"The Crime of 1873" Part 4: From "Our Country, Then and Now"

"Custer's Last Stand," Conclusion

During the last third of the 19th century, after the close of the Civil War, great changes took place in the US with the westward migration of vast numbers of settlers, the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution, the explosion of immigration from Europe, and the growth of the great cities of the north and midwest. Less visible but of vital importance was the struggle over the nation’s money supply between democratic forces favoring a Greenback-type currency and the monetization of silver vs. the international bankers of New York and London making their big push for a gold standard under their control. It would be the bankers who won out.

Meanwhile, the struggle between Native Americans and white newcomers that had been going on since Europeans first arrived reached a crescendo with the wars against the Indians in the Great Plains, the Rockies, and along the Pacific Coast.

In the last installment we witnessed the genocidal assault of the US Army, fresh from its Civil War triumphs, against the Sioux. The battleground was the Plains region from Kansas north to the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. The most famous of the Army’s military leaders was Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.

Custer had been sent west to fight the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. A Democrat, Custer had political ambitions and was viewed as a lock as a senator from his home state of Michigan. But would that be enough for a soldier who had already been one of the youngest high-ranking battlefield officers in US military history?

In 1873, Custer was transferred north to Dakota Territory to protect the workers on the Northern Pacific Railroad which had reached Fargo, North Dakota, in its cross-country trek. In 1874 Custer led his force into the Black Hills and made the announcement that gold had been discovered there. Custer’s fame took another leap.

Even as large numbers of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos lurked in the vicinity, the Black Hills Gold Rush now began, with Custer’s name appearing prominently in the newspaper headlines. A major gold discovery was international news, with prospectors swarming in from the US and abroad. But soon Custer was back in Washington, DC, taking on President Grant’s Republican administration. This is where our story resumes.

“Custer’s Last Stand”

Events now moved swiftly to “Custer’s Last Stand.”

In 1875, the Grant administration offered to buy the Black Hills from the Sioux. When the Sioux refused to sell, they were peremptorily ordered to report to government reservations by the end of January 1876. It was a deliberately cruel and deceptive demand, as mid-winter weather made compliance impossible.

The impasse enabled the Sioux to be labeled “hostiles.” The Army was ordered to bring them to the reservations in the following year. Custer was to command one prong of a three-part force, with troops under Colonel John Gibbon and soldiers under General George Crook also taking part.

But with Custer's 7th Cavalry scheduled to set out on April 6, 1876, he was summoned to Washington to testify at congressional hearings investigating corruption on the part of Secretary of War William W. Belknap. Also implicated were President Grant’s brother Orville and traders at several frontier Army posts. The traders were accused of price gouging, with kickbacks going to Orville and Belknap.

Custer’s fame took another leap forward as he made several new accusations against Grant’s Republican administration while writing articles for The New York Tribune. In particular, he accused Orville Grant of extorting money. The Democratic press ate it up, Belknap was impeached and his name forwarded to the Senate for trial, with President Grant retaliating by removing Custer from duty. Custer defiantly took a train to Chicago, intending to rejoin his regiment.

Grant ordered Custer’s arrest, but the newspapers howled. Custer was supported by the commanding generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan, causing Grant to relent under fears that if the Sioux campaign failed without Custer, he himself would be blamed. Grant backed down but insisted that General Alfred Terry lead the upcoming campaign. So Custer would head the force with Terry nominally in charge, though Custer told Terry’s chief engineer, Captain Ludlow, that he would “cut loose” from Terry and operate on his own.

The story of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where Custer’s command, part of the 7^th cavalry, was wiped out and Custer himself killed by a force of 1,000-2,000 Plains Indians, consisting of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos, has been told and retold as one of the great sagas of the West.

Custer intended to follow the usual US Army pattern of a terrorist strike on a large village of Indian women and children, with an engagement against whatever warriors happened to be present. Custer also planned to take civilians hostage, including the elderly and disabled. Unfortunately for Custer, the Indian force under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse was the largest contingent of armed warriors ever seen in the Plains wars, a force armed, moreover, with almost as many guns as there were Indians. The battle took place on June 26, 1876. There were no survivors among Custer’s 268-man force.

