"It may be regarded as certain that not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians without their consent."  Thomas Jefferson, 1786

 

 

Our Centennial Fiasco

 

 

Neither wise nor honest, a series of incomprehensible policies pursued by the United States towards the aboriginal inhabitants of its western lands finally hit the wall at the end of 1875.  The wall was William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army, whose periodic and less than convincing antipathy towards the western aborigines paled significantly lain against his white-hot hatred of bureaucracy and civilian politicians, the press, and the nation’s capital.   In the years immediately before the Centennial, Sherman had been increasingly marginalized by the corrupt politicians that permeated the Grant administration, primarily because they knew - without question and absolutely -  that the redheaded warrior would enjoy nothing more than a half decent reason to clean them out.  When a meeting was held with Grant to discuss what to do about the Black Hills and the gold therein, Sherman, the highest ranking officer in the Army that was to enforce the meeting’s decision, was not even invited.

 

Sherman was not a ray of sunshine in any gathering, which may have made him most unpopular in his own time but a joy to read today.  Perfectly willing to acquire an empire for his country, he was discerning of the evidence before him, and not easily influenced by the opinions of another.   “We had one war with Mexico to take Arizona and we should have another to make her take it back,” he once offered to a startled public.  When elevated in 1868 to further national prominence and command of all the armed forces by his old friend and Civil War superior, President Grant, Sherman’s love of and respect for the nation’s capital matured and was best expressed by his eventual moving of the entire Department of the Army to St. Louis in 1874.   Although many thought it just a fit of pique because he was increasingly ignored by the political hacks that were his superiors, from Sherman’s viewpoint the logic was persuasive.  While no war against Native Americans had ever been declared by Congress, there were wars being fought west of the Mississippi, the Army was engaged, and that was where he should be.   If he was remote from the perfumed tonsils of politicians and the sensationalistic, lying, and treason-inclined press, that was just a happy, happy coincidence.

             

In marked contrast to most others, Sherman had an intellectually honest if cruel view of the Indian. The first year of his elevation to head of the Army, he attended the Ft. Laramie treaty negotiations in Wyoming with other military luminaries and so met the enemy.  In the surviving photographs, it seems the army brass sat on chairs while the aborigines sat on the ground, wrapped in their blankets.  The whites look preternaturally lit, as in a Rembrandt; they are in excellent focus, almost posed with Sherman dramatically leaning forward in the center of his negotiation team.  The Indians, insignificant to the photo’s intended audience, are huddled on the left, many with backs to the camera.  In the center, also with backs to the camera, seem to be some ‘half breed’ translators if such can be divined by dark complexion, curly and short hair, a white man’s jacket and position between the Indians and the Army.

 

In the event, the natives did not strike Sherman as much in the way of a threat, and he privately summed up the conference (and reality) with precision and sentiment-less accuracy.  If peace was desired, the Indians would “all have to be killed or maintained as a species of pauper.” It was stupid and dishonest to pretend that they could continue their nomadic, war-based culture and live cheek by jowl with the white settlers, who were not to be contained, and however unfair and even sad to view the destruction of an entire culture, it was doomed anyway.  Hence, cut to the chase and, if they would not surrender outright and become citizens in demeanor, dress, and occupation, destroy them.  However momentarily bloody, in the long run it would reduce the number of overall casualties among whites and Indians both.  There was a relentless logic, truth, and prescience in Sherman, and it could not be credited to racism since this policy was little different from his view towards the hostile white South in the recent past. It was a job, and one starts a job with an accurate assessment.

             

Of late, the Indians had been handled by agencies of The Department of the Interior from their offices on a series of amorphous reservations enforcing amorphous policies.  Sometimes corrupt, often ignorant, periodically sadistic, nearly always hated, the agents were not above filling out food allocations with rocks and rotten meat, nor swindling the Indians in off-the-book deals, nor above calling in the military to enforce their self-serving decisions.  Comprehension of national policy varied considerably within the ranks of agents and Indians alike.  Wide agreement was reached that agents, whatever else they did, would offer food and weapons to Indians who agreed -- or so the agents were paid to believe -- to give up the inheritance of centuries for the dole.   Beyond viewed as a source of food and bullets, most Indians regarded the agents with the same deep respect and reverence with which modern man values attorneys or dentists: handy when needed. 

 

Sherman’s views of the civilian agents were hardly less contemptuous than those held by the Indians.  If tears flowed in St. Louis at the news of another illegal white man’s expedition being massacred, or when the depredations of famously corrupt Indian agents backfired, this is a subject ripe for speculation only where prolonged laughter will not offend.  However, his job was to make inevitably cruel, bloody events as short as possible.  If war was hell, why prolong it by offering procedures of dubious value for the sake of 19th century political correctness?  

