As an aside, just a factoid about the battle that is not known as much as you would think: the battle took a terrible toll on the men of the Custer family. In addition to George, the deaths that day included his brother Tom, his brother Boston and their teenaged nephew Armstrong “Autie” Reed. This left only one surviving son in the Custer family (Nevin, a farmer- he raised Tom’s illegitimate son, Tom Jr.- all three of the Custer brothers who died that day were credited with illegitimate children, incidentally).
The survival of G. A. Custer’s father Emmanuel until the 1890s and his wife until 1933 (she lived to see several movies made about him) largely detracted from the publication of any negative accounts of Custer for two generations after his death.
The greatest mystery to me of Little Big Horn will always remain this: it was one of the few times the Sioux and Cheyenne, who had far more common heritage than different and certainly far more common concerns than different, ever entered together into a significant (if unintentional) military alliance, and you see the results. This was never attempted again. Why? (I know there’s an answer, I’m just not familiar with it- my guess would be the inability of the Plains to sustain that large a group for very long.)
Just speculation but possibly because of casualties? By US standards the indians had very limited manpower and even though they ‘won’ they just couldnt afford the toll that fighting pitched battles like this meant.
Just an side: have any psychic people reported bad vibes at the site of the battle? I seem to recall reading once that several people have reported seeing things there…and many people get the creeps just from being there. If there was ever a spot for ghosts, the Little Bighorn ought to be one.
The Cheyenne and Sioux were of course culturally somewhat similar, as there tended to be a considerable cultural convergence among the purely nomadic groups of the Great Plains. However they were in different linguistic groups ( Algonquian vs. Siouan ). The Cheyenne were actually a bit closer to their perennial allies the Arapaho, who were also Algonquian speakers. Both the Cheyenne and Arapaho were split into Northern ( roughly along the North Platte ) and Southern ( roughly along the upper Arkansas ) tribal groups ( with a fair bit of intermingling ).
It was predominantly the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho that were involved in the wars with the Sioux and they appear to have been allied with them from ~1840. In addition to the Sioux Uprising of 1876-1877 ( where the Northern Cheyenne and a few Arapaho made up maybe ~1/6 of the Amerindian forces present ), they had also participated with the Sioux in the Bozeman Trail War of 1865-1868 ( something of a success ).
The Southern Cheyenne clashed with the U.S. army as early as 1857 and from at least 1864 ( with the outbreak of the Cheyenne-Arapaho War ) were involved in wars with the U.S. throughout the 1860’s and into the 1870’s ( they participated in Red River War of 1874-1875 and some may have straggled north afterwards to join the hostilities there ). They were always allied with the Southern Arapaho and frequently with the Kiowa and Comanche throughout those years.
So these alliances weren’t rare - they just weren’t enough and were at any rate sometimes confounded by the habit of different autonomous bands to negotiate seperate peaces at various points. The biggest players were the various branches of the Dakota/Sioux and the Comanche, which were the two largest groups of nomadic Plains Indians. The smaller Cheyenne ( and somewhat smaller yet Arapaho ) tribes played slightly secondary, if still very significant roles in the fighting.
That was actually referring to the Little Bighorn. Supposedly the Cheyenne and Arapaho made up one of six of the big tepee circles at the Little Bighorn encampment.
I have a few questions about the structure of the US Army at the time of Custer:
First: what was a GENERAL doing commanding a small cavalry troop? Seems to me that a colonel or major would have been more appropriate. Generals are rather too precious to risk losing in actions like this.
Second: Major Reno/Captain Benteen: wern’t these guys rather old to be in their ranks? Benteen was older than Custer-how could one remain a captain for so long-was promotion that slow in the post-Civil War era?
At the subsequent inquest, Benteen testified that he didn’t think much of General Custer’s abilities…what happened to Benteen? Did he retire at that point? Or was he stuck with his junior rank forever?
Custer was a Lt. Col. at the time of the battle. Custer was only a temporary wat-time General in the Civil War. At the time it was referred to as a “brevet” rank.
Custer was not a general at Little Big Horn. He was a lieutenant colonel. He was breveted a general during the civil war. But that ende3d when the war ended and he reverted back to his previous rank.
