven [
sic
] respected the great Chief.” Low Dog explained that “the wise men and chiefs of our nation gave out to our people not to mutilate the dead white chief, for he was a brave warrior and died a brave man, and his remains should be respected.”
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But in general Indians did not desecrate corpses other than scalping or making signs like the Sioux death mark, a slash on the leg from the hip to the knee. Mutilation was most thorough and shocking when used to torture the living; scalping the dead was a means of preventing a fallen foe from entering the next life.

In any case, the Indians did not know who they had killed. “No warrior knew Custer in the fight,” Hunkpapa chief Crow King stated. “We did not know him, dead or alive. When the fight was over the chiefs gave orders to look for the long-haired chief among the dead, but no chief with long hair could be found.”
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Low Dog concurred: “I did not see General Custer. I do not know who killed him.”
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“I killed him,” Rain-in-the-Face later claimed. “I made many holes in him. He once took my liberty; I took his life. I am glad I did.”
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But like the tale of Tom Custer's heart, he recanted this story too.

The timing, manner, and location of Custer's death have been open to endless speculation and mythmaking. Thirty-seven years after the battle, Custer's scout Curley—or someone claiming to be him—told a far-fetched tale of being present with the attacking force, which allegedly gave Crow scouts immunity, and seeing Custer in his final moments hacking down Sioux warriors with his saber. “You here, Curley?” Custer supposedly said. “We'll fight to the end!” A Sioux warrior then shot Custer in the chest, and Curley rushed forward and cradled his head as he died—so he said.
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Another theory was that one of Custer's scouts shot him. Yet another has it that he committed suicide, or that all his men did, or they shot each other.
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Robert Utley argues convincingly that stories of mass suicide on Last Stand Hill originated with Indians who came in to the agencies after the battle and did not want to be blamed.

Sitting Bull credited some deaths to lightning and to the troopers' own horses trampling them. But he maintained that Custer fought bravely to the end. The chief had not fought in the battle; his main contribution was encouraging warriors to fight bravely (“Sitting Bull was big medicine,” Gall explained).
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But he no doubt heard numerous accounts of the battle and gave his version a year afterward.

“It was said that up there where the last fight took place, where the last stand was made, the Long Hair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him,” Sitting Bull said. A few men still stood by him. “He killed a man when he fell,” the old chief continued. “He laughed.”

The interviewer sought to clarify: “You mean he cried out.”

“No,” Sitting Bull said, “he laughed; he had fired his last shot.”

This was Custer in his final moment, as we might wish to remember him, expressing the sum of his existence: the gregarious goat of West Point, the mad demon of Civil War battlefields, laughing in the face of death, and ending his life with a smile.