             

So in 1875, Sherman decided that the Sioux people, who had by numbers and energy emerged as the pre-eminent tribe on the continent, were to be either nailed down or destroyed.  There had been too much blood associated with them, regardless of whose fault it was.   Diddling around with negotiations that the Indians neither understood nor the whites honored, wasting lives in defensive police actions, trying to distinguish which Indians were involved in which events, and coddling  people who would often just as soon open you up as share a pipe, all of this had to go.  He therefore gave instructions to his subordinate, General Philip Sheridan, who had replaced General Hancock in the Missouri military division.  An agreement involving the Black Hills - which could be construed, if sufficiently drunk,[1]  to have first been broken by Sioux hostile to accommodation with the whites - would be the convenient pretext.

             

Sheridan was to make Sherman’s theory of total war against the Indians reality just as Sherman had done against the deep South and he himself had done to the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia.  By this, it was understood villages would be attacked when they were most vulnerable, at winter at first light, all property destroyed, all the warriors driven to surrender or killed.  Sheridan, the cavalry general who foamed at the mouth and literally chewed the rug during the Civil War, assessed his forces for a winter campaign to be followed by a spring campaign if needed.   Based upon previous endeavors, it was assumed that it would be needed.

             

The army since the Civil War had gone from over a million men to, in the year of the Centennial, only twenty-five thousand, most massed along the Mexican border and in Washington D.C.  Therefore, the two related campaigns of 1876 could utilize no more than 3000 men but would involve two general officers, and at least five officers at or above the rank of Lt. Colonel, any one of which would have commanded many more men during the previous war back East.   The swollen ranks of the brass were further confused and inflated by the usage of brevet (honorary and temporary) ranks from the Civil War.   Custer himself had been a brevet Brigadier General of volunteers during the War but had risen only to Captain in the regular army by 1865.  He was now a Lt. Colonel, but was often addressed socially as General, a normal custom whatever orders of etiquette the Army now tried to enforce. And he had not received a promotion in ten years.

             

Adding to the good fellowship to be found in an army with an overabundance of officers with little chance of promotion, many of these officers nursed grievous grudges against each other for slights and events during the Civil War.  For example, Sheridan and General George Crook were not close.   Crook despised Sheridan for a wartime incident and would refer to his superior’s rapidly increasing girth with vicious glee and venom.  But Crook was, thus far, the most successful Indian fighter in the army, and Sheridan ordered him to make a winter march north from his new station at Ft. Fetterman in Wyoming against the 'hostile' Sioux and Cheyenne known as the winter roamers.  These were the ones who reported to reservations seldom if at all and then only to pick up food and bullets; otherwise, they stayed off the land set aside for them.  This was in violation of the treaties someone or other appointed by whites had signed on the behalf of the Sioux but without their permission.  It was better to hit them in winter before they became mobile.

             

In winter, the Indians ponies were weak from sparse razing, and the people themselves involved in saving energy and leading the sedate life of all nomads in cold weather.    They were vulnerable because they could not or would not move.  So in March of 1876, Crook found a village in northeast Wyoming, and it was attacked by his subordinate Major J. J. Reynolds heading an advance force of cavalry.  Reynolds had small experience fighting Indians.  The Indians scattered at the unexpected attack.  Then, while the Army burned the Indians’ food, ammunition, and winter clothing, the Sioux returned and made menacing gestures of the sort that suggested to Reynolds the need to retreat.  He had, after all, insufficient food, ammunition, and winter clothing to continue.  

 

Crook, appalled, had to comply in the retreat without his infantry being brought to bear at all.    Reynolds was eventually court-martialed, “as much for stupidity as anything,”[2] and left the army, which probably did not surprise anyone.  Most officers knew that there were many, many of their fellows waiting to move up or over should they err.  Crook, who would eventually be forced out to make room for Nelson Miles at general rank, was undoubtedly reinforced in his belief that most current federal soldiers could not defeat anyone and that the only way to defeat Indians was with Indian troopers.  But since he had just come to this department from down south where he had temporarily defeated the Apache and Kiowa, he had yet to locally refine his famous systems of supply, spies, and scouts to wage war.

             

Sheridan, his winter’s strike a damp fizzle, concentrated on organizing a surefire spring campaign that would be won or lost almost exactly on the nation’s centennial. 

