133 years ago...Custer's last stand

[MOUNTAINORACLE]

On June 25th it will be 133 years since the Battle of the Big Horn or Custer's Last Stand. I am posting this a day early as I don't figure I will be able to post it tomarrow.

I read the on line Billings Gazette daily; we lived in the Billings area for 4 years and would be living there today if I could talk the ball and chain into moving back.
IMHO this is a very interesting article, well researched by the staff writer, and worth the time to read.
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Haunted by history: Tragedy followed Bighorn battle survivors
By LORNA THACKERAY
Of The Gazette Staff

When a two-day siege by Sioux and Cheyenne ended with the approach of reinforcements June 27, 1876, the surviving half of the U.S. 7th Cavalry understood more horrors were to come.

As they cautiously plodded across the hills above the Little Bighorn River, putrefying and hideously mutilated corpses of their friends, in groups or alone, were scattered across the reeking landscape. All but a few were so badly disfigured by relentless summer heat and avenging tribesmen that they could not be identified even by their closest friends.

Carcasses of bloated and moldering Indian ponies and cavalry mounts were thick on the field of battle, adding to the assault on the senses.

On the top of the hill, in the midst of a concentrated group of officers and men, lay their 36-year-old commander, Lt. Col. George A. Custer - a man more than a few had considered invincible.

It was a mind-altering scene for the 7th survivors and for the men with Gens. John Gibbon and Alfred Terry, who had relieved the besieged troops. In the middle of Indian country; almost 200 miles from Fort Ellis near Bozeman, the nearest military base; in country where they presumed thousands of warriors were celebrating their victory and spoiling for another fight, the troopers' immediate task was to bury the dead.

"Our camp is surrounded with ghastly remains of the recent butchery," Capt. Walter Clifford, who arrived with the relief column, wrote in his journal.

"The days are hot and still, and the air is thick with the stench of the festering bodies. We miss the laughing gaiety that usually attends a body of soldiery even on the battlefield. A brooding sorrow hangs like a pall over our every thought.

"The repulsive-looking green flies that have been feasting on the swollen bodies of the dead are attracted to the camp fires by the smell of cooking meat. They come in such swarms that a persevering swing of the tree branch is necessary to keep them from settling on the food.

"An instant's cessation of the motion of the branch and they pounce down upon the morsel that is being conveyed to the mouth. They crawl over the neck and face, into eyes and ears, under the sleeves with a greedy eagerness and such clammy, sticky feet as to drive taