Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (40 page)

Whether Crazy Horse participated in this savage butchery or not is unknown. This was the first big victory the Indians had won against the soldiers, and certainly he was as worked up, as excited, as beside himself as his fellow warriors. Years of frustration and rage poured forth as the mutilations took place, coupled with the exultant feeling of triumph. An old white scout, Frank Grouard, however, claimed that Crazy Horse and Hump disappeared immediately
after the battle, that they went off to search for their hard-luck friend Lone Bear, the warrior who was always getting wounded or having his galloping horse step into a prairie-dog hole. They eventually found him lying among the rocks, so badly wounded that he could not crawl out from the place where he had been hit. The blood from his wounds had already frozen. According to Grouard, Lone Bear “died in the arms of Crazy Horse while Hump stood by, weeping.”
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That sounds terribly romantic, but it may be true, as it is known that Lone Bear died that day and that Hump and Crazy Horse stayed together throughout the fight. In any event, the bloody orgy was real enough. Cutting up the soldiers’ bodies helped the Indians relieve their tension and made the victory more satisfying and complete. It was not a typical Indian action. In tribal warfare, the Sioux seldom got possession of their dead enemies’ bodies, and certainly never in any numbers. Most Indian battles were running fights and, as previously mentioned, casualties hardly ever exceeded two or three on a side. Individual mutilation was common enough, but there was simply no opportunity to chop up bodies on a mass scale until the Fetterman fight. The orgy of December 21, 1866, revealed the Indians’ savagery and their extreme hatred of white soldiers, who, after all, mutilated Indian bodies when they got hold of them.

About an hour after the battle, Captain R. Ten Eyck with sixty-seven men came out from Fort Phil Kearny to reinforce Fetterman. Ten Eyck stayed far away from the mass of Indians, contenting himself with watching them from a nearby hill. The warriors taunted the relief column, challenging it to come down into Peno Valley to fight, but Ten Eyck refused to accept the challenge. After an hour or so, the Indians rode off. A big storm was coming up; it was bitter cold; enough had been done. Ten Eyck’s men later recovered the bodies of Fetterman’s command.

Carrington feared an attack on the fort itself. He laid fuses into the powder supplies in the magazine, which he packed with ammunition, then surrounded the magazine with three rings of wagons. “We had ten women and several children with us,” an officer inside the fort reported. “The colonel [Carrington] gave orders that as soon as the Indians made the expected attack, the women and children should enter the magazine, and the men should hold the fort as long as possible. When they could hold it no longer, they were to get behind the wagons that surrounded the magazine, and when the colonel saw that all was lost, he would himself blow up the
magazine and take the lives of all, rather than allow the Indians to capture any of the inmates alive.”
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No one inside the fort slept that night, but there was no attack. Whites had a notion that Indians would not fight at night because they feared dying in darkness would prevent them from getting to the Happy Hunting Grounds, but that was nonsense. Indians did not fight at night because the dew got their bowstrings wet and they could not fire. And, being expert weather predictors, they had felt the storm coming on and wanted to get to shelter. Perhaps most important, all the warriors, including Crazy Horse, were satisfied with what they had accomplished. They withdrew, leaving some scouts to make sure Carrington did not try to get out but making no effort themselves to get into the fort. It is remarkable but nonetheless true that these Indians, who could so horribly mutilate dead bodies, lacked a killer instinct. Custer never let a defeated opponent get away that easily.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Custer Comes to the Plains

“Talk about regulars hunting Indians! They go out, and when night comes, they blow the bugle to let the Indians know that they are going to sleep. In the morning they blow the bugle to let the Indians know that they are going to get up. Between their bugle and their great trains, they manage to keep the redskins out of sight.”  A Kansas settler

“I did not marry you for you to live in one house, me in another. One bed shall accommodate us both.”  Custer to Libbie

The Red Cloud-Crazy Horse victory at Fort Phil Kearny had a direct impact on Custer’s life. It was the first time that anything Crazy Horse had done affected Custer, but from that point onward the two men were slowly, almost imperceptibly, drawn ever closer to each other and their final face-to-face encounter. From December 1866 to June 1876 Crazy Horse’s activities influenced Custer’s responses, while Custer’s campaigns came to dominate Crazy Horse’s plans and actions. Their careers became intertwined. Each man did what he had to do, sparing no one, least of all himself.

The influence of one upon the other began with the aftermath of the Fetterman disaster. The Army was shocked and outraged. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,” said General Sherman, who was as responsible for the defeat as Fetterman, “even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”
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Western newspapers echoed the call, even accusing the Army of cowardice for not searching out and destroying the hostiles. Railroad and stagecoach companies sent lobbyists to Washington to urge Congress to allow the Army to go out and shoot all the red devils. It was in 1867, in response to these cries, that Custer got his first command on the Great Plains, where he would spend the bulk of the remainder of his life.

On the Plains, Custer and Libbie found happiness. They responded
to the region as few couples before or since have done. Everything delighted them, from the majestic views to the smallest wild flower putting forth its first bloom on a warm spring day. Horses and riding became, if possible, even more central to their lives than they had been during the Civil War. They rode almost daily, for miles at a time, enjoying the freedom of the unfenced prairie. Custer became an avid, almost fanatic hunter, taking full advantage of the bountiful wild game. For the most part he enjoyed independent commands, which added to his and Libbie’s sense of freedom. It was exactly the kind of life Custer wanted to lead, and he silently might have thanked Crazy Horse and the hostiles for making it possible. Certainly the Fetterman defeat and the Army’s response to that disaster rescued Custer from a bad situation. The year and a half since the end of the war had not been a good time for him.

Custer’s first postwar assignment was to accompany General Sheridan to Texas on an expedition that had three objectives: first, to force Confederate General Edmund Kirby-Smith and the last rebel force to surrender (which was accomplished on May 26, 1865, before Custer got to the scene); second, to provide an occupation force for Texas; third, as a show of force against French adventurers in Mexico. Indeed, Sheridan informed Custer that he might march into Mexico at the head of a volunteer division to drive Emperor Maximilian and his cohorts out of the country. Nothing came of this, so in the end Custer stayed in Texas solely as a conqueror imposing order on a defeated people.

Libbie went along, as did everyone else close to Custer whom he could persuade the Army to add to his party. Most of his Civil War staff accompanied him—George Yates, Tom Custer, and the others—as did his cook Eliza, his father (Custer got him on the payroll as a forager), his horses, and his pets (including a flock of turkeys he had acquired and a dozen or so dogs, some picked up along the way). Custer and Tom never lost their boyish impulsiveness and they played countless practical jokes on their father, on Libbie, on a steamboat captain, indeed on anyone unfortunate enough to come to their attention. The trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers went by quickly, marked by much laughter and rough good humor. In New Orleans the boy general and his dashing young wife enjoyed that delightful city to the full, indulging themselves at the famous restaurants, having their portraits painted, shopping, squandering money on dresses for Libbie (by the time she got back
to civilization, a year later, the dresses were out of style and she never got to wear them), enjoying themselves.
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The party rode another steamboat up the Red River to Alexandria, Louisiana, where Custer took command of his volunteer division and prepared for the march into Texas. He cut his flowing locks—July in Louisiana is about as hot as any place on earth—but Libbie continued to wear her full outfit, with its floor-length, sweeping skirt.

