Custer’s Last Doctor: Dr. Henry R. Porter

 

Three doctors were attached to the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.

George Edwin Lord, commissioned as a first lieutenant, was the only commissioned medical officer.  The other two, Dr. James Madison DeWolf and Dr. Henry R. Porter, were civilian surgeons under contract with the army.  Dr. Lord accompanied Custer and the headquarters battalion and was killed along with all of the men under Custer’s direct command. 

Dr. DeWolf was killed during Reno's retreat from the timber to Reno Hill. He successfully crossed the ford before being shot from his horse and scalped in full view of Reno’s retreating men.

Dr. Henry R. Porter was attached to Reno’s command and successfully escaped from the timber to Reno Hill.  For two days Dr. Porter cared for some thirty wounded men, improvising a field hospital which was under constant fire.  The majority of these thirty men survived. Porter had laudanum to ease pain, and used a carbolic-acid solution to sterilize wounds

Porter’s accounts of the battle were published in the New York Herald, in 1876, and the in Bismarck Tribune in 1878.

In an interview given in 1900, Dr, Porter recounted: “As soon as we could, several of the officers and myself went over to where Custer had fought…. We found Custer's body stark naked, as white and clean as a baby's. He was shot in the head and breast. The body of Captain Tom Custer, General Custer's brother, was horribly mutilated. He was disemboweled, and his head had been crushed in by a blow from a stone hammer used by the Indians. The only arrow wound I found was in his head. He had the Sioux mark of death, which was a cut from the hip to the knee, reaching to the bone. His heart was not cut out, as has been reported…. I cut a lock of hair from the head of each officer as he lay and gave it to their families on my return home…. After burying the dead, we took the wounded on litters ten or twelve miles to the (the steamer Far West), and I was detailed to go down to Fort Lincoln with them.” 

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time