The Strange Odyssey of the Little Bighorn Artifacts

 

On June 25, 1876, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, five companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, under the direct command of George Armstrong Custer were wiped out. 

 

Many artifacts initially lost on the battlefield were to have a strange after life.  Take for example, the engraved pocket watch of George Armstrong Custer.  There are at least two stories regarding the odyssey of the watch. 

In Son of the Morning Star, historian Evan S. Connel relates that in 1906 a Montana saloon keeper bought the watch from a Sioux Indian.  The watch was lost in a dice game, exhibited in a travelling show, and finally turned up in California before being purchased for the Don and Stella Foote Collection in Billings, Montana. The Foote’s would eventually offer their Treasures of the West collection to the city of Billings, which rejected the gift because the city did not want to pay to have the collection insured.  The collection was sold off and the whereabouts of Custer’s watch is now unknown.

In his book, The Law Marches West, a Canadian Mountie named Cecil Denny claimed that he retrieved the watch from Sitting Bull and sent it to Libbie Custer.

 

Custer’s final message to Captain Benteen to “Come quick, bring packs”, written down by Adjutant Cooke went missing for decades. 

 

In the 1920’s one of Custer’s early biographers, William Graham tried to locate the missing document, only to be told by Benteen’s son that all his father's papers had been destroyed when their house had burned down many years before.  This turned out to by incorrect. 

 

Captain Benteen had given the famous message to an army officer friend, Captain Price. The message finally came to rest in the hands of a New Jersey collector for fifty years, before being put up for auction.  By a happy circumstance Colonel Charles Francis Bates learned of the existence of the message and secured it for the museum at West Point, where it resides today.

 

The medals of Captain Miles Keogh tell an interesting story.  The senior captain among the five companies wiped out with Custer, Keogh's body was found at the center of a group of troopers that included his two sergeants, company trumpeter and guidon bearer.

 Keogh was stripped but not mutilated, perhaps because of the "medicine" the Indians saw in two Papal medals he wore on a chain around his neck.  Vatican records confirm these two medals were given to Keogh during The Papal War of 1860.

  Captain Benteen secured the medals which were sent to Keogh’s sister in Ireland.  They remained in the family until 1988 when they passed into the hands of a well-known collector.  The medals were recently auctioned off for $35,000.

 2nd Lt. John James Crittenden of Kentucky received a gold watch from his father on his twenty first birthday.  Crittenden was 22 years old when he died at Little Big Horn. His body was identified because of his glass eye.

His watch was missing.  In 1880, E.F. Gigot was working in a Canadian trading post when a trapper came in with furs, blankets, and a watch.  Gigot bought the watch of $2.  This was a gentleman’s watch and Gigot began to research.  He wrote to the watchmaker in London, providing the serial number.  The watchmaker confirmed that the watch had been sold to a man named Crittenden.  Gigot wrote to the U.S. Army which confirmed that the watch belonged to 2nd Lt. John James Crittenden.  The watch was returned to the family, which loaned the artifact to the Kentucky Historical Society in 1949 where it remains to this day.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer the Resplendent

 

In the early days of the American Civil War, George Armstrong Custer wore his hair long, and wore a braided black velvet jacket and a flaming red necktie.  When a female friend asked Custer why he had dressed in such a fantastic manner he replied:

"I was but a boy, just from West Point and I felt young and insignificant. There were men in my brigade old enough to be my father. I wished them to know and recognize me at once from any part of the battlefield. I chose a uniform that would catch their attention and individualize me."

History's Ten Worst Generals

The Grisly Epilogue of the Battle of the Little Bighorn

 

On June 25, 1876, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, five companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, under the direct command of George Armstrong Custer were wiped out. 

 

White Wolf, who was in the fight, said that afterwards a lot of young men searched the soldiers’ pockets. That square green paper money was in them. Later when the children were making toy mud horses, they used the money for miniature saddle blankets. Silver money was also found from which the Cheyennes made silver buckles.

 

Other warriors including Wooden Leg, Little Hawk and Bobtail Horse found bottles of whiskey on dead troopers.

On June 27, 1876 the cavalry discovered the remains. 

Lieutenant E.S. Godfrey reported

The marble white bodies, the somber brown of the dead horses and the dead ponies scattered all over the field, but thickest on and near Custer Hill, and the scattering tufts of reddish brown grass on the almost ashy white soil depicts a scene of loneliness and desolation that "bows down the heart in sorrow." I can never forget the sight: 

Captain Tom Custer  was found near the top of the hill, north, and a few yards from the General, lying on his face; his features were so pressed out of shape as to be almost beyond recognition; a number of arrows had been shot in his back, several in his head, one I remember, without the shaft, the head bent so that it could hardly be withdrawn; his skull was crushed and nearly all the hair scalped, except a very little on the nape of the neck.

General Custer was not mutilated at all; he laid on his back, his upper arms on the ground, the hands folded or so placed as to cross the body above the stomach; his position was natural and one that we had seen hundreds of times while taking cat naps during halts on the march. One hit was in the front of the left temple, and one in the left breast at or near the heart.

Boston, the youngest Custer brother was found about two hundred yards from "Custer Hill." The body was stripped except his white cotton socks and they had the name cut off.

Occasionally, there was a body with a bloody undershirt or trousers or socks, but the name was invariably cut out. The naked mutilated bodies, with their bloody fatal wounds, were nearly unrecognizable, and presented a scene of sickening, ghastly horror! There were perhaps, a half dozen spades and shovels, as many axes, a couple of picks, and a few hatchets in the whole command; with these and knives and tin cups we went over the field and gave the bodies, where they lay, a scant covering of mother earth and left them, in that vast wilderness, hundreds of miles from civilization, friends and homes, to the wolves!"

Trumpeter Giussepi Martini saw a heap of dead men in a deep gully between Custer and the river. Martini said that one of the first sergeants with whom some of the men had left their pay for safe keeping had about $500 in paper money torn up and scattered all over his body.  He also reported that one of Adjutant Cooke’s sideburn was scalped off, skin and all.

Seventh Cavalry scout George Herendeen added, "The heads of four white soldiers were found in the Sioux camp that had been severed from their trunks, but the bodies could not be found on the battlefield or in the village."

Lieutenant Charles Roe of the Second Cavalry, said, "we found in the Indian village a white man's head with a lariat tied to it, which had been dragged around the village until the head was pulled off the body."

Survivor Jacob Adams recalled, "troopers were lassooed from their horses and dragged to the center of the village, where they were tied to trees and burned to death that night within sight of their comrades of Benteen's division, who were helpless to rescue them. After the battle, John Ryan said, "we found what appeared to be human bones, and parts of blue uniforms, where the men had been tied to stakes and trees."

Of the five guidons carried by Custer's troops at the “Last Stand” only one was immediately recovered, concealed under the body of a dead trooper.  That trooper was Corporal John Foley, who was trying to escape on horseback.  Foley was pursued by Indians and shot himself in the head before he was overtaken. The recovered flag later became known as the Culbertson Guidon, after the member of the burial party who recovered it, Sergeant Ferdinand Culbertson.

The Culbertson Guidon was sold by Sotheby’s auction house to a private collector in 2010 for $2.2 million.

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined 

 

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined