Who Killed Custer?

 

One of the most debated issues of the Battle of the Little Bighorn is the exact nature of George Armstrong Custer’s death.  Who killed Custer, where was he killed, and when did he die? 

One popular theory says that Custer was seriously wounded (or even killed) early in the battle.  Custer advanced with several companies down Medicine Tail Coulee in an attempt to ford the river.  Supposedly, Custer was shot in the middle of the stream and the cavalry retreated after placing the dying man back on his horse.  White Cow Bull claimed to have fired the shot that felled a buckskin clad soldier.  Was it Custer?  None of the other warriors who were actually present at the ford ever mentioned the incident.  The only corroboration comes from two of Custer’s own Crow scouts, who were not actually there.  The scout White Man Runs Him heard later that Custer was hit in the chest by a bullet and fell into the water.  The account of the scout Goes Ahead, comes to us second hand from his wife Pretty Shield, to whom he supposedly told the story that Custer was killed at the river and that he was drunk at the time.

Historians have suggested that the attempt to ford the river at Medicine Tail Coulee was abandoned not because Custer was shot but because he realized that this was the middle of the village not the end.  In any event, the Crow scout Curly, reported Custer in robust health, after he had supposedly been shot, galloping north in an attempt to find another crossing point.

There are many other candidates for who killed Custer, including Custer himself.  According to this theory, Custer killed himself because he feared capture.  Custer’s body had two wounds, a chest wound and a head wound in the left temple.  It would have been difficult for the right handed Custer to shoot himself in the left temple, but theoretically this could have been an “assisted” suicide.

Among those claiming to have killed Custer were:  Red Horse, a Miniconjou warrior; Flat Hip, a Hunkpapa warrior, and Walks-Under-the-Ground, a Santee warrior who wound up in possession of Custer's horse after killing somebody.  Little Knife, a Hunkpapa warrior, said Brown Back killed Custer to avenge his brother.  Two sons of Scarlet Tip, chief of the Santee, claimed they jointly killed Custer. 

Cheyenne oral tradition passed down since 1876 says that Custer may have been killed by a woman warrior, Buffalo Calf Road Woman.  Minimally, she is said to have knocked Custer off his horse with a club and made off with his saber.

In 1905 Rain-in-the-Face made a deathbed confession that he thought it was he who had killed Custer having been “so close to him that the powder from my gun blackened his face.”

The mystery of who killed Custer was probably never known. The dust, smoke and chaos of the battle made it impossible to distinguish one soldier from another.  When asked, Sitting Bull said that nobody knew who killed Custer — nor even knew that he was present until days later.

Gold, Murder and Monsters in the Superstition Mountains

Arizona Legends and Lore

Custer's Dead Officers: First Lieutenant James Calhoun

 

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.  Among the dead was:

First Lieutenant James Calhoun was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1845. He enlisted in the Union Army in 1864 . By the end of the Civil War, he held the rank of sergeant.

After the war, Calhoun accepted a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the infantry and served in the western territories.  He married Margaret “Maggie” Custer, sister of George Armstrong Custer, in 1872. This connection brought him into the inner circle of the so-called “Custer Clan.”

Calhoun was promoted to 1st Lieutenant and transferred to Company C of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, which was commanded by Captain Tom Custer, George’s brother. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Calhoun was acting commander of Company C, as Tom Custer was serving as aide-de-camp to his brother. Calhoun and his men made their last stand on what is now known as Calhoun Hill, where evidence suggests they fought fiercely before being overwhelmed.

He was initially buried on the battlefield. His remains were later moved to Fort Leavenworth

Calhoun was nicknamed “The Adonis of the Seventh” because of his striking appearance.

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined

The Great Northern Rebellion of 1860 (alternate history)

Custer's Dead Officers: First Lieutenant William W. Cooke

 

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.  Among the dead was:

First Lieutenant William W. Cooke, a Canadian who was the Regimental Adjutant and was known as "Queen's Own" Cooke.  Cooke was known for his long side whiskers that he always wore.

Cooke was awarded brevet promotions to captain, major and lieutenant colonel for this bravery during the Civil War.  He joined the Regular Army after the War and was made a second lieutenant in the 7^th Cavalry in 1866. 

