Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (61 page)

The whole country, not just the stock market, was indeed in a state of panic. Farm prices plummeted. One of the worst grasshopper plagues in history swept the Midwest and the Great Plains; when flying, the insects blackened the sky; when resting or feeding, they were sometimes two or three feet thick on the ground. An epidemic of yellow fever struck the Mississippi Valley. In the cities, meanwhile, there were one million or more unemployed, nearly 20 per cent of the non-farm working force, and in a day when there was no public relief available anywhere. Although farmers could not meet their costs because of falling crop prices, food prices at the city grocery stores dropped only 5 per cent, while factory wages for those lucky enough to hold onto a job were down 25 per cent and more. There were more people in jail than ever before in the nation’s history, but
crime continued nevertheless at unprecedented rates. Tramps were everywhere, wandering the land, wondering what had happened to them and to their nation. Worse, the nation’s leaders had no idea what had gone wrong. It was cruel and heartless, this smashing of the American dream, because it was so unexpected and so unexplainable.
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Since the political and economic leaders could not explain what had caused the depression, they could hardly come up with any solutions. Normally confident, boastful, swaggering, these men had held to the doctrine of continual progress as to holy writ; now their faith was destroyed and they knew not where to look to find another. They were a curious mixture, these leaders of the Gilded Age; innovative and dynamic in the business world, they had stretched the limits of what was possible in every direction. But for all the changes they had wrought, their political views remained stuck in the eighteenth century. The government’s role in the economy, as they saw it, was to pour money into industry (via such means as land grants and direct bonus payments to the railroads) but otherwise to keep hands off. The nation’s leaders would not provide unemployment relief or welfare, for they were as hidebound about the functions of government as they were innovative about business.

In trying to understand what had brought on the depression, the leaders tended to put the blame on a lack of circulating money. President Grant had limited the number of greenbacks, which had the effect of putting the country on a gold standard, which was exactly where the most conservative and influential economists of the period wanted it to be. But in an expanding economy the gold supply was insufficient. Farmers’ groups and labor unions wanted to expand the amount of paper money in circulation, but such a course seemed blasphemous to the men in power, who were wedded to the gold standard and who thought the issuance of paper money dangerously radical. Still, the powerful wanted more money too, in order to finance the rebuilding of the economy and to get the boom going again. And President Grant and his advisers did want the government to do something about the situation, provide some hope for the tramps, get the country back to normal. The solution to the problem, as the Administration saw it, lay in opening new territories for exploitation. Physical expansion had solved America’s problems before and would again. In effect, Grant’s relief program was to open new opportunities for the jobless and pump more money into the economy through the development of new gold deposits.

That is where Custer came in. Once again he became the cutting
edge of the nation’s expansion. By conquering Sioux territory and discovering vast gold deposits, he helped end the depression, and the nation was able to get back to normal without having to examine itself, without having to change the existing cozy relationships between government and business. In the process, Custer added to his own fame.

The Black Hills,
Pa Sapa
to the Indians, had been promised to the Sioux forever in the treaty of 1868. After the Panic of 1873, however, the United States Government began to look on the Hills with greedy eyes. Rumor had it that there were vast mineral deposits in
Pa Sapa,
including gold. A handful of whites had entered the Hills; those who were not killed by Indians returned to civilization with glowing accounts of the riches to be found there. The Indians, knowing that the yellow metal seemed to make whites go crazy, had done their best to keep the whites from knowing of the presence of gold in the Hills. In the 1840s some Sioux brought a few yellow nuggets to Father De Smet, who advised them to bury the gold deep in the earth and forget it. Worm, Crazy Horse’s father, had attended a large Indian council where the warriors had agreed that any Indian who revealed the presence of gold in the Hills to the white man, or any white man who discovered it, was to be slain.
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Nevertheless, the word somehow got out and white Americans began to demand that the government open the Hills for exploitation; these demands grew to a crescendo following the Panic of 1873.