             

It was supposed that the Indians would at that time be in eastern Montana or Wyoming somewhere in or near the drainage area of the Powder River, a favorite, or one of its sister streams to the west.   They were not expected to be as far west as the Bighorn Mountains, the stronghold of the Crows, powerful and traditional enemies of the Sioux.  The hungry roamers would naturally gravitate to where the grass would be rich for their ponies as well as for the large game needed for food.   As the winter droned on, new information indicated the Sioux would likely be along the Bighorn River.  Some thought the upper Little Bighorn, a tributary, the likely area for the spring assembly.  It was a preferred spot of the Northern Cheyenne, who had grown increasingly close to the Oglala Sioux and were in respectful awe of Sitting Bull, the foremost Hunkpapa leader and a spiritual force throughout the Sioux people.  Regardless, the campaign would be flexible enough to meet any contingency, and now Sheridan looked over his small assortment of forces and their commanders spread over seven of the huge western states and districts.  They were an odd lot.  

               

Colonel John Gibbon, a southerner who had fought for the Union against his many brothers fighting for the South, had a pelvis so shattered during the Civil War he was called No Hip Bone by the Indians. Once a brevet general who led the famous Iron Brigade, Gibbon had been an excellent soldier then but, like many others, had never attained the successes during the Indian Wars that was expected of him.  Gibbon had once said “an army commander must be as near a despot as the institutions of his country permit,” an acceptable line of blather for Civil War soldiers but a counterproductive attitude in the army of the frontier. Gibbon was there in Ft. Shaw in central Montana and he was ordered to move south along the Yellowstone until he met a detachment from Ft. Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota under General Alfred Terry.

             

Terry had not been trained as a soldier at all, but was a lawyer and jurist who found success as a Volunteer during the Civil War.  A bachelor, Terry was an educated and refined man, very popular and seemingly competent, but his military genius does not dampen the pages of history at any point, despite the professional and personal respect of General, now President, Grant, who later took the time to mention Terry in his autobiography for events not precisely key to book or war.   Having absolutely no experience fighting Indians, he was put in charge of the whole campaign, ranking even Crook.  Each column would contain infantry and cavalry, and Gibbon would contribute a small amount of artillery.  Together, they would total about fifteen hundred men.

             

Terry’s plan suffered from the same serious deficiencies that beset the Japanese Navy during World War II: plans far too complicated to pull off in peacetime, much less war, highly dependent upon timing that was in turn totally reliant on coincidental occurrences; in short, a belief in your forces not bolstered by the abilities of your command and its recent history.  Such strategy reflects an assumption of your own intrinsic ability to adapt perfectly to events while your peers, by paranormal means, are to react correctly to your moves of which they otherwise could not be aware.  After Gibbon and Terry united, they could not communicate with Crook without having control of the land between, the absence of which was the arguable point of the whole expedition, and the reason for the Seventh Cavalry's presence. 

 

There was a third column in Sheridan's plan.  Trudging up from Ft. Fetterman - yet again - would be General Crook with about thirteen hundred3 soldiers, both infantry and cavalry.  After Gibbon and Terry met along the Yellowstone, they would head south down the Little Bighorn.  Somewhere on that river, Crook would somehow meet them.  It was far too complicated to be entirely smooth, relying on timing utterly beyond large units with infantry out of touch with each other for weeks at a time.  If needed, it was assumed that each unit would react to its separate incidents independent of the others but the idea was that the hostiles would be caught between the three and there would be at least one major battle.  It was not expected that there would be more than fifteen hundred warriors at any one time.   After the commands had left, Sheridan came into information that there could be as many as 5000 warriors in the camp.  This too, could be an underestimate, but most historians now say there would have been between three to five thousand warriors in a village of ten to fifteen thousand people to confront the three small armies.  Even together, they were greatly outnumbered, but unlike their opponents they never were gathered in one unit.   It was expected that Gibbon and Terry would unite mid-June along the Bighorn, and that they would meet Crook late June, early July along the Rosebud or the Little Bighorn.  It was likely that all would be done before the major July 4th festivities in Philadelphia in celebration of the nation’s Centennial, although that in no way was a fueling factor.       

