Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (42 page)

Republican leaders feared the appeal of white supremacy, but voters were more concerned about the elevation of former Confederates. While Democrats and Johnson’s supporters tried to portray the issue as simply involving white supremacy, the majority of northern voters were not prepared to forget wartime animosities toward Confederates or paternalistic idealism toward blacks. In trying to sell his lenient Reconstruction program through appeals to racial antipathy, Johnson merely widened the gap between himself and northern public opinion. And northern voters alone voted for congressmen in 1866. Unable to seat the southern delegations in 1865-66, Johnson’s political gambit had backfired.

Custer gradually came to recognize that fundamental truth. The “swing around the circle” was exciting enough in a way—Custer and Libbie enjoyed hobnobbing with all the notables Johnson had collected, including Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, General George H. Thomas, and others—
but Custer could hardly be blind to the increasingly hostile reaction Johnson received from the crowds whenever he spoke. On the few occasions Custer tried to speak, he was shouted down. Accustomed to adulation, he was not prepared for criticism. When the presidential party was in Michigan, local politicians again offered Custer a nomination, this time for congressman. After giving it some consideration, he said no—he wanted nothing more to do with politics.
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Custer’s worst moment came at Scio, Ohio, nearest railroad point to his birthplace. When the presidential train pulled into the station, Custer swung to the ground. He noticed anti-Johnson placards among the crowd but ignored them to shake hands with old friends of the family. The crowd began badgering the President, calling out ugly remarks about his parentage and his patriotism. Custer, disgusted, faced the mob and shouted, “I was born two miles from here, and I am ashamed of you.” He climbed back into the train and told Libbie he would never visit Scio again, a resolution he kept. As always, he had to write his feelings down immediately, and he dashed off a letter to the Scio citizens telling them he considered the reception a personal insult. Shortly thereafter Custer and Libbie left the presidential party. That was the end of his political activities, an attitude that was immeasurably strengthened in November 1866, when the Republicans won smashing victories in the congressional elections.
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Being back in Washington had initially done wonders for Custer’s spirits. He had discovered that he was still loved, admired, honored. But he had been in a difficult position; as a war hero he had strong ties with such Radical Republicans as Chandler, Stanton, and Bingham, but he could not agree with their politics. These men did not want to desert him—he and his reputation could do as much for them as they could do for him—but the Republicans were put off by his doleful description of the freedmen in Texas, his gloomy predictions about the future of blacks, and his general adherence to a southern-Andrew Johnson line. Custer had gone too far, finally, when he joined Johnson on “the swing around the circle.” The trip was also a climax for Custer. Never seeing that there were real issues involving real people at stake in the presidential-congressional struggle, he denounced the whole thing as “typical politics” and withdrew from the field, somewhat horrified at what he had seen. It was time for him to get out of Washington.

In early 1867 Custer joined his regiment, the 7th Cavalry, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. He took along his usual retinue, including Libbie,
Eliza, a black jockey he had acquired in Texas and who rode his horses in races, four favorite horses, Byron (a greyhound), Turk (a white bulldog), and several hounds. He looked forward to the hunting at Fort Riley.

On their way to Kansas, Custer and Libbie had stopped off for an exposition in St. Louis. There they saw an American classical actor, Lawrence Barrett, in a play. Custer was much impressed and went backstage after the performance to meet the actor. Barrett noticed that Custer had direct and penetrating eyes, yet seemed bashful and reticent. The actor said Custer’s voice was “earnest, soft, tender and appealing,” and that his personality was one of rare charm. Custer took Barrett to his hotel to meet Libbie and the three became lifelong friends.
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Custer usually impressed eastern or European sophisticates; that winter, which he spent at Fort Riley, Custer entertained a prominent New York newspaperman, Charles Godfrey Leland, who wrote in his memoirs: “There was a bright and joyous chivalry in that man [Custer], and a noble refinement mingled with constant gaiety in the wife, such as I fear is passing from the earth.”
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As Leland’s remarks indicate, Custer had a fine time that winter. There was plenty of good hunting an easy ride from the fort, Libbie and the whole gang were with him, and he loved riding on the Plains. Once, galloping side by side with Libbie, he reached out with one hand and lifted her from the horse’s back, held her at arm’s length, then gently put her, breathless, back again.

