To Hell with Honor: Custer and the Little Big Horn

ISBN-13: 9780806134727

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Publication Date: 03-01-2003

Pages: 176

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.95(d)

Larry Sklenar, an independent scholar living in Georgetown, South Carolina, is retired from the U.S. Department of Defense.

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Chapter One

A Dirty Little War

The death of George Armstrong Custer and nearly half his command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn captured the attention of America in a way that no other engagement in the Indian Wars had done. The business of absorbing the aborigines into the outskirts of white civilization gained a momentum it might have lacked but for Custer's fatal decision on 25 June 1876 to attack a Sioux and Northern Cheyenne village ostensibly too large for his Seventh U.S. Cavalry to handle, in a manner perceived as foolishly proud, uncommonly stupid, or incredibly brave. The name of Custer has dominated the event from the first, even though hundreds of soldiers and warriors died in that clash of arms on a most desolate piece of earth. The Plains Indian way of life was already doomed, but Custer's last fight mobilized a recently reunified nation to accelerate the movement toward a final resolution.

    This is not to say that the Battle of the Little Bighorn defined the "Indian problem" or led directly to a universal and totally satisfactory accord. After all, European settlers in North America had been pushing Indians westward out of their natural habitats for more than two hundred years, and a century after Custer's death, fundamental legal and ethical questions regarding the treatment of the native inhabitants are still being debated. But if the Custer defeat marked the zenith of the Plains Indians' expression of power, that humiliation also galvanized the people and the institutions of the reunited United States to settle all Indian issues by force, ifnecessary, forgoing the niceties of peaceful negotiation and treaty-making, however flawed and even corrupt those earlier efforts at peaceful accommodation may have been.

    After the Seventh Cavalry had been crushed by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, America reacted with dismay and outrage. Newspaper headlines throughout the country resounded with calls for action. In accordance with legal authorization for an "expansible" army, the U.S. president was able to increase the size of companies from seventy to one hundred soldiers. Young men joined the Seventh as "avengers" to complement the residue of "bloodhounds" who had survived the worst humiliation of the post—Civil War cavalry, all no doubt possessed by the idea of getting even with the "red heathen." The war of "Civilization" against "Barbarity," with the army as the "advance guard," as General William Tecumseh Sherman called it, was about to reach a denouement in the American West, in partial fulfillment of Custer's own unintended prophecy that it would take "another Phil Kearny massacre to bring Congress up to a generous support of the army." For the military establishment, such an awakening was indeed limited, sufficient only to finish the pesky Indian problem, which had its own long, sad chronicle of broken promises and greedy exploitation.

    Within a year after the Little Bighorn fight, the remnants of the great Sioux confederacy—led in the West by the Lakota (Teton) tribe—were essentially under U.S. government control on reservations. With the surrender and killing of Crazy Horse of the Oglalas in 1877, the war on the plains was effectively over, and with the return of the Hunkpapa Sitting Bull and his small band from Canada in 1881, any real hope of restoring the nomadic life central to the Lakota culture vanished forever. For generations to come many Indians would blame Custer personally for the outcome, even though he died in a battle that for the Sioux was their single greatest military triumph, an exquisite piece of work by arguably the most skilled individual horsemen on the continent.

    The U.S. Army was the instrument for enforcing federal policy on the western frontier, and the cavalry, because of its greater mobility, was the primary action arm. In truth, the military establishment had limited ability to influence the nuances of change manufactured by civilian leadership in the nation's capital. Even with the election of General Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency in 1869, the army found itself chasing after overall plans and specific programs devised by the executive and legislative branches of the government to deal with the Indian problem. Army officers argued mightily for a greater voice in the management of Indian affairs, but the country and its elected representatives were in no mood to entrust the recent saviors of the nation with too much power.