             

Heading Terry’s cavalry arm was Lt. Colonel Custer, leading the entire 7th Cavalry.  Custer, who had been court-martialed ten years previous for deserting his troops and allowing his officers to shoot lesser deserters without trial, was again in the official doghouse for offering testimony during the hearings concerned with the depredations of Secretary of the Interior William Belknap in Congress.  These hearings, which led to the resignation of this Cabinet member before he could be indicted for corruption, had an ancillary connection to the selling of positions at official trading posts and agencies throughout the West.   A hereditary Democrat,4  Custer offered to testify, but his ramblings turned out to be nothing more than innuendo and hearsay and played no significant role in the outcome.5  President Grant, however, forced Sheridan and Sherman to remove Custer from the Seventh as punishment, and a hysterical Custer left Washington against orders to beg General Terry to intercede on his behalf.   Because of his supposed experience, and the grudging support of Sheridan based upon Civil War activity, Grant gave in, and despite having run out on giants Sherman and Sheridan, Custer’s luck held as he rode at the head of the Seventh in a column he might normally have been expected to command himself instead of Terry, who had no experience with the Sioux at war.

             

While many have suggested that Custer was consumed with ambition, perhaps even ambition for the Presidency, in reality he was fighting to keep his job.  There were plenty of experienced officers waiting to move up or over to command of the Seventh Cavalry, officers who had never been court-martialed, who had what a future generation would call much lower negative ratings, and whose Civil War records were just as distinguished.   And they would not have implicated the Presidential war hero who had attained a rank superior to George Washington’s.

 

During the advance of Terry’s column, a segment of the Seventh under Major Reno was sliced off to go down the Powder and over to the Tongue River to find what Indian trails or camps might be encountered.  When confronted with a huge trail heading west, Reno did exactly what Custer would do in a week and immediately followed it west into the valley of  Rosebud Creek, disobeying orders but revealing that if there was a village, it was bigger than previously thought and likely on the lower Little Bighorn.  This meant it was closer than suspected and that Crook could not arrive in time if the camp was to be hit before the Indians broke up and vanished. The growing uncertainties of a campaign against a foe nobody really understood led Terry to explode against Reno, even though the major had provided valuable information.   In a microcosmic prelude of the controversy that would surround Custer, Terry accused Reno of risking the success of the mission by possibly revealing the presence of the army to the Indians by following their trail against orders, although like a good soldier, Reno kept his commander informed and precipitated no action he could not win.

             

Custer, in his daily writings to an eastern newspaper, took almost giggly pleasure in relating that Terry was muttering about a court-martial for Reno, who had never been one of Custer’s intimates.   Now Reno, like his commander, rode with the knowledge he was being watched by those who might need to see compensation for a recent mistake.          

             

Having something to prove had rarely been an effective precursor to success within the Seventh Cavalry or any military unit.  At Custer’s Battle of the Washita in 1868, Major Joel Elliott (who upon return from that campaign would be brought up on charges of killing deserters without trial) took off with some men away from the main action in pursuit of the inevitable decoy Indians.  He and all his men were killed when they were surrounded.  Custer, involved with other things, never expressed concern and left without having made more than a desultory search.   Elliott6 was said to have been popular with the men, or at least with the officers and noncoms, and his death and Custer’s desertion of him caused a major rift within the regiment.  Elliott’s official last words -- as opposed to what he might have actually said --  were “here’s for a brevet or a coffin!” as he sped off, which may have been an accurate assessment of his immediate future.

             

In the event, the two ranking members of the Seventh were concerned with more than mere success.  Custer had to achieve it, perhaps in a manner to cast his recent actions into the memory hole if the Republicans won again, and now Reno was concerned about being made the scapegoat if the expedition was unsuccessful.  This was not a sparkling combination.

             

Some of Custer’s officers had been assigned to Philadelphia to serve in festivities for the Centennial, and therefore the current third highest officer in his command and the senior captain was, while possibly the best soldier and leader in the regiment, an embittered and stubborn man named Frederick Benteen.  Captain Benteen, like Confederate General James Longstreet and Abraham Lincoln and so many others, had lost several children to the diseases of civilization and had a perpetually ill wife caring for his surviving son.  It has been suggested that if he had meningitis - which he said he had - and passed it on to his wife and children, he lived in great guilt, which would explain much of his personality.7   He detested Custer, took perverse pride in it, and had in print excoriated the Battle of the Washita, Custer’s one successful Indian battle, as mainly a slaughter of innocents, which was the case, and stated firmly that Elliott had been deserted, which was indeed the truth.  Like Gibbon a Southerner who fought for the North, Benteen studiously avoided the political skills of his commander, which did little to compensate for not having attended West Point and being born in the South.  Even though he had commanded large units during the war and was an acknowledged leader and winning commander, Benteen held on to the quaint vision that competence and dedication would eventually be rewarded by a grateful army.  As truth dawned, his mood darkened year by year.