Shortly after he arrived at Fort Riley in 1867 Custer heard the shocking details of the Fort Phil Kearny battle. He may have heard the name Crazy Horse via the Army’s rumor mill, although he did not read it in newspaper accounts because Crazy Horse was not yet famous among the whites generally. In any event, Custer realized—everyone at Fort Riley realized—that there would be a grand campaign against the Indians in the spring, the peace policy advocates to the contrary notwithstanding. Perhaps nothing could be done immediately about Crazy Horse and the Powder River Indians, but sure as hell the Indians were going to be cleared out of Kansas and Nebraska. The Kansas Pacific Railroad had reached out from Kansas City, Missouri, to Abilene and beyond, while the Union Pacific was in central Nebraska. Both lines were anxious to push westward when good weather returned. No bunch of redskins could be allowed to stand in the path of these carriers of the nation’s destiny. Knowing that the government and the Army had determined to punish the Indians—any Indians—for the Fetterman disaster, with an active
campaign to look forward to, and with Libbie to share his life, Custer thoroughly enjoyed his first winter on the Plains.

That same winter, 1866-67, on the Powder River, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were having trouble holding their force together. It was a terribly hard winter, bitterly cold, the snowdrifts so deep that most of the elk and buffalo left the country in their search for food. In one gulch, it was said, a herd of three hundred buffalo were trapped and froze to death and were now covered with snow. Even the wolves would have to wait for the spring thaw to get at the carcasses. Snow-blindness was common, but the Indian remedy—sprinkling a little snow in the eyes—made that problem manageable. Hunger was not so easily handled. Crazy Horse and Little Hawk spent much of their time hunting on snowshoes. Once they bagged eight elk in a protected canyon, catching the beasts in the deep snow and cutting their throats with knives.
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Other hunters were not so lucky and by mid-January Red Cloud’s army was gradually disappearing. Young braves from the Laramie Loafers or Spotted Tail’s Brulés returned to the white man’s agencies, promising to come back the next summer; until then they would live on government hand-outs (Army officers, naturally enough, grew livid at the mere thought of the government feeding the hostiles in the winter so that they could fight in the summer). Red Cloud kept some scouts posted around Fort Phil Kearny to make certain the soldiers there did not try to get away, but with the snow so deep and the weather so cold there was not much danger of that happening. Besides, the Indians had had enough war for one season. The defeat of Fetterman satisfied them and they had no inclination to attack the fort itself.

By February 1867 there were massive desertions from the Red Cloud camp. The southern Cheyennes, who had come in force to fight beside their relatives, the northern Cheyennes, on the Powder River, returned to Kansas. They did not think much of the cold northern winters and wanted to be back on the relatively mild central Plains. Some southern Oglalas went south too. Crazy Horse accompanied them part of the way, but he and Little Hawk dropped out of the moving village when it reached the vicinity of Fort Reno, at the southern end of the Bighorn Mountains along the Bozeman Trail. For the remainder of the winter, Crazy Horse and Little Hawk harassed the whites in and around Fort Reno.
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The southern Cheyennes and the southern Oglalas thought they were returning to a land of peace. Kansas had been quiet all through
1866, with only some minor Indian troubles being reported from the southwestern corner of the state and that consisted of a few small Kiowa raids. The red men in Kansas thought they had a treaty with the United States Government and felt secure. Custer and the Army were about to show them that they were wrong.