In 1868 he participated in the Washita Campaign.  At the Battle of the Washita, Cooke, one of the best shots in the regiment, commanded forty sharpshooters.  Cooke’s men hid themselves on the northern side of the river and shot down Cheyenne fleeing Custer’s charge.  Chief Black Kettle and his wife Medicine Woman Later were killed by Cooke’s sharpshooters.

In 1871Cooke became the regimental adjutant reporting to Custer.  Cooke became a close friend of Tom Custer and became part of what was known as the Custer Gang, a close-knit group of Custer’s friends and relatives. 

The anti-Custer faction within the regiment, including Captain Frederick Benteen and Major Marcus Reno, began calling him “The Queen’s Own.”

On the day of battle at the Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876, Cooke was by the side of George Armstrong Custer.  He is remembered for writing Custer’s final orders to Captain Benteen: “Come On. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs. W.W. Cooke. P.S. Bring Packs”.

Cooke died alongside Custer. He was scalped twice, the second trophy being his side whiskers.  The Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg claimed to have scalped the whiskers from one side of Cooke's face. He gave this trophy to his grandmother, who didn’t think much of it and discarded it two nights later at a victory dance.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

The Great Northern Rebellion of 1860 (alternate history)

Custer's Dead Officers: Captain Tom Custer

 

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.  Among the dead was:

 Captain Tom Custer, 31, rode with the five companies led personally by George Custer.  Tom Custer had distinguished himself during the Civil War, receiving the Medal of Honor twice for bravery, becoming the first of only 16 individuals in American history to achieve this distinction.  

After the Civil War, Tom Custer was appointed a first lieutenant in the 7^th cavalry.  He was wounded at the Battle of the Washita and took part in the Black Hills expedition of 1874.  During the 1876 campaign he served as aide-de-camp to his older brother Lt. Colonel George A. Custer and died with his brother on Last Stand Hill.

 In an interview given in 1900, Dr, Henry 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…”

 In fact, Tom Custer’s body had been so badly mutilated that his remains were identified only by a recognizable tattoo of his initials on his arm.

 The bodies of George and Tom Custer were wrapped in canvas and blankets, then buried on the field in a shallow grave.  When soldiers returned a year later, the brothers' grave had been scavenged by animals and the bones scattered.  According to a witness, "Not more than a double handful of small bones were picked up."  George Custer was reinterred with full military honors at West Point Cemetery on October 10, 1877.   The remains of Tom Custer, were reinterred at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Legends of the Superstition Mountains

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined

Custer's Dead Officers: First Lieutenant William Van Wyck Reily

 

First Lieutenant William Van Wyck Reily was one of the youngest officers in the 7th Cavalry Regiment and among those killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.

Born on December 12, 1853, Reily came from a naval family.  Reily himself entered the Naval Academy in 1870 but resigned in 1872 after academic difficulties. He later joined the 10th U.S. Cavalry as a Second Lieutenant in 1875 and transferred to the 7th Cavalry in early 1876, just months before the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

He was described as a “dashing and handsome officer,” though some accounts suggest he was still learning to ride when the regiment departed on the final campaign.  His a signet ring was later recovered from a captured Cheyenne warrior in1877 and returned to Reily’s mother. His remains were reinterred at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Sneak Attack! (Four Alternative History Stories)

Wars and Invasions (Four alternative history stories)

Custer’s Dead Officers: 2nd Lieutenant James Sturgis

 

On June 16, 1875, James “Jack” Sturgis graduated from West Point and was appointed a 2nd Lt, in the 7th Cavalry.  Jack Sturgis, at twenty-two, was the youngest officer in the regiment.  He was also the son of the 7^th cavalry’s commanding officer, Colonel Samuel Sturgis. 

Lt. Jack Sturgis would have had little time to get to know Custer.  He arrived at his duty station at Fort Abraham Lincoln in October 1875.  In March 1876 Custer went East to testifying before Congress.  Custer would not return until May 1876 in time to lead the troops in the field in the campaign against the Sioux.

On June 25, 1876, on the day of Custer’s last fight, Lt. Sturgis was with Company E, one of the five companies under Custer’s direct command that day, all of which were destroyed.  According to archaeological evidence and Native American accounts, it appears that Company E conducted a disciplined retreat toward Last Stand Hill until overwhelmed. 

Jack Sturgis’s body was never officially identified.  His blood-soaked underwear was picked up by General Terry’s troops across the river in the remnants of a Lakota camp. Several decapitated corpses were found near the river, and one soldier later claimed he recognized Sturgis’s scorched head along with several others in a Lakota fire pit.