             

On June 17th, 1876, while Reno returned from his scout, General George Crook and his thirteen hundred men were surprised by an attack of an equal number of Sioux along the upper reaches of Rosebud Creek.  Entirely saved from disaster by his Crow, Shoshone, and Arikira scouts, Crook finally organized his troops and fought a widespread battle that gave both sides evidence for victory according to their lights.  The Sioux had surprised, scared, and humiliated the army by many countings of coup, and their own losses were not excessive.  The Army also had few casualties, and it was left in possession of the field after driving the enemy seven miles.   Unfortunately, Crook’s men had fired off an amazing amount of ammunition, twenty-five thousand rounds, to achieve this goal, and this fact -- combined with the surprise that Indians would not only stand and fight a large, disciplined army but would attack it -- led him into mental recesses that forced him to retreat down to Goose Creek in what is now Sheridan, Wyoming.  Here he waited for reinforcements, ammunition, and news from the north.   Some in the military consider his retreat the cause of the coming disaster, though nobody indicates what advantage bringing a thousand men into battle with insufficient ammunition would be.  He sent off messengers to all parties, but there was no way he could be sure the information would reach Terry or Gibbon in time, and in fact it never reached them at all.  They learned of it weeks later from General Sheridan’s office in St. Paul.

 

Ignorant of Crook’s fight, but acting on the new information brought by the disobedient Reno, Terry and Gibbon decided that it would be best to send the Seventh up the Rosebud (which meant heading South) to where the trail Reno had found crossed it, continue about twenty miles further to compensate for any Indians who might have moved South, then turn west to the Little Bighorn valley.  Custer was to make sure that all Indians were herded west and north into the lines of infantry and units of the Second Cavalry that Gibbon and Terry would march south up the Little Bighorn.  On about Monday, the 26th, the two units could close on the village and destroy it.   Fifteen hundred undisciplined warriors should be no match for the army, perhaps no match for the Seventh alone.  It was possible that Custer might bump into Crook, and subordinate himself to the General while both turned north.  As historian Barbara Tuchman said in relation to another military endeavor, it was logical but as is not inconsistent with logic, wrong.

             

There was no logic in the written orders that Custer received.  All good military commanders have one thing in common: they give clear, precise instructions in short, informative paragraphs.  Whatever anyone thought of U. S. Grant, for example, all agreed that there was no possibility of misunderstanding what he wanted in his orders.   Terry, however, committed to paper a glob of information laced with attaboy rhetoric which to this day can be construed to the views of those who argue Custer did or did not disobey them.    That in itself is the stigmata of inferior command.   Battle orders should not be subject to interpretation, but Terry’s, viewed from certain perspectives, could be so subjected.   After crossing the trail, Custer was to continue south, sweeping all to the west and north, but it was needlessly added that Custer could deviate from these orders if new information suggested the necessity.   That could mean anything, and Custer partisans have argued this point for over a century.  Most who read the orders feel that Custer disobeyed before he got to the point where he was allowed to exercise initiative, but not all do.   Custer’s haters wish Terry’s orders had said: “You will march down the Rosebud without deviation under all circumstances unless the survival of the command is threatened.  You will, after crossing the Indian trail, continue at least twenty but no more than twenty-five miles, at which point you will cross over into the Valley of the Little Bighorn while feeling constantly to the left for any stray Indians.  Once in the Little Bighorn Basin, you will march north with the expectation of reaching the village at the same time the northern force does, perhaps during the late hours of the 26th or the morning of the 27th.  Once in the Little Bighorn valley, however, we have too much faith in your skill to burden you with orders now that you know what we wish to be achieved.”   But Terry’s orders were lovely considerations for Custer’s feelings in less than precise language.   It was to Terry that Custer had pleaded to regain his command, by one witness on his knees and weeping, and the lifelong bachelor Terry had responded.

             

These were especially ill-chosen words given the current threats to Custer’s career in the army and his military tendencies in general, which were to charge the enemy regardless of other factors.  For Custer, to have merely been an obedient cog in this campaign may not have saved his job if the Republicans won in November.  His natural, seemingly chemical desire for attention and success were compounded.

             

Custer took food for fifteen days, indicating neither he nor his commander were expecting a battle very soon, and started off up the Rosebud on a forced march about midday on June 22nd, 1876.  He had not told his officers or men where precisely they were going or what the plan was.  After only twelve miles, Custer ordered camp and had an officer’s meeting.  On this important day and gathering, he started out by stating that he knew some of his officers had complained about him up the line of command, and that he hoped in the future they would go through channels first as regulations required.  Benteen, with an eye toward the Washita affair, made the reasonable suggestion that Custer should just address those with whom he was angry rather than casting a pall over all of them, which drew a huffy response, although in making it Custer apparently eliminated Benteen as a cause of the complaint.