There is, however, a “rest of the story,” recounted by Stephen E. Ambrose in his book Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. Before telling the Custer story, let me mention that his two main adversaries, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, were later killed in the hands of the Army following their surrender.

The main mistake Custer made was to divide his force in the face of the enemy. This was something that Napoleon was famous for doing, but it didn’t always work. Also, Custer had been driving his men so hard to reach the location of the Indian encampment that they were exhausted. Witnesses among the Indians later said that Custer’s men were literally shaking with fatigue when they arrived on the scene. Why then was Custer in such a big hurry? Well, maybe Custer needed to get the job done so he could campaign for president.

1876 was a presidential election year, and Custer, a Democrat, was being celebrated in the press for standing up to President Grant in the Belknap/Orville Grant corruption scandal. According to Ambrose, “Custer was one of the most famous men in the country and extremely popular to boot.”[1]

While the actual deliberation took place in secrecy, Ambrose speculated that Custer was to be the choice of New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett for nomination to run for president at the Democratic Party National Convention taking place in St. Louis on June 27, 1876. Custer had promised Bennett that he would give the Herald exclusive rights to publish his account of the Sioux campaign.

The Herald had a reporter, Mark Kellogg, riding with Custer during the campaign, against the explicit orders of General Phil Sheridan. Ambrose writes, “Perhaps Custer hoped that Kellogg could get a report of the battle with the Sioux to the Democrats and to the country before June 27, the opening day of the convention.”[2] There were telegraph wires in the region, and Kellogg had already filed a story with the Herald about a scouting mission carried out by Custer’s subordinate, Marcus Reno.

Was there any other evidence? There is, for after the battle—in some cases, long after—journalists and researchers sought out and interviewed Indians who had fought against Custer, as well as Indian scouts who helped him. Ambrose relates the following:

“One evening shortly before the column moved out, Custer had visited the camp of the regiment’s Crow and Arikara scouts, and that visit brings us back to speculation about what may have been said to Custer while he was in the East [i.e., testifying to Congress and talking with the press and Democratic Party leaders]. First, Custer presented his Rhee scout Bloody Knife with several gifts purchased in Washington and told him and the Arikaras of his visit to the capital. Then he said that this would be his last Indian campaign and that if he won a victory—no matter how small—it would make him the Great White Father in Washington. If the Arikaras helped him to a victory, he promised that when he went to the White House he would take his brother Bloody Knife with him. He also told the scouts that he would look after them and see to it that they got houses to live in, and finally promised that as the Great White Father he would always look after the welfare of his children, the Arikaras”.[3]

How desperate was Custer in driving his men to their possible deaths in order to defeat the Sioux before the Democratic Party convention? We’ll never know. But we do know from modern-day experience how far ambitious people may go to be elected to high political office and how many corpses may litter their road to power.

Conclusion

The post-Civil War period has been America’s “lost history,” yet patterns were established that continue to determine events today—notably, the rule of money over any attempt to establish rational and fair governance. Industry was exploding, while government stagnated in passivity and favoritism. Mediocrity reigned in public life, while the bankers and “captains of industry” grew obscenely rich. The Greenback Party and other reform movements tried to introduce a modicum of fairness to the financial system, but with little success.

The Indians suffered the most, along with formerly enslaved Africans living in poverty in the South. Commentators have pointed out that, had the government made a good faith effort to provide funding to transition the Indians on reservations to an effective system of subsistence farming, the policy might have worked. In fact, the Indian treaties promised as much. But the promises were betrayed, to the lasting shame of white American elites, so that Indians and blacks alike were condemned to back-country poverty that has never been healed.

Sioux Indian chief Sitting Bull put his finger on the problem that has been the bane of US society throughout its history. He said, “The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”[4] There is more to this wise observation than you might think.

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[1] Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer, p.407.

[2] Ibid, p.407.

[3] Ibid, p.405-406.

[4] Ibid, p. 351.