Every level of American society was represented in the demand to open the Black Hills to prospecting. The nation’s pride was involved—no patriot could permanently accept the idea of Sioux sovereignty in the vast enclave between the Missouri, the Yellowstone, and the Nebraska boundary. Railroad men generally and the Northern Pacific backers specifically wanted the hostiles subdued. Businessmen, farmers, and laborers wanted to coin the gold found in the Black Hills and put it into circulation. The Army was itching for revenge against the Sioux. Emigrants from the thirty-seven states, and immigrants from Europe, wanted the northern Plains opened to settlement And President Grant wanted to demonstrate to a suffering, bewildered public that the United States Government could take decisive action to help end the depression.

The United States, like many nations, has started its share of wars on trumped-up charges, but no excuse ever given for the initiation of hostilities—not the Mexican War, not the Gulf of Tonkin—was more absurd than the one given by General Sheridan for the commencement
of the Great Sioux War. With the enthusiastic backing of his military and political superiors, Sheridan decided in the spring of 1874 to send a column of troops into the Black Hills in order to establish a fort there, and, although this reason was unacknowledged, to find gold. This was a direct, open, unilateral violation of the treaty of 1868. Sheridan said it had to be done because the Sioux were not living up to their agreements in the treaty. Specifically, he charged that the hostiles were still killing settlers in Nebraska and disrupting the railroads. Although the evidence is fragmentary, it seems clear that Sheridan exaggerated at best, lied at worst. The Indian agents were unanimous in the judgment that the tribes were behaving well, and Sheridan himself had reported officially in 1873 that “The condition of Indian affairs in the Department of Dakota has been remarkably quiet …” Bishop William H. Hare protested directly to Grant about the plan to march troops into the Hills; Hare said it would be a “high-handed outrage” and would forever sully the honor of the United States. Democratic newspapers accused Grant of instigating the march as a way of diverting attention from the nation’s problems.
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Washington ignored the complaints and warnings and went ahead with its plans. As George Hyde wrote, “this proves that very strong influences were back of the project, influences which were willing to risk a Sioux war in carrying out their program. … This violation of the treaty was deliberately planned and executed.”
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The proposed expedition received vast publicity—everyone in the West, it seemed, was talking about it. Custer applied for and got command of the entire force; he was immediately besieged with applications from civilian adventurers who wanted to go along.

Fort Abraham Lincoln was base camp for the expedition. There Custer gathered together his column. It was as colorful as its commander. Custer had ten companies of the 7th Cavalry, two infantry companies, a three-inch Rodman gun, and three Gatling guns. His train consisted of one hundred and ten wagons. There were one hundred Indian scouts along, mostly Arikaras (or Rees) and Santee Sioux, and including the Rhee scout Bloody Knife. Two famous white scouts, “Lonesome” Charley Reynolds (so-called “because he preferred to go off and hunt or trap by himself rather than to spend his time in the dreary little frontier towns where cards and whiskey were the sole diversion”) and Louis Agard, a guide and interpreter for thirty years in the Sioux country, came along. Captain Luther North and Lieutenant Colonel George “Sandy” Forsyth, both famous Indian fighters, were there, along with Colonel Fred Grant.
Custer hired two miners to accompany the expedition and to look for gold and also brought along a geologist, Newton Winchell, in order to authenticate any gold discoveries. Custer asked Yale University paleontologist O. C. Marsh to make the trip, but Marsh could not go and sent a young osteologist, George Bird Grinnell, instead, thereby starting Grinnell on a career that was of incalculable benefit to every student of Western or Indian history. A stereoscopic photographer joined the party. Finally, to insure publicity, Custer brought along four newspaper reporters. Altogether the column totaled at least one thousand men, with nearly two thousand horses and mules.
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On July 2, 1874, the column moved out from Fort Abraham Lincoln to traverse the Plains southward and enter the Black Hills. As usual, the band played “Garry Owen.” Custer pushed hard, so hard that the scientists complained that they had no time to make side trips or follow up important discoveries. Custer had written in one of his magazine articles that he was entering “a region of country as yet unseen by human eyes, except those of the Indians.” That was typical Custer exaggeration, but it was true that no systematic investigation had ever been made of the country. Winchell and Grinnell found stacks of dinosaur bones and made other fascinating discoveries, but because of the pace Custer maintained they could only barely sample the richness of the region. The troopers were also unhappy; the July sun burned down on the treeless prairie and temperatures consistently rose above one hundred degrees in the shade. Still Custer pushed on; the monotony of the Plains that wearied other men elated him. He had the men up by 3
A.M.
and on the march by 4
A.M.;
at times they did not make camp until midnight. He often charged ahead on his favorite horse, Dandy, in pursuit of antelope, his hounds bounding along with him. He lied to Libbie about his hunting, telling her that he was obeying her repeated orders to stay within the column at all times.