             

Here is a potentially key question absolutely and suspiciously unaddressed, even by those who feel time/motion study and forensic applications are the key to the battle.   Exactly, who were the officers who had complained about Custer up the chain of command?  If it was not the man who took pride in publicly despising Custer - Benteen -  who were these other officers who had objected to Custer’s execution of his office?   Custer apparently knew.  If Reno, would that explain anything?   Surely it was not Custer’s brother, Thomas, or James Calhoun, a brother-in-law, or Myles Keogh who seemed a member of the family, or William Cooke, Custer’s adjutant and a Canadian mercenary. 

 

Did any other officer know the author of this ‘betrayal?’   Could it be one of the officers in Philadelphia, presented with Commanding General, even Presidential ears?  Could it be any of the young officers now with the regiment whose fathers were high rankers elsewhere, like Lt.’s Sturgis or Crittendon?   Was there only professional concern in such a matter, or could one too many losing poker hands have been the inspiration?   Or something else, entirely?

             

 Might it have been Thomas Weir?  Or since this scene seems to appear only through the offices of Frederick Benteen and Godfrey, did it occur at all?

             

Whoever it was, this was not the subject to bring up just before a major battle, even if Custer was merely hoping to clear the air and move on.  Despite this attempt at uniting the officers with fealty to the regiment and each other, his history of self-aggrandizement and back-room deals was not likely to inspire new allegiance.  It was so startling for Custer to ask for allegiance and help that Godfrey recalled Lt. Wallace saying that Custer was going to die.   

             

This incident of Custer’s pre-battle meeting, told by those both in favor of Custer and those not, is a red flag both to Custer Buffs and to his detractors.  It is easy to see why.   If it were to be revealed that Custer, while held in some affection by his nepotistic subordinates, was not held in high regard by even them, and considered enough of a menace that it was necessary to whine up the chain of command to the Army brass, than a major prop of the Custer-as-martyr myth vanishes.   But it also plays into the hands of those who consider Custer a sacrifice, betrayed by his own men and the Army itself.  Between the battle and the court hearing into Reno’s behavior three years later, accusations were made that the surviving officers covered up what had happened in aggregate with allegations that Custer had been left to die by Reno and Benteen.  On the face of it, any officer who had complained about the commander under such circumstances might be made known and his motives and actions discussed, but not in this case.   So, the issue just sits there, seemingly unresearched, while the original battlefield location of a surgeon’s button is argued over, and great import is given to the location of bullets and casings although nobody can know who fired them or precisely when. 

               

 Sometime, about the moment the Little Big Horn becomes an obsession, historians amateur and not have to deal with at least two major decisions.  First, come clean about why the battle is so haunting to them (they never do) and, second, what do they think of Fred Benteen?  Traditionally, one must either hold him as the most  'craven poltroon' ( a phrase that would inspire duels back then) of the day, the man who deliberately flouted Custer's orders and dilly-dallied in a sulk during his day's assignment even before ignoring a cry for help, or recall only his deliberate, intelligent and uncontestedly brave behavior on Reno Hill.  If Benteen acted wisely, you see, than it follows as night follows day and the Sioux the Cheyenne that Custer was totally out of touch with reality - perhaps insane or insanely foolish - and thereby casting doubt on his previous career and, somehow, all Anglo myths of the West.  It cannot be had both ways: Benteen either disobeyed orders or Custer's orders were not possible to obey.    Somehow, it can never be seen that logical assumptions by both men were simply wrong, that there was no evil at work, and that only the assault of a jaundiced press forced survivors to justify what to them and many objective people feel needs no justification.

 

"Anglo Myths" is not a grab bag of vagaries to muddy the waters.  The culture of western Europe and virtually all of the United States had been defined by Britain, which in 1876 was at the height of Empire and a power less military than of infectious self-image, an attitude that allowed tiny numbers to rule millions and, for the most part and considering their opportunities to have exacted worse, do a good and honest job of it.  Further, literary and industrial revolutions spun out from this counter point of Japan on the Eurasian land mass, all transmogrified by the burgeoning science of archeology busy at Troy and Pompeii, epic polar exploration and self-sacrifice (John Franklin, Robert Scott), and a burning desire to root it all in direct decadence from all Empires that had gone before.8 It might be a normal defense of the imperialistic mind to posture as the bastion of culture and history.   Myths grew to justify action, and where better to find correlation for the actions of the white race than in the ancient legends of Teutonic and Norse history and race memory?  Where indeed.