Sherman was determined to teach the redskins a lasting lesson. He wanted most of all to get at Red Cloud’s Indians on the Powder River in Wyoming. On December 30, 1866, he wrote his brother, a senator from Ohio, John Sherman, “I expect to have two Indian wars on my hands … The Sioux and Cheyennes are now so circumscribed that I suppose they must be exterminated, for they cannot and will not settle down, and our people will force us to it.”
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Sherman had sent for Custer to join him on the frontier with the idea that Custer would provide the cutting edge of his extermination campaign. Writing to his brother in February 1867, Sherman said, “G. W. [
sic
] Custer, Lieutenant-Colonel Seventh Cavalry, is young,
very
brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer.” Sherman had not known Custer during the Civil War, but Custer came recommended by both Grant and Sheridan and he made a strong impression on Sherman when they talked in St. Louis. Custer “came to duty immediately upon being appointed,” Sherman wrote, “and is ready and willing now to fight the Indians.” Custer’s outstanding characteristics, Sherman believed, were “youth, health, energy, and extreme willingness to act and fight.”
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Sherman did not have the backing of the government in Washington for action against the Indians, however, since the government was still controlled by the peace party. President Johnson appointed a new set of commissioners to go to Fort Laramie in June 1867 to try to induce Red Cloud to sign a treaty. The United States could hardly send a peace commission and a military expedition into the same area at the same time, so Sherman was forced to call off a planned Powder River offensive. In the central Plains no such obstacle blocked the Army, and if Sherman’s first priority was to kill some Indians somewhere in retaliation for the Fetterman massacre, he was equally concerned with protecting the transcontinental rail-roads. He decided to send Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding the Department of the Missouri and stationed at Fort Leavenworth, on a grand campaign to clear the Indians out of Kansas and Nebraska. Custer would lead the way.
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General Hancock looked every inch the soldier. His appearance was so impressive, General Grant wrote, that he “would attract the attention of any army as he passed.” He had earned the label “Hancock
the Superb” for repulsing Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and had indeed fought superbly in almost every major battle of the Army of the Potomac. He seemed the perfect choice for over-all command in Sherman’s offensive, with Custer as the ideal tactical officer.
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The trouble was that neither Hancock nor Custer knew anything about Indians or about the Plains, while they both had an exaggerated idea of their own abilities.

The United States Army has been unjustly maligned for its record in the wars with the Plains Indians. It is accused of starting most, if not all the wars, and of then blundering once hostilities broke out. But the Army was badly served by its political masters, given conflicting orders, hardly ever knowing from one month to the next what the policy of the government might be; it was poorly equipped and inadequately supplied. It was the clear duty of the Army to protect the advancing frontier and the transcontinental railroads, and the Indians
were
in the way. They had to be removed if the nation’s destiny were to be realized. And in view of the expanding white population (and the growing world demand for foodstuffs), the red men could not be allowed to retain hundreds of square miles of prime grazing or wheat country in order to support a few thousand Indians.

There were two ways to remove the Indians: drive them onto reservations or bribe them there. The government never made the bribe attractive enough, as we have seen (and it may be doubted if any amount of presents could have induced Crazy Horse to sell his birthright), so the dirty job of removing them fell to the Army. In the process, though the Army made its share of blunders, showed its share of stupidity and cruelty, and initiated its share of hostilities, it also fought with great skill and bravery, tried on any number of occasions to avoid war, and blamed the government and its Indian agents, rather than the red men themselves, for its troubles.

It was really more a police force, less an Army, and it would be altogether wrong to think that its officers had no sympathy for the Indians. They did, but they also had a higher calling. Having spent four years fighting a bloody civil war to keep the nation unified, they intended to finish the job by seeing the transcontinental railroad completed and the Plains thoroughly integrated into national life. They hoped to realize their objectives without excessive bloodshed, for in truth there was little glory in Indian fighting by that time. Custer is almost the only Plains Indian fighter whose name is remembered today, and his is remembered primarily because of the circumstances surrounding his death.