It is believed that the unidentified remains of Jack Sturgis were buried in a mass grave with the enlisted soldiers. 

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined

Widows of Custer's Seventh Cavalry

 

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.  News of Custer’s death reached Fort Abraham Lincoln and his wife Elizabeth “Libbie” Custer, on July 6.

On July 29, 1876, “Libbie” Custer met with the widows and children of the enlisted men who died at the battle of the Little Bighorn.  She thanked them for their friendship and bade them farewell.  She presented each child with a picture of her husband George Armstrong Custer in uniform.

The next morning four widows, Libbie Custer, Maggie Custer Calhoun the widow of Lt. James Calhoun, “The Adonis of the 7^th”, Nettie Brown Smith the widow of Lt. Algernon Smith, and Annie Yates the widow of Captain George Yates traveled by carriage and steamboat to Bismarck in the Dakota Territory.  From Bismarck they went by train on toward their final destinations.

The journey of the widows was widely reported in the press.  An article in The Findlay Jeffersonian reported, “It is a tragic sight.  It is now thought that Mrs. Custer will not long survive her husband.  Her condition is a critical one, and her death may be looked for at any time.  The bullet that pierced the brave Custer was also the death wound for his loving wife.”

Once settled in at her in-law’s home in Monroe Michigan, Libbie transformed the room she occupied into a shrine to her late husband, making the room a replica of their quarters at Fort Abraham Lincoln.  Custer’s uniforms were even placed in the wardrobe next to her own clothes.

The widows, especially Libbie were perplexed and irritated that some newspapers blamed Custer’s recklessness for the disaster at the Little Bighorn.  Much more congenial was a letter of condolence from Major General George B. McClellan under whom Custer once served during the Civil War.

“As a man, I mourn in your noble husband’s death the loss of a warm, unselfish and devoted friend.  As a soldier and citizen, I lament the death of one of the most brilliant ornaments of the service and the nation, a most able and gallant soldier, a pure and noble gentleman….It is some consolation to me, I cannot doubt it is to you, that he died as he had lived, a gallant gentleman, a true hero, fighting unflinchingly to the last desperate odds.” 

Libbie Custer found success as an author.  Her three books, Boots and Saddles (1885), Following the Guidon (1890), and Tenting on the Plains (1893) recount her life with Custer on the frontier.  Elizabeth Custer paints a human portrait of Custer as, “boyish”, as the soldier’s friend, and as a man devoted to his mother. 

 Elizabeth Custer was widowed at the age of thirty-four and spent the next fifty-seven years, until her death in 1933, glorifying and defending her husband’s reputation.   Only after her death did historians begin seriously re-examining the Custer legend.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined

Frank Finkel: The Great Liar of the Little Bighorn?

 

      In 1920, sixty six year old Frank Finkel was a moderately wealthy farmer in Dayton, Washington, living a quiet life with his wife and children.  This changed in April 1920 when Finkel got into a public (perhaps beer enhanced) argument with one of his cronies who made some ill-chosen comments about George Armstrong Custer being ambushed by Indians.

 

      “You don’t know what you are talking about,” roared Finkel.

  

      “What makes you such an authority,” asked the neighbor.

 

       “I was there,” retorted Finkel.

    

     Was Finkel just an obnoxious know-it-all shooting off his mouth, a man making a grab for “stolen glory”, or the sole survivor of Custer’s Last Fight?  Within a week Finkel was telling his story at a Kiwanis Club meeting and the press was there.  A breathless article stated that Finkel:

“GAVE TO THE CLUB THE ACCOUNT OF HIS THRILLING ESCAPE AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT PREVENTED THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS SURVIVAL FROM REACHING THE GOVERNMENT AT THE TIME.

CONGRESSMAN JOHN W. SUMMERS OF WALLA WALLA WAS A GUEST AT THE LUNCHEON AND HE WILL MAKE AN EFFORT TO GET GOVERNMENT RECOGNITION OF MR. FINKLE’S STORY.”

     Finkel claimed that, early in the battle, both he and his horse were shot, and the horse bolted. Days after the disaster, Finkel shot his dying horse in the head. Finkel wandered on and then discovered a shack in the middle of the uncharted territory. A man called Bill doctored him back to health. When Finkel returned to civilization he discovered that his own name appeared in the Bismarck Tribune as among the dead.  He said he reported to an Army officer to request a discharge, but gave up on the matter when the officer required him to provide two witnesses to vouch for his identity.  Now, officially dead, Finkel never returned to the Army.