    In 1866 Congress had authorized army strength at several times the level existing before the Civil War—primarily to deal with Reconstruction, coastal defense, and frontier protection—but the people retained a healthy suspicion of a peacetime military, which might be tempted to assume dictatorial powers in order to solve problems. In real terms, the size of the army had been approximately 18,000 at the start of the Civil War. During the conflict, the Union forces numbered several millions of volunteers from the states, but when the fighting machine was demobilized in 1865-66, these citizen-soldiers were mustered out of the army, and in their place was a vastly shrunken thing made up of enlisted men more often than not indifferent—even hostile—to the duties they were expected to perform. The authorized strength of the regular army as set by Congress in 1866 was roughly 54,000, decreasing to 37,000 in 1870 and to 25,000 in 1874. Even these numbers are misleading because actual manpower was never up to authorized levels. With so much yet to be done, the army in post-Civil War America was a pitiful shadow of the formidable Union hulk that had brought the South to its knees.

    The primary function of the army immediately after the war was the implementation of Reconstruction policies. The army walked a thin line between the views of Radical Republicans, who were bent on a dramatic remaking of Dixie, and those of a resistant Democratic president, Andrew Johnson (1865-69), who, being from Tennessee himself, was inclined to be more lenient toward the former Confederate states. Although armed with the best of intentions, Johnson's Republican successor, Grant (1869-77), fared no better. Reconstruction was virtually dead by the mid-1870s, but still one-fifth of the army was kept busy quelling riots in the South, pursuing a growing Ku Klux Klan, and chasing moonshiners. From 1866 to 1876, the army performed its constabulary duties with varying degrees of success but never so well as to endear itself to the American public. The soldiers were simply national policemen, not the hometown heroes of the Civil War. They were despised in the South and shunned in the North, separate from and barely connected to the ocean of people they were meant to serve.

    Out in the West, beyond the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, fractions of this truncated military apparatus were manning isolated outposts, conducting tiresome patrols, and escorting private and commercial parties across the vast expanse of land seemingly bereft of redeeming qualities—land so unattractive, in fact, that General Sherman would find the trans-Mississippi area nearly useless to the civilization he would later trumpet as essential to its taming. The evolution of official attitudes toward the western plains was directly proportional to the enterprises that saw value in the area's exploitation. As railroads, mining interests, ranchers, and homesteading farmers drifted toward the setting sun in increasing numbers, an irresistible national urge was unofficially promulgated and promoted. For a country that had recently whipped the states'-rights Southerners into submission, the hesitancy of American Indians to show respect for the idea of an inviolable United States could not be countenanced. The expression of Manifest Destiny predated the Civil War by more than a decade, but with the bitter taste of that expensive victory still in their mouths, the people of the rejuvenated union adhered to the idea even if they could not call it by its name or recite the language of its definition. The nation of states was growing, and regardless of the reservoir of ordinary decency residing in its collective soul, a small army of mostly unspecific men was expected to pound heads if necessary to force any outsiders into line.

    Rounding up hard-to-catch Indians was work that appealed to few soldiers. Pride in country and duty were attributes common to nineteenth-century Americans imbued with the Victorian virtues inherited through the strained but uncut umbilical to mother England. However, many of the common soldiers who served in the postbellum army were recent immigrants from parts of Europe other than England, and in the eyes of the general population, they and their comrades in arms were "bummers, loafers, and foreign paupers," a rabble of ne'er-do-wells who could not find proper employment in the civilian sector. For these men, Victorian ideals were no more than that, and for many of them, the obligation to serve their country was about an escape from personal difficulties, about a yearning for adventure, about a free ride to the gold and silver fields, or maybe just about a way to be fed and clothed for a year, for a season. But regardless of the cultures from which they had come, they were finally creatures of the white, Protestant, and middle-class society that set the standards of conduct and judged them accordingly.