Returning from his hunting trips, Custer would dash back the length of the column to urge others on, looking magnificent in his buckskin shirt and broad-brimmed hat. He had cut his hair somewhat—it now fell only to the back of his neck, not to his shoulders—and had grown a mustache that covered his mouth and hung down on either side of his chin. His eyes were becoming narrow slits, perhaps as a result of constant squinting into the blazing sun of the Plains. He was trim and fit, as always—no middle-age bulge for the thirty-four-year-old Custer—and even those members of the expedition who disliked Custer marveled at his unbelievable stamina. His
enthusiasm for anything new continued, as did his collector’s instinct “I am gradually forming my menagerie,” he wrote Libbie at Fort Abraham Lincoln (the phrase indicating that, finally, he was learning to poke a little fun at himself and his unusual habits). He had collected for pets a rattlesnake, two jack rabbits, an eagle, and four owls. His two fine badgers were accidentally smothered. He sent a curlew that he had caught back to Libbie, carried by a courier, with instructions to Libbie to catch grasshoppers for the bird.
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Custer had no problem with Indians. Smoke signals surrounded the column, indicating that some of the Sioux in Dakota knew where he was and what he was doing, but there were no attacks. As Sheridan had hoped, the column was too strong for the Indians to risk an assault. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the hostiles seem to have spent the summer well west of the Black Hills, over toward the Bighorns, and they may not have even been aware of the Custer expedition. Custer’s only problems were the heat and dust, which discouraged the men. They relieved the monotony by getting drunk whenever they had a chance. Custer told Libbie that “there has not been a single drunken officer since we left Fort Lincoln,” but that was another of his little white lies designed to reassure her. In fact, as one civilian member of the expedition wrote, “the sutler had a wagon with liquor which he sold to the soldiers and everybody who wanted to buy it Fred Grant … was drunk nearly all the time.” Indeed, Custer placed Grant under arrest once for drunkenness, an action young Grant greatly resented and which he later reported to his father.
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On July 22 Custer, having approached the Hills themselves from the northwest, camped near Inyan Kara, an extinct volcano on the western edge of the mysterious mountains, just inside Wyoming. At this point, his Indian scouts told him to turn back—they insisted that exploration of the Black Hills would be impossible with such a heavy column, and in any event they did not want to invade
Pa Sapa
for fear of Sioux retaliation. When they learned that Custer was going to go ahead anyway, they refused to give him any further information—from that point on, the whites would have to find their own way. Custer argued with them, but to no avail. It seems probable that the Rees and Santees had never been in the Hills anyway, so they could hardly have served as guides. Bloody Knife did remain with Custer, who decided to plunge ahead.

On July 25, 1874, Custer entered the Hills, following a heavily used Indian trail. The trail took him into a valley that moved the aesthetic senses of even the most hardened trooper. Custer named it Floral
Valley, and for once he did not exaggerate. The newspaper reporters were simply dumfounded by the surrounding beauty; so were the others; so are those who go to the Black Hills today. Troopers plucked armfuls of flowers and decorated their horses with garlands.
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The expedition camped in the valley; within the confines of the campsite alone the expedition’s botanist collected fifty-two varieties of wild flowers in bloom. Other flowers had finished blooming, while some were still in bud. Currants, gooseberries, juneberries, huckleberries, strawberries, and raspberries provided sumptuous desserts. The air was clear and cold, clear of flies, gnats, or mosquitoes. Signs of game were plentiful. That night, in this Garden of Eden setting, the band played a concert. A more perfect day could hardly be.
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