     Historians who support Finkel's claim argue that several details in his account could only be known by someone who was at the Little Bighorn and that Frank Finkel was actually George August Finckle, a sergeant in Tom Custer's Company C.  Historians in the pro-Frank Finkel camp, such as John Koster, author of the book Custer Survivor, argue that George August Finckle was erroneously reported as killed in action.

     Maybe, but there seems to be a great deal of evidence running against Frank Finkel’s story.  Frank Finkel himself was adamant that he was a private and occasionally an acting corporal, but never a sergeant.  Did he perhaps forget a false name under which he enlisted? Those who dispute Finkel's claim argue that army records at the time do not indicate the existence of a Frank Finkel and that the fate of all the people who have been suggested as possible false names for Finkel are known.

     What about Frank Finkel’s encyclopedic knowledge of the battle and the local terrain?  By 1920 a great deal had been written about the battle, including a lengthy account written in 1892 for The Century Magazine by Lt. Edward Godfrey, who had survived the fight at Reno Hill. In 1892, Lieutenant Godfrey also told of finding a dead 7th Cavalry horse, at the place Frank Finkel claimed he had shot his wounded horse.  By 1912, there had even been a movie made about the battle called Custer’s Last Fight, which Frank Finkel and his wife saw at the Keylor Grand Theater in Walla Walla, Washington.

     What additional evidence is there that Frank Finkel was not George August Finckle, the sergeant in Tom Custer's Company C?  The sergeant’s body was identified, but is it possible that the identification was an error?  Although the bodies of the cavalrymen were bloated and badly mutilated, sergeant Finckle’s body was identified by three people who knew him, Sgt. Samuel Alcott, Sgt. Daniel Kanipe, and Lt. Edward Godfrey.  Sergeant George August Finckle was also the tallest enlisted man in the 7th Cavalry and one of the heaviest, making his identification that much easier.  Further research has demonstrated the sergeant’s handwriting was totally different from that of Frank Finkel.

     Frank Finkel died in 1930 at the age of seventy six, never having tried to profit from his lone survivor story.  We can only guess at his motives for telling the story.  Perhaps he had just become obsessed with the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined

Custer’s Last Stand: Were There Really Survivors?

 

     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.  Over the course of the next seventy years, however, more than 120 men would come forward claiming to be the sole survivor of Custer’s Last Stand. 

     Custer’s widow received dozens of letters detailing the horrors of the battle and the writer’s lucky escape.  There were basically three types of stories: (1) the survivor disguised himself as an Indian, (2) the survivor hid inside a scooped out horse, (3) the survivor was saved by an Indian maiden who instantly fell in love with him.   Some of these so-called survivors, such as “Arizona Bill” Gardner became minor celebrities.

     Not everyone who rode out with Custer’s five companies died of course, simply because they never made it to the final fight.  Sergeant Daniel Kanipe was dispatched by Custer to hurry up the pack train, and trumpeter Giovanni Martini was sent with orders for Captain Benteen to “Come quick”.  There were others.  Privates Peter Thompson, James Watson, John Fitzgerald and John Brennan, claiming problems with their horses, could not keep up with Custer and finally limped back to Reno’s position.

     The Crow scouts were not in the fight.  Custer sent his Crow scouts away about an hour before the final battle.  The scout Curly was the first to report Custer’s annihilation. Curly did not claim he fought in the battle, but only that he witnessed it from a distance.  When accounts of “Custer's Last Stand” began to circulate in the press, however, legends grew that Curly had actively participated in the battle, but had managed to escape. 

     Historian, Albert Winkler, asserts that Private Gustave Korn was a genuine survivor of the battle: Several contemporary accounts note that Korn's wounded horse bolted in the early stages of the battle, while he was serving with  ' I '  company.  Winkler speculates that the horse took Korn on a mad ride through the Indian village, back toward Reno’s original position, and up the bluffs to safety, before dropping dead from loss of blood.  However improbable this may seem, Korn did end up joining Reno's companies making their stand on Reno Hill.  The Bismarck Tribune printed the first known newspaper account of Korn's story in 1884.