             

As we have seen, virtually anywhere.  For Norse myth was not a repository of uplifting stories and New Age Tales of Self Worth. Quite the opposite.  Norse gods are going to die just like the humans, and will do so in an utterly predictable final battle with their mortal enemies, the Giants, after which the One, the real god, would remake the world.  Until that enchanted moment, life was not to be mistaken for a giddy skip through the park either.  It all seemed to come down to how someone would die, how they would face their final moment.  Life was just a preparation for death in purpose and intent.  Like the bullfight, a Moment of Truth, and nothing else mattered.

 

Christianity, when it elbowed its way into the snow of Norway and Iceland, was easily grafted on to the Elder Edda, the repetitive and odd Icelandic equivalent of a frozen Iliad, combined with troves of Old Testament-like stories if told by senile old men.   When natives glumly recited their depressing view of spirituality and the future, closing with the One reupholstering the landscape, the Christian priests must have jumped for joy, screaming “And guess who He is?  Come on, guess!!”

             

Note, however, how authentic, early Christianity hardly conflicts with such an outlook.  Originally, people died and rotted and obtained heaven only on the Day of Judgment.  Thus, it was important to keep corporeal matter together and easy to be reassembled.  Since the Millennium was not long in the future, this was not viewed as a problem.   When twelve noon on the first day of 1000 AD passed in wintry bleakness, and the heavens remained vaulted and sealed, and nothing particularly divine happened for a couple of decades after, heaven became viewed as instantaneous at death, much like the thieves on Calvary were told. 

             

Predestination and an anal retentive approach to daily life appeared in northern Europe, betraying little of Christianity's Asian birth but a whole lot of northern climate, not excluding Ice Ages, great and small.  Perhaps as a method of marginalizing the terrible choices life demanded, the thought that Heaven was selected for a chosen few before birth evolved with no sense of conflict with a messiah who had come to save those very souls.  Further blendings of existing spirituality with the beliefs of those that now held the sword and purse in Rome produced considerable confusion and philosophical non-sequiturs to the great masses of Europe.  As such, life was a game of incomprehensible do's and don'ts that were meant to provide order till the big moment, manner of death or Judgment Day.    

               

Benteen and Custer are not traditionally seen as the two poles of the debate: that dubious right traditionally goes to Reno and Custer.  But the reality is, Reno is almost irrelevant to it.  As Reno charged according to plan, his three companies and scouts were stopped and forced to go on the defensive.  The arguments against Reno have been that if he kept charging, then Custer would have been able to attack and divide the village.  But as has been shown by recent analysis, Custer was utterly unable to come to Reno's help even if, and it is an ‘if,’ he even wanted to at the time it was needed.  Custer was only beginning to look for a crossing when Reno was utterly engaged, already way too late.   Further, he had seen the size of the village and was himself perplexed about how to make a crossing against such a mass.  Then, he split his unit again. 

             

It must be said that no person on earth, anywhere, has been more unfairly trashed by the ill and over informed than Custer.  This was partially his fault, partially his wife's, and partially Frederick Whittaker's in that hack’s mostly unreadable beautification sold as a biography after the battle.  Custer was an aggressive, social climbing romantic whose selected life virtues were pretty much disemboweled by the Civil War, if only he had noticed.  Perhaps he did notice, and this might explain on some level his search for the big, unsullied victory that would get his wife and himself off the plains and into city life.   He was guilty of killing Indian women and children, herding them back into their theme parks, and treating them as, depending on the occasion, subhuman or subservients.  At the Washita, he was guilty of treating Indians just like or worse than they treated each other, and white liberals will never forgive him for this.  If they wear necklaces of hands and scalps, fine, that's nature's way and a sociological acceptability.  If Custer or his men shoot children, he's a war criminal.

             

The crisis in this comes over Custer's decision to attack on the 25th, what he thought he was attacking, and the splitting of the regiment.  Much has been made of the animosity between Benteen, Reno, and Custer, but it is evident nowhere that they would sacrifice men in order to inflict defeat on each other.  Whatever Benteen thought of Custer, he had friends in Custer's battalion and there is nothing to indicate that he would enjoy their death; if, for no other reason, than the fact that he might need their services to save his own skin. The same can be said of the others.

             

Fragging hardly began in the Vietnam War.  Officers have been steely-eyed solely for the enemy only in military books for children and the sort of personalities that feel their life of exemplary mediocrity in the service of their country was the high point, in need of import and shaping in other's memory.  Clearly, there were people here in Custer's regiment who would, under certain conditions, kill each other. Benteen in particular.  He had slapped Reno and threatened to pull a gun on Custer after Custer suggested he needed a whipping, all this before the other officers.  Nobody doubted his cheerful homicidal will; few doubted their own. 