From a great site on Benteen
Promoted to Major in the Ninth Cavalry in 1882, he was given command of Fort Duchesne, Utah in 1886. In 1887, he was tried by court-martial for a number of charges of drunkenness on duty and conduct unbecoming an officer. He was convicted of most of the charges against him, and sentenced to dismissal from the Army; however the general commanding the Department of the Platte, Brigadier General George Crook, forwarded the proceedings to the President with a recommendation for clemency. President Cleveland agreed, and remitted the sentence to one year’s suspension from rank and duties at half pay. Shortly following his reinstatement the following year, Benteen retired from active service and settled in Atlanta, where he was a minor celebrity, although he refused requests for interviews about his service in general, and about the Little Bighorn in particular. In 1890 he was brevetted to the rank of Brigadier General for gallantry at the Little Bighorn and at Canyon Creek. He died on June 22, 1898, of a stroke. Benteen is buried in Arlington National Cemetary.
I think it was George Carlin who posed the question: “Have you ever noticed that when the enemy wins, it’s a massacre; but when we win, it’s a victory?”
Military custom called for an officer to be addressed by the highest rank he ever held, even if a brevet or temporary rank. So Lt. Colonel Custer was addressed and usually referred to as “General” Custer. Most of his officers were Civil War veterans, and most also had held higher ranks, so Lieutenants and Captains in the 7th might have been addressed as Major or Colonel or whatever. Promotion in the regular, peacetime army was glacial. Congress had authorized a specific number of regiments. Regiments were allowed some many officers of each rank - and until someone retired, was re-assigned to another regiment, or died, no one got promoted. Seniority ruled.
Technically, Custer was not even in command of the Seventh. He was what we would call the executive officer. The official commander, whose name I forget, was on detached duty somewhere, and had very little if anything to do with the actual command - a very common occurence when you remember that the Army did not really have a full time general staff. At the time, everyone knew this, and Custer was rightfully and universally acknowledged as the real commander of the Seventh.
It really is worth a visit - it is a stunningly beautiful part of the country. My two major memories are of seeing the note Custer sent to Benteen telling him to come quickly with the ammo, and looking down at the site of the Indian camp. Seeing the size of the camp, my one thought of Custer was “what a putz!”
I’m curious about this custom because in Terry’s written orders to Custer on June 22, 1876, he explicitly addresses Custer as “Lieutenant-Colonel Custer, 7th Cavalry”.
Custer held temporary rank during the Civil War of Major General – the nominal rank for a division commander but at the time the highest grade in the US Army except for one Lieutenant General who was US Grant from March or April 1864. The rank had been dormant. Grant was the third person to hold it, the others being (I think) George Washington and Winfield Scott. There was an elaborate system for figuring out who was in charge at any given moment and the relative precedence between temporary and permanent ranks. At the end of the Civil War Custer reverted to his permanent rank in the regular army of Captain. When the Seventh Cavalry was organized in 1868 (again, I think) he was offered the job of second in command to Samuel D. Sturgis, also a brevet Major General. As a practical matter Sturgis was kept busy with duties at department and army HQ and Custer was the defacto regimental commander almost all the time.
Terry’s written order was directed to Custer as a LTC because it was an official communication. Use of brevet rank was more of a matter of social protocol than any thing else.
Incidentally, COL Sturgis’s son, James, was a junior lieutenant shortly out of West Point and was killed at the Little Big Horn. His body was never identified. The bodies of a number of officers were not identified. This is some indication of the extent to which the dead were mutilated as well as an indication of how fast a body left out in the Montana summer decomposes. A grave was marked for young Sturgis and a photograph taken of it a year or so later when a detachment was sent to clean the place up so that his mother would not know that the boy was not found and that his body was probably just left on the field under a thin layer of gravel.
It is hard to think that Custer’s body was left alone. There is some indication that the body buried as Custer’s might not have even been his. Some unknown and unknowing German or Irish immigrant Corporal might be planted at West Point. There may have been a conspiracy among the officers to conceal from Mrs Custer the extent of her husband’s wounds.
Apparently Captain (brevet LTC) Keogh’s body was not mutilated. There is speculation that this was because he was wearing a Catholic metal from his service in the Papal army during the Italian Revolution and the Indians either respected the metal or had a superstitious fear of it. Keogh, and every body else, was stripped but the metal was left on him.
If anybody is interested in all this William Graham’s The Custer Myth is an excellent collection of primary information, including reports from the Sioux, Cheyenne, Ree and Crow participants in the campaign. Graham was an old pre-WWII army lawyer and interviewed some of the junior officers as old men. Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star is a good read although more than a little caustic, and Richard Fox’s Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle is fascinating if you like that sort of thing.
There were significant resemblances twixt Custer and his brothers and there is a theory that the least mangled of the Custer bodies may have been “identified” as G.A.'s in order to give the best appearance of a heroic death as well. Considering that embalming as we know it didn’t exist and the bodies had been exposed to the elements for some time before claimed, it would have been an easy deception to make since only the most basic features would have been recognized (and as mentioned above he had cut his famous long locks before LBH).