    Custer was a product of these times. Born into a middle-class and very Methodist family in New Rumley, Ohio, on 5 December 1839, he was by the age of fourteen spending most of every year in Monroe, Michigan, with his half sister, Lydia Reed, and her family. Over the years, although frequently separated from his family, Custer retained strong bonds with his parents, his brothers (Nevin, Thomas, and Boston), and his sister (Margaret, or "Maggie"). In the company of his family, close friends, or other relatives, Custer took pleasure in games and practical jokes for his entire life, and he possessed a self-deprecating humor too seldom mentioned as a feature of his personality. To these people, he was "Autie" (a childhood mispronunciation of Armstrong), who seemed always willing to share his sense of adventure and even the little money he possessed. On the other hand, to some men during the Civil War but especially afterward, Custer was an arrogant and egocentric showboat who boasted too much and who inflated reports about the accomplishments of his commands—as well as being a swindler and a womanizer.

    Certainly, as a young man, Custer chased the girls and may have had his way with one or two. At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he apparently was treated for a case of gonorrhea, probably contracted during a visit to the brothels in New York City. He also consumed alcohol to excess before and in the early years of the Civil War, and his capacity for cursing a blue streak was enhanced during that conflict under the informal tutorship of his senior officers. By the time the war ended, however, he had managed to bring all of his "vices" under control except for gambling, which seemed to suit his innate propensity for risk-taking. All in all, he was a bit of a wild boy, thoroughly convinced that in following his instincts, he would find his destiny as dictated by the God of Battles. In this sense alone, he was a fatalist, as men in combat must always be.

    As terrible as the Civil War would prove to be for the nation as a whole, it was a serendipitous event for Custer, as fortuitous as had been his entrance into West Point and his eventual graduation, the genesis of the often cited and highly ironic "Custer's luck." Like most of his academy classmates, who served on both sides of the conflict, Custer was an eager warrior. But whatever his daydreams and whatever his enthusiasm, he could not have foreseen the sequence of events that would carry him to success under a variety of commanding officers, his rapid promotion to brevet (honorary commission) brigadier general, and the fame that would result from coverage of his exploits by the popular press. Of course, he was not the only "boy general" in the Union and Confederate Armies, and he was not the only one who rode fearlessly as officer-fodder at the head of his troops into the jaws of hell, but he was special. History has adjudged him to have been perhaps second only to General Philip Sheridan in his courage and skill as a Union cavalry leader, displaying exceptional abilities to command in the field from Gettysburg, down the Shenandoah Valley, and to Appomattox Courthouse, where Custer received the first indication of the South's willingness to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia. To mark the surrender, Sheridan presented Custer's wife with a small table used in preparing the surrender documents; he included a note saying that no one had done more than her husband to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion.

    Custer never won a more important prize during those Civil War years than Elizabeth Bacon. Known as "Libbie" to family and friends, she was a beautiful and intelligent young woman, who succumbed to Custer's persistent courting only after a long period of clandestine communication and in spite of her father's initial resistance to the match. Eventually, her stern father (Judge Daniel Bacon) was won over, partly by the new brevet brigadier general's entreaties and partly perhaps by the inevitability of the engagement. On 9 February 1864, Libbie and Autie were married in the First Presbyterian Church in Monroe. This was Libbie's church; Custer chose to worship a personal and nondenominational God.

    For the last year of the war, Libbie spent as much time as possible in the company of her husband, often in the field under the most trying of circumstances. When apart, they exchanged titillating correspondence, including references to pet names for parts of their bodies. Obviously Libbie was no prude, and as rigorous as their life was at that juncture, she was amenable to fighting through the difficulties as he fought his way to fame, if not prosperity. One only has to read the last letters exchanged between them to realize that regardless of the strains in their marriage, the mood swings, the jealousies, the arguments over finances, and the absence of children, Libbie never wavered in her support and her care for that fallible piece of flesh she had labored with such dedication to protect. From the moment of his death until her own death at age ninety, she remained the steadfast partner she had been during their happier times of adventure and exploration together. Not able to imagine any head but Autie's on her pillow, she steeled her fragility after his death and guarded his reputation against the plethora of after-action what-ifs that would haunt her widowhood.

