Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (77 page)

Perhaps Touch-the-Clouds had this in mind as he looked down on those courageous, confused people. “It is well,” he said quietly, reassuringly. “He has looked for death and it has come.” The Oglalas filed away, silently, into the night.

* In Chapter 23 I have abandoned the use of specific footnotes altogether. Most of the material in this chapter is drawn from interviews with eyewitness survivors, red and white, primarily in the Eleanor Hinman interviews and the Ricker tablets at the Nebraska State Historical Society, and in various issues of the
Nebraska History Magazine.
To credit each informant properly I would have to have a footnote at the end of almost every sentence. Anyone interested in going deeper into these sources should consult the original interviews, which can be identified from the context.

* Clark reported on August 1, 1877, that “the Indians, especially the northern fellows, seem to be ravenous for meat, really suffering from the want of it.”

† How odd it is to think of Crazy Horse being “allowed” to go hunting.

‡ Grouard, for reasons of his own, willfully mistranslated this statement, to make it appear that Crazy Horse said he would fight until there wasn’t a white man left. The error was straightened out, but it hardly helped the atmosphere around the agency.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

What Happened to the Others

“There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.”

Benjamin Franklin, 1773

Custer’s body was found at the Little Bighorn by Gibbon’s men on June 27, 1876. It had been stripped naked. He had a bullet hole through his left breast and another in his left temple—either wound would have been fatal. His body was just short of the highest point of the hill. He had not been scalped nor mutilated. He was buried there on the field; a year later his body was disinterred and brought to West Point, where he was reburied with full military honors.

Crazy Horse’s body was taken away from Camp Robinson on September 7, 1877, by his parents in a wooden coffin to Spotted Tail Agency. A few days later, when the Spotted Tail and Red Cloud Indians were forcibly moved to the Missouri, Worm put the body on a travois. Then Worm and Crazy Horse’s mother broke away from the others and took their son out onto the prairie to the north, beyond Pine Ridge, South Dakota, along the valley of Wounded Knee Creek. Somewhere out there, no one knows where, Crazy Horse’s parents wrapped his body in a buffalo robe and placed it on a scaffold.

Libbie Bacon Custer learned on July 5, 1876, of her husband’s fate. Margaret Custer Calhoun was with her—Maggie had lost a husband, three brothers, and a nephew at the Little Bighorn. Together the two women helped carry the terrible news to the other thirty-seven widows at Fort Abraham Lincoln who had lost husbands at the Little Bighorn. That fall Libbie moved back to Monroe; later she lived in New York City, where she earned her living by serving as a secretary to the Society of Decorative Arts, an organization that sold artistic works of other widows who, like Libbie, were “ladies” and thus prevented by custom from taking a job. Her widow’s pension from the
United States Government was only $30 per month; later General Sheridan got it raised to $50 per month. For years Libbie skimped in order to have enough money to purchase a bust of Custer that artist Vinnie Ream was creating. Libbie once told Vinnie, when Vinnie had asked her to come to Washington to supervise the finishing touches, that she lacked the courage to show herself in public. “A wounded thing must hide, and I cannot go to Washington and stay among the general’s friends.”

Eventually Libbie got the bust, which she kept on her desk the rest of her life, and she began a writing career, one that was so successful that it brought her a handsome living, so that she could afford trips to Europe and a series of homes, and hobnobbed at summer writing conferences with such writers as Mark Twain, John Burroughs, and Frank Stockton.

Throughout her fifty-seven years of widowhood, Libbie defended her husband’s reputation, concentrating especially on the events of June 25, 1876. Her version, which became the most widely accepted one because of her extraordinary efforts and determination, put the blame squarely on Major Reno and Captain Benteen.
If
Reno had continued his charge or
if
Benteen had obeyed orders and come on with the ammunition train, Custer would have won the battle. In short, Custer was betrayed. Many participants in the tragedy—especially Reno and Benteen—withheld their own comments about the various controversies, saying that they would wait to tell their version until Mrs. Custer died. But she outlived them all.

In 1908, at the age of sixty-seven, Libbie went for a motor-car tour of Europe. Young women still noticed, with jealous eyes, that wherever she went in a drawing room, the gentlemen followed, eager to engage her in conversation. She deeply disapproved of Margaret Calhoun’s remarriage, and when Maggie died shortly thereafter, Libbie insisted that the inscription on her grave should read
MARGARET, SISTER OF GEN. GEO. A. CUSTER
.

Libbie’s loyalty to her Autie never flagged. To the end, she laboriously answered by hand any letter from a veteran who had ever spent a day in the 7th Cavalry. She started a movement to preserve as monuments the frontier forts. Death came on April 6, 1933, at the height of Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days of the New Deal—surely a world away from that hot dusty day on the Little Bighorn, fifty-seven years earlier. She was buried at her husband’s side at West Point, with a small marker which rests in the shade of Custer’s gigantic memorial.

Black Shawl remained a widow. Dr. McGillicuddy had done his work well; she lived at Pine Ridge until 1930, when she was in her mid-eighties.

Major Reno, like Libbie, spent the remainder of his life haunted by the events of June 25, 1876. A lengthy Army Court of Inquiry was insisted upon by Libbie, and by Reno himself after Custer’s first biographer, Frederick Whittaker, blamed him for Custer’s death. The court held Reno blameless for the disaster, but few others were convinced. In 1880 he was dismissed from the Army for drunkenness and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. It was said that he had ordered a subordinate away on special duty and in his absence made advances toward the subordinate’s wife. He died, a bitter man, in 1889.

Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses became what was known as a “progressive chief.” In 1889-90 he opposed the Ghost Dance and tried to dissuade the adherents; he brought some bands back to the Pine Ridge Agency after they had gone to the Bad Lands to practice their religion. But he was never a bootlicker. When the Army demanded that he turn in some of his warriors for murdering two white men, he replied: “No, I will not surrender them, but if you will bring the white men who killed Few Tails I will bring the Indians who killed the white soldier and the herder; and right out here I will have my young men shoot the Indians and you have your soldiers shoot the white men, and then we will be done with the whole business.” In 1883 the Oglalas had elected Young Man Afraid to be president of the Indian Council; he beat Red Cloud in the election by a three to one margin. The whites later reinstated Red Cloud.

Captain Benteen took the lead in criticism of Custer’s tactics, writing many articles and letters to various newspaper editors. In 1877 he fought the Nez Percés well enough to win a promotion to brevet brigadier general. He retired from the Army in July 1888 to live in Atlanta, Georgia, where he died in 1898.

He Dog lived to be a very old man, highly respected by both red and white. He became the judge of the Court of Indian Offenses at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In the early 1930s he was Eleanor Hinman’s chief informant. She said of He Dog, “In spite of his ninety-two years and their infirmities, He Dog is possessed of a remarkable memory. He is the living depository of Oglala tribal
history and old-time customs. Anyone digging very deeply into these subjects with the other old-timers is likely to be referred to him: ‘He Dog will remember about that’. In interviewing He Dog one can hardly fail to be impressed with his strong historical sense and with the moderation and carefulness of his statements.”

General Sherman remained General-in-Chief of the Army until 1883. In 1884 the Republicans tried to nominate him for the presidency, but he absolutely refused (“If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve”). He died in New York City in 1891. Sherman was converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed, so he and his old adversary Red Cloud were members of the same faith at the end.

Sitting Bull went to Canada to stay; he much preferred Grandmother Victoria to the Great White Father. But it was cold in Canada and the buffalo were scarce, so in 1881 he surrendered. He was held prisoner at Fort Randall, South Dakota, for two years; in 1883 he was allowed to join the Hunkpapas at Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota. There he and his people began to starve because of government neglect. Sitting Bull rose to address one set of visiting stuffed-shirt commissioners from Washington and said, “It is your own doing that I am here; you sent me here and advised me to live as you do, and it is not right for me to live in poverty.” Senator John A. Logan of Illinois told him to sit down, that he had no right to speak because he had “no following, no power, no control, and no right to control.”

SITTING BULL:
I wish to say a word.

LOGAN:
We do not care to talk anymore with you.

SITTING BULL:
I would like to speak. I have grown to be a very independent man, and consider myself a very great man.

LOCAN:
You have made your speech. And we do not care to have you continue further.

SITTING BULL:
I have just one more word to say. Of course, if a man is a chief, and has authority, he should be proud, and consider himself a great man.

Buffalo Bill Cody knew that Sitting Bull was a great man and made him the star attraction in his Wild West Show. Cody treated Sitting Bull with respect and earned his friendship. But Sitting Bull quarreled incessantly with the agent at Standing Rock and from the Indian Bureau’s point of view he was a disruptive force. He became something of a leader in the Ghost Dance, which terrified the whites,
and in December 1890 the Army ordered him arrested. Indian police tried to do the dirty work at dawn on December 15. Sitting Bull resisted, was shot in the back by an Indian policeman, and died immediately.

President Grant tried for the presidency again in 1880, but the Republicans rejected him for the nomination, choosing James A. Garfield instead. Grant’s last years were overshadowed by misfortune, poverty, calumny, and illness. His income failed. He was exploited in business and humiliated by bankruptcy. In the last year of his life, however, Grant triumphed; with the enthusiastic support of Mark Twain, he undertook to write his Civil War memoirs. Stricken with cancer, he wrote from his sickbed in his home in New York State and died on July 23, 1885, shortly after completing the best set of memoirs ever written by a professional American soldier.

Red Cloud, always the consummate politician, remained as head of the Oglalas after they moved to Pine Ridge Reservation. He was criticized by the Indians for giving in too easily to the whites, and by the whites for being an obstinate enemy of progress. He did his best. He died peacefully, on December 10, 1909.

General Crook went to Arizona to fight Chief Geronimo and his Apaches. He chased Geronimo all over the southwest, but in 1886 Geronimo surrendered to General Miles, thus giving Miles some revenge for Crook’s “stealing” of Crazy Horse from him in 1877. After 1888 Crook served as commander of the Division of the Missouri. He died in Chicago in 1890.

Spotted Tail remained the head of the Brulés. He sent his children to Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, to be educated, but after visiting them there and learning how much they hated it, he pulled them out, to the great consternation of the white friends of the Indian. Spotted Tail was also involved in constant political machinations at Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, usually emerging triumphant, at least until August 15, 1881, when one of his rivals, Crow Dog, shot him to death from ambush.

General Miles captured Chief Joseph and the Nez Percés shortly after Crazy Horse’s death. In 1886 he fought the Apaches under Geronimo, chasing them into Mexico. After holding various Army posts, he commanded the forces that put down the Sioux after the
Ghost Dance outbreak in 1890, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. Later, in 1894, from his Chicago headquarters, Miles was called upon to quell the Pullman strikers and subsequent rioting. In 1895 he became General-in-Chief of the Army and in 1898 took over Puerto Rico from Spain for the United States during the Spanish-American War. He retired from the Army in 1903 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1925.

Black Buffalo Woman’s fate is unknown, but her pale-skinned daughter, born less than a year after she ran off with Crazy Horse and having his light hair and complexion, lived at Pine Ridge Reservation until World War II.