     There were other stories of bolting horses taking men away from the scene of battle.  Corporal John Foley of C Company was chased for miles by three Indians armed only with bows. The pursuers were out of arrows when Foley panicked and shot himself in the head.  Others might have initially gotten away, only to be ridden down and killed.  Loyal Crow Indians found six skeletons with 7th Cavalry equipment years later, far from the battlefield.

     The most controversial survivor claimant is Frank Finkel.   The story goes like this:  Finkel claimed that, early in the battle, both he and his horse were shot, and the horse bolted. Days after the disaster, Finkel shot his dying horse in the head. Finkel wandered on and then discovered a shack in the middle of the uncharted territory. A man called Bill doctored him back to health. When Finkel returned to civilization he discovered that his own name appeared in the Bismarck Tribune as among the dead.  Now, officially dead, he never returned to the Army.

Historians who support Finkel's claim argue that several details in his account could only be known by someone who was at the Little Bighorn.  Those who dispute Finkel's claim argue that records at the time do not indicate the existence of a Frank Finkel and that the fate of all the people who have been suggested as possible false names for Finkel are known.  This controversy, like many others inspired by the Battle of the Little Bighorn, rages on.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined

George Custer and the Death of Lieutenant Sturgis

 

On June 16, 1875, James “Jack” Sturgis graduated from West Point and was appointed a 2nd Lt, in the 7th Cavalry.  Jack Sturgis, at twenty-two, was the youngest officer in the regiment.  He was also the son of the 7^th cavalry’s commanding officer, Colonel Samuel Sturgis. 

Colonel Sturgis and Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer had a sometimes-prickly relationship.  Colonel Sturgis found himself almost always on detached duty leaving Custer in command of the troops in the field most of the time.  Sturgis suspected that this was the preference of Custer’s mentor Lt. General Philip Sheridan and often felt slighted.

Lt. Jack Sturgis would have had little time to get to know Custer.  He arrived at his duty station at Fort Abraham Lincoln in October 1875.  In March 1876 Custer went East to testifying before Congress.  Custer would not return until May 1876 in time to lead the troops in the field in the campaign against the Sioux.

On June 25, 1876, on the day of Custer’s last fight, Lt. Sturgis was with Company E, one of the five companies under Custer’s direct command that day, all of which were destroyed.  According to archaeological evidence and Native American accounts, it appears that Company E conducted a disciplined retreat toward Last Stand Hill until overwhelmed. 

Jack Sturgis’s body was never officially identified.  His blood-soaked underwear was picked up by General Terry’s troops across the river in the remnants of a Lakota camp. Several decapitated corpses were found near the river, and one soldier later claimed he recognized Sturgis’s scorched head along with several others in a Lakota fire pit.

It is believed that the unidentified remains of Jack Sturgis were buried in a mass grave with the enlisted soldiers.  In 1877 his mother, Jerusha Sturgis, insisted on seeing the spot where her son died. A marker was placed in the vicinity of Last Stand Hill in deference to his visiting mother. A photograph in the U/S. Signal Corps archives shows a heap of stones beside a crudely labeled board.  This fictitious grave was dismantled after the grief-stricken woman’s departure.

Colonel Samuel Sturgis never forgave Custer for the death of his son and became one of Custer’s most vocal critics.  Sturgis wrote that Custer, “was a brave man, but also a very selfish man.  He was insanely ambitious of glory.”

He wrote that Custer was “tyrannical and had no regard for the soldiers under him.”  Sturgis accused Custer of making his attack, “recklessly, earlier by thirty-six hours than he should have done, and with men tired out from forced marches.”   Pro-Custer editors rushed to Custer’s defense, which prompted a further stinging attack by Sturgis.

In 1877, plans were being made for a memorial statue to honor Custer. Colonel Sturgis wrote, “If a monument is to be erected to General Custer for God’s sake let them hide it in some dark valley, or veil it, or put it anywhere the bleeding hearts of the widows, orphans, fathers and mothers of the men so uselessly sacrificed to Custer’s ambition can never be wrung at the sight.”  The statue was eventually placed at West Point.

The watch of Jack Sturgis was restored to his parents in 1878, having been traded by Sioux who had escaped to Canada.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

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

Custer's Last Moments

 The Last Stand

   Six months after the battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25, 1876), Frederick Whittaker’s A Complete Life of General George A. Custer was published.  Whittaker’s book was a canonization which presented Custer as a dashing and brilliant military leader abandoned to his fate by lesser, disloyal, treacherous, and cowardly men.  Whittaker borrowed generously from Custer’s own book My Life on the Plains, as well as on his own imagination, which was fulsome, since Whittaker was a professional writer of nickel and dime novel fiction for a leading publisher.