    The post-Civil War army in which Custer continued to serve was in some disarray. The military was expected to enforce Reconstruction policies that were at best unclear. In dealing with the Indian problem, the army was a confused tool of schizophrenic schemes concocted within the federal government in response to pressure from myriad competing special-interest groups. Commercial concerns in the West wanted the army to drive the Indians out of the way while religious and humanitarian organizations in the East hoped to educate the "savages" to the path of industry and civilization. The Interior Department and its Bureau of Indian Affairs looked after their charges, providing arms and ammunition for the hunt, while the army suffered the consequences of superior weapons in the hands of already able warriors. Congress slashed appropriations in programs designed to honor treaty obligations, alienating the various tribes and hindering the government agents operating on the reservations and the soldiers trying to minimize depredations in the field, even while unscrupulous traders cheated the Indians and the government. Held in low esteem by a general population as perplexed by the Indian question—and by Reconstruction—as was their government, the army entered a "dark age" that would last for twenty years after the Civil War. Civilian versus military, line versus staff, West Point graduate versus volunteer, cavalry versus infantry: the army was rife with its own tensions, all of which were exacerbated by congressionally mandated reductions in total force strength, which in turn stimulated increased appeal to political patronage among officers striving for the few plum positions and rare promotions.

    When Custer was mustered out with the volunteers in 1866, he did not have many career choices. His name recognition and status as a bona fide hero might have opened the door to a term or two in Congress, but Libbie was opposed to that course, and Custer himself must have recognized that his poor oratory skills, restlessness, and action-oriented personality were not suited to political campaigning and service. Also, he had no commercial or financial savvy, as he would demonstrate in his lifelong effort to amass a small fortune without the business acumen to achieve that goal. In fact, his ventures into money-making schemes were generally disastrous and in several cases involved some unsavory characters, the episodes tending to taint Custer with guilt by association. He had always been able to write well enough, and with Libbie's help in refining this talent, he would turn out many articles for Galaxy and Turf, Field, and Farm, but such work was occasional, not a livelihood. Similarly, he might have felt some real yearning to become an actor, like his good friend Lawrence Barrett, but that was not a realistic option, even though Custer would have brought to the stage extraordinary energy, strong sentiments, and a comic side deriving from the frivolity that had defined his youth before war had fixed his visage with a public mask severe enough to command authority.

    Custer's only viable career choice was to remain in the army, specifically the cavalry. Following his last Civil War assignment in Texas (where errors in judgment magnified existing tensions), Custer was offered and accepted an appointment as lieutenant colonel in the regular army, although General Sheridan had attempted without success to obtain a full colonelcy for his protégé. General Sherman said that Custer "gracefully subsided" to the lieutenant colonelcy from his brevet rank of major general (two stars conferred in 1865), but in real terms his commission represented a two-grade promotion. By the end of 1866 Lieutenant Colonel Custer was off to become second-in-command of the Seventh, then being formed in Fort Riley, Kansas, as part of the congressionally mandated increase in army strength from pre-Civil War levels. The Seventh was nominally commanded by a full colonel, but more often than not Custer headed the regiment in and out of garrison.

    In December 1866, just about as Custer was joining his new unit, Captain William J. Fetterman and eighty soldiers were killed in a decoy-and-ambush ploy implemented by Sioux warriors, including the young Crazy Horse. This was the Fort Phil Kearny (northern Wyoming) debacle to which Custer later alluded. Nearly coincident with Fetterman's reckless and vainglorious foray, which stunned the army and the general populace, the government in Washington, D.C., was making plans to conclude another in a long list of nearly meaningless treaties with the Indians. In 1867, while Custer and the Seventh were engaged in fruitless chases after Cheyenne villages at the behest of settlers on the central plains, a government commission was charged with persuading the Cheyennes especially to remove themselves to reservations in Indian Territory. The result was the Medicine Lodge Treaty, which may have pleased reformers back East but which simply confused the issues and did not stop Cheyenne warriors from committing depredations in white settlements.

    The Seventh Cavalry did not meet with much success during its first year on the job as it grappled with the strange business of subduing Indians on the central plains, roughly between the North Platte River and the Texas Panhandle. The whole army was having difficulty coping with problems in the area, but for Custer particularly the tasks were daunting and the results embarrassing. Usually charged with pursuing bands of uncooperative Indians, he found that trails petered out and whole villages disappeared almost under his nose. In addition, many of the enlisted men in the regiment—as in virtually all military components then serving on the frontier—found the duty hard, the work irksome, and the pay too low for the aggravation. They deserted by the scores.

    Frustrated and impatient with the general state of affairs during his first experience as an Indian-fighter, Custer made a series of mistakes—including leaving his post without clear orders in an effort to determine Libbie's whereabouts and safety—leading to his court-martial and suspension from service. He was reinstated in less than a year and was available to command the regiment at the Battle of the Washita, the most famous of his encounters with Indians until the Little Bighorn. The winter campaign against mostly Southern Cheyennes located on the Washita River in Indian Territory (present-day western Oklahoma) was a significant victory for Custer, especially within the army chain of command, but influential humanitarians in the East regarded the attack and loss of life as pointless and unjust. The victory at the Washita may have done much to assuage Custer's feelings of inadequacy as a field commander, but the results did not materially affect his career.

    Also during 1868, another peace commission, including General Sherman, was persuading a limited number of Lakota chiefs to sign the Fort Laramie Treaty, which specified that the Sioux would reside on a reservation encompassing much of present-day South Dakota in exchange for certain government concessions, including the abandonment of forts along the Bozeman Trail. The treaty was a highly technical document not fully understood by the chiefs, who were not in a position to speak for all of the members of their communities. Two features of the Fort Laramie Treaty would have a direct bearing on Custer's misfortune at the Little Bighorn. One was that the Black Hills—which were as symbolically central to the Sioux culture as they had been to some of the Indian peoples displaced by the westward push of the Lakota—were part of the land set aside for the original reservation. The other was that a huge tract of land in the Yellowstone country of present-day Montana and Wyoming was designated "unceded Indian territory," which whites were not to enter without permission from the tribes. Unhappily, other legalistic provisions of the treaty permitted such trespasses. Besides being an exercise in noncommunication between very different cultures, the agreement was a sham in many respects, and "nontreaty" stalwarts such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—now designated "hostiles"—were as determined to ignore its strictures as white men were to find loopholes in its maze of expedients.

    By 1869, Grant was in the White House, fully committed to a peace policy that would effectively turn the management of the Indian problem over to religious groups enthused by the prospect of proselytizing the Indians to their civilized Christian point of view. The Quakers were apparently the first of the denominations to press the matter with Grant, but others soon followed, some going so far as to institute full-fledged lobbying efforts to acquire control over one Indian agency or another. The idea was that the groups would choose members to serve as agents at the various reservations, ensuring not only that the wards of the government got fair treatment but also that they would be educated in Christian doctrine while they were trained to perform useful work such as farming.

    The peace policy reflected the quintessential Victorian proclivity to balance moral salvation with practical relief for the downtrodden. The intervention by men of God was expected to produce clean and respectable Indians who would, by the assumption of daily tasks, be beggars no more. No longer would they be unregenerate paupers dependent on the largesse of the government, nor nomadic savages living in filth as they trailed aimlessly and endlessly after herds of buffalo and elk; with proper attention, they might henceforth become productive members and possibly citizens of a progressive Eurocentric society. The concept appealed to Grant, who "had settled in his own mind that the great result of the Civil War was that America was one nation, with a national norm, a single idiom."

    Some Indians benefited from the plan, but most did not, in large part because they resisted the constraints imposed on their freedom to roam. They did not take to growing potatoes or corn or any other crop on the hardscrabble or dusty ground available to them, when by nature and tradition they were bound to hunt and fight, without compass or clock. Only in the frigid months did they come into the agencies to take advantage of government annuities, though at other times they visited long enough to trade animal pelts or other native products for manufactured goods, including weapons. Like the government they served, the mostly well-intentioned clerics and their lay agents lacked the key to persuade the native inhabitants of the West to accept the white man's ways.