             

Custer had, after reviewing Reno's scout the previous week, suggested in a letter that court-martial was not out of the question, for Reno had disobeyed his orders from General Terry.  It is worth noting that Reno disobeyed orders based on new information that clearly demonstrated that the foundation for his mission was based upon faulty suppositions.  It is also noted that Custer must have realized that the reason Reno was not punished in the field was because he had succeeded in the spirit of his mission despite disobeying orders. 

             

The puzzle begins with the element of surprise.   Much has been made of the various events that propelled Custer to attack that day because the Indians knew of their approach and would escape.  There seems to be some confusion here about Indians in a war party and Indians equipped with children, women, travois, and a pony herd.  The former could, indeed, appear and vanish quickly and leave indistinct trails.  But there is nothing to indicate that family units, weighed with their impedimenta, moved quicker than cavalry, and quite a bit to indicate the opposite.  If Custer had done what the original plan indicated and crossed over about twenty miles south of where he did and noisily marched north on the west of the Little Bighorn, it is not clear that any military advantage would have been lost.  The Indians were trapped between the Crows to the West, Terry and Gibbon to the north, and Custer to the south.  To the East were the reservations after the Sioux made a retreading of the recent decent from the Wolf Mountains, towards the Rosebud and the Powder. 

             

In any event, it was hardly a given that attack was the only option open to Custer even if he had been spied by the hostiles.

             

Further, what did Custer see from the Crow's Nest, that flattened mound in the Wolf Mountains?  Supposedly, he saw nothing to indicate the huge village that his scouts did, but Mitch Boyeur later convinced him.  If so, sending Benteen off to the west to see if there were smaller villages to the south of the main village is puzzling.  According to historian John Gray, Benteen received orders orally with no one else around, but that Lt. Francis Gibbon recorded the orders were to see what could be seen and get back to Custer for instruction.   If info for such a short distance was the job, what advantage was there in sending three companies when the more knowledgeable and faster scouts could accomplish all of that much quicker?  It makes no sense.  For if there were villages there, Benteen would not have enough men to attack and would have to wait for Custer anyway, who with Reno would be traveling at 90 degrees and increasing the hypotenuse with each hoof beat.  What Custer did was divide his unit into four battalions, sending them to attack unknown numbers out of support distance and with no clear instructions or alternatives. 

                

More to the point, the area Benteen was to search lay directly in view from the Crow's Nest, right in line with the camp on the Little Big Horn, so it remains a mystery what element of hostiles of any size could be there if the scouts and Custer himself hadn't noticed from that rise in the Wolf Mountains.   Whatever Custer or the scouts saw, nobody mentioned any activity in that area, much less hundreds or thousands of Indians.

             

Why did he send Benteen out there?  Well, Benteen was quite certain that Custer had tried to get him killed at the Battle of the Washita in 1868.  The reason for this, if Benteen can be believed, is that Benteen had been more or less forced to front Custer one hundred dollars and had not been repaid.  Benteen wrote a blistering assessment of Custer's one big victory to a friend, and he was not particularly upset to see the letter make it into print.  When confronted by a livid Custer, who had threatened to whip the officer responsible, Benteen checked his revolver and said he was ready for the promised whipping.  At this point Custer backed down.  Benteen does not describe exactly how Custer's assignment to him that day overly endangered his life.

             

From the distant past of the Seventh Cavalry, a Lt. Aspinwall was recalled fondly by Benteen thirty years after the young man had been forced out of the army for gambling debts.  What the circumstances were for the young and well-liked Lieutenant’s removal is not entirely clear from reading Benteen’s thoughts on the subject, since they are included only in the once famous correspondence he had with a former private, but known liar, fraud, and Republican politician, Theodore Goldin, who would virtually extort a Congressional Medal of Honor out of a reluctant army twenty-eight years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  What is known is that Custer wanted Aspinwall to be replaced by the brother of James Calhoun, himself a future brother-in-law of the Boy General.

             

It is known that in 1868 Custer, after officers reluctantly drew his attention to the fact that the targeted village of Black Kettle was only one of several in the area, packed up and left, leaving Major Joel Elliott in unknown circumstances.  Elliott and his men had been butchered rather early in the fight, having ridden off downriver to chase some Indians on horseback (sound familiar?) when they were surprised and overpowered by unexpected numbers, but this was not known for two weeks.  Officers and men who served with Custer in Oklahoma remembered his conduct eight years later as they lay in the dust, blood, stench of dead and dying comrades and horses through two days of blistering heat and gaseous decomposition.

 

To Be Continued