The Indians met the men under Custer’s immediate command about six hundred yards east of the river.  The Indians drove the soldiers up the hill, and then made a circuit to the right around the hill and drove off or captured most of the horses.  The troops made a stand at the lower end of the hill, and there they were all killed.  Whittaker’s source is the New York Herald of October 6, 1876 which published the deposition that Kill Eagle, one of the hostiles, gave to Captain Johnston, Acting Indian Agent.

Citing an “officer of the general staff who examined the ground” as his source, Whittaker describes the Custer fight in detail.  Custer was driven back from an unsuccessful attempt to cross the stream to successive stands on higher ground.  Three quarters of a mile from the river Calhoun’s company is thrown across the line of retreat.  Whittaker (who perhaps had the powers of a psychic medium) puts these words into Custer's mouth, “The country needs; I give her a man who will do his duty to the death: I give them my first brother (First Lt. Calhoun was the husband of Custer’s only sister).  I leave my best loved sister a widow, that so the day may be saved.”

James Calhoun

Whittaker continues, “So they stood till the last man was down…and then came the friendly bullet that sent the soul of James Calhoun to an eternity of glory.  Let no man say that such a life was thrown away.  The spectacle of so much courage must have nerved the whole command to the heroic resistance it made.  Calhoun’s men would never have died where they did, in line, had Calhoun not been there to cheer them.  They would have been found in scattered groups, fleeing or huddled together, not fallen in their ranks, every man in his place, to the last.  Calhoun, with his forty men, had done on an open field, what Reno, with a hundred and forty, could not do defending a wood.  He had died like a hero, and America will remember him, while she remembers heroes.” (Whittaker, 597)

Whittaker continues, “…every man realized that it was his last fight, and was resolved to die game. Down they went, slaughtered in position, man after man dropping in his place, the survivors contracting their line to close the gaps. We read of such things in history, and call them exaggerations. The silent witness of those dead bodies of heroes in that mountain pass cannot lie. It tells plainer than words how they died, the Indians all around them, first pressing them from the river, then curling around Calhoun, now round Keogh, till the last stand on the hill by Custer, with three companies.” (Whittaker, 597-8)

Whittaker now turns to the testimony of one of the Indian scouts, Curly, who claimed to have escaped from the field of battle.  (In 1886, Gall, a war leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota, claimed that Curly knew nothing about Custer’s last moments, ”He ran away too soon in the fight”). 

Curly

 According to Whittaker, however, when Curly saw that the party with Custer was about to be overwhelmed, he begged Custer to let him show him a way to escape.  “…Custer looked at Curly, waved him away and rode back to the little group of men, to die with them.”  Why, Whittaker asks, did Custer go back to certain death?  “Because he felt that such a death as that which that little band of heroes was about to die, was worth the lives of all the general officers in the world….He weighed, in that brief moment of reflection, all the consequences to America of the lesson of life and the lesson of heroic death, and he chose death.” (Whittaker, 599-600)

Elizabeth Custer with President Taft

Whittaker’s biography of Custer molded the public’s perception of George Armstrong Custer for over fifty years, because it was endorsed and defended by Custer’s widow and her powerful friends and allies.  Elizabeth Custer was widowed at the age of thirty-four and spent the next fifty- seven years, until her death in 1933, glorifying and defending her husband’s reputation.  Only after her death did historians begin seriously re-examining the Custer legend.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Since his death along the bluffs overlooking the Little Bighorn River, in Montana, on June 25, 1876, over five hundred books have been written about the life and career of George Armstrong Custer. Views of Custer have changed over succeeding generations. Custer has been portrayed as a callous egotist, a bungling egomaniac, a genocidal war criminal, and the puppet of faceless forces. For almost one hundred and fifty years, Custer has been a Rorschach test of American social and personal values. Whatever else George Armstrong Custer may or may not have been, even in the twenty-first century, he remains the great lightning rod of American history. This book presents portraits of Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn as they have appeared in print over successive decades and in the process demonstrates the evolution of American values and priorities.

History's Ten Worst Generals

Success leaves clues. So does failure. Some of history’s best known commanders are remembered not for their brilliant victories but for their catastrophic blunders.