    The government's shift in emphasis away from reliance on the military may have convinced Custer that it was time for a different kind of assignment. He applied in 1869 for the position of Commandant of Cadets at West Point. Although Colonel Samuel Sturgis, recently appointed commander of the Seventh, endorsed his application, Lieutenant Colonel Emory Upton instead received the assignment, effective in July 1870. Upton was clearly the better choice. The commandant was responsible for ensuring that the cadets were taught tactics for the three arms of the service, as well as for overseeing the general curriculum, discipline, and administration. Custer may have felt that he needed a tour outside purely line/field duty, but he must have realized that the only way he could fulfill the requirements of the job was to turn upside down his own record of undisciplined behavior and lax study habits at the academy, instilling in the cadets a determination to do the opposite of what he had done. In all probability Custer lacked the intellectual focus and rigidity of temperament for the assignment, but the corps of cadets as a whole might have adored him.

    Many commentators have made much of the fact that when Custer graduated from West Point in 1861, he ranked last in a class of thirty-four. The truth is that nearly twice that many cadets had entered with Custer four years earlier, and besides those who had departed to join the Confederate armed forces at the start of the Civil War, a number of others had dropped out because of the rigors of the curriculum and the severity of the discipline. So even though Custer was probably a mediocre student more inclined to have fun than to apply himself, he did survive the ordeal, presumably by applying his quick wit and by cramming (or purloining an exam) when faced with failure and possible expulsion. His amassment of demerits for mostly minor infractions of West Point's code of conduct was extraordinary and at the end came close to keeping him from graduating at all. In sum, one has to admire his determination and resiliency, even as his deficiencies as a serious scholar make it obvious why the more cerebral Upton (a contemporary of Custer's and also a "boy general" during the Civil War) was chosen to fill the commandant position.

    Thwarted in his attempt to get the West Point job, Custer spent the period of 1870-72 in Kentucky performing Reconstruction duties and purchasing horses for the cavalry. For part of that time, he was on leave, enjoying New York society and gambling at faro or at the Saratoga racetrack. Also, at about the middle of this pleasant interlude, he returned to the West in order to accompany Russia's Grand Duke Alexis on a hunting trip, which proved to be a great success. By the spring of 1873, Custer and Libbie were back on the frontier, stationed at Fort Rice while the new quarters for the Seventh Cavalry were being built at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory. During the summer of that year, the Yellowstone Expedition occupied Custer and nearly all of the Seventh in support of a Northern Pacific Railroad survey; Libbie returned to her and Autie's home in Monroe. The expedition included several sharp fights between the Seventh and Sioux warriors, and in these confrontations, Custer displayed the tactical skills usually associated with his name.

    The Black Hills Expedition of 1874 was more placid. One purpose was to explore the possibility of establishing an army fort on territory considered important to the Sioux and other Indians and by treaty part of the Great Sioux Reservation, but the trip ended up being a virtual picnic. As a byproduct of this sojourn, it was confirmed that gold existed in the Black Hills in sufficient amounts to warrant further examination and possible exploitation. Again it was Custer who would be blamed for opening up the "Thieve's Road," but Custer's first reports were restrained regarding the prospects of finding precious metals in paying quantities. Besides, an irreversible momentum had already been established by white men determined to pursue all avenues leading to the dream of easy wealth.

    The following year was mostly uneventful except for the U.S. government's failed efforts to buy the Black Hills from the Sioux, leading to a growing feeling that the army would have to apply force in order to settle the issue. By the fall of 1875, President Grant and his military and civilian advisers were agreed on a policy that would drive the Sioux onto reservations, in the absence of their peaceful compliance with government ultimatums. For Custer, the winter of 1875-76 would have been an interval of quiet waiting had it not been for his good-intentioned but fundamentally flawed entrance into an