While in Alexandria, Custer spoke out against slavery for the first time in his life. In the mansion where he was living, he wrote his father-in-law, “there is a young negro woman whose back bears the scars of five hundred lashes given at one time, for going beyond the limits of her master’s plantation. If the War has attained nothing else it has placed America under a debt of gratitude for all time, for removal of this evil.”
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Nor did he find the Deep South as attractive as he had found Virginia. Neither did Libbie. “Everything here is so behind-hand,” she wrote her parents. “ ‘Ancestral Halls’ and ‘Parental Mansions’ are nothing but old-style roomy houses, not so good as that of a Michigan farmer. … They need the advent of the thrifty ingenious Yankee.”
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The march into Texas, in the middle of a Gulf Coast summer, must have been a trial for all concerned, but Custer was delighted to be on an active campaign again, and if her man was happy, Libbie was happy. Custer fixed up an ambulance for her to ride in, but the heat inside—and her own eagerness to see everything, do everything—gave her an excuse to travel horseback. She rode sidesaddle, despite a dress that was so heavily weighted at the hem that she could not lift it over her head unaided. Reveille came well before sunrise. Libbie, terrified that she might hold up the column, learned to make her morning toilet, dress, and be ready to mount up in seven minutes flat. During the midday break she and Custer found relief from the blazing sun under the southern pines, but even there they could not relax because of the ever-present poisonous snakes. More irritating, if less dangerous, were the chiggers. Libbie later described the ordeal: “They bury their heads under the skin, and when they are swollen with blood, it is almost impossible to extract them without leaving the head imbedded. This festers, and irritation is almost unbearable. If they see fit to locate on neck, face or arms, it is possible to outwit them in their progress; but they generally choose that unattainable spot between the shoulders, and the surgical operation of taking them out with a needle or knife-point, must devolve upon some one else.”
Libbie wouldn’t dream of halting the column so that she could remove a chigger; instead she endured the torment throughout the rides and had Custer remove the insects at night.
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As the column swung out of the Louisiana swamps and onto the Texas prairie, rabbits increased in size and number. Custer’s hounds would take off after a startled rabbit, Custer would give a whoop and follow, and Libbie would give her horse a tap with her little switch and set off to join the adventure. One of the hounds would catch the rabbit, break its back with one bite, and bring it back toward the galloping couple. The dog would wag its tail, Custer would beam at the dog, and Libbie would beam at her man.
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“Horseback riding is one of our chief pleasures,” Custer wrote home. “Libbie—I never saw her in better health—is now an expert horse-woman, so fearless she thinks nothing of mounting a girthless saddle on a strange horse. You should see her ride across these Texas prairies at such a gait that even some of the staff officers are left behind.”
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Libbie had only one complaint—she did not have enough room in her ambulance bed to kneel at night to say her prayers, but had to wait until she had crawled under the rough Army blanket. But even that difficulty was easily brushed aside, “since I had nothing to ask for, as I believed the best of everything on earth had already been given to me.”
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At Hempstead, Texas, Custer went into semipermanent camp. Here Lieutenant Jacob Greene and his new bride, Nettie Humphrey, joined up. Nettie was Libbie’s old friend from Monroe; Greene had served with Custer during the war and was glad to be back in the Army after failing in civilian life as an insurance salesman. Together with Tom, George Yates, and the other Custer hangers-on, they went on late-afternoon hunting parties, held dances, played jokes on each other, and generally did their best to enjoy the situation.

Custer needed all the relaxation he could get, for his problems were serious and never-ending. A mere twenty-five years of age, he had been given an assignment that would have taxed the statesmanship of a Lincoln. As senior military officer in Texas, he was expected to see to it that the freed men and women received fair treatment, that unsubdued rebels behaved themselves, that the rowdy frontiersmen obeyed the government, that the conquered rebels were punished, and that his own troops refrain from individual acts of lawlessness directed against the people they had so recently conquered. In addition, Custer was offered great temptation. Cotton had shot up in price during the war and was stored in great quantities throughout
Texas. Speculators offered him vast sums—$25,000 in one case—to allow them to sneak it out of the state and sell it in New Orleans. Custer was guilty of nepotism, of seeking political favors, and of enhancing his own exploits, but he was not a crook and he refused the bribes. Still, as Libbie pointed out, it was highly irresponsible for the government to place such a young man in such a demanding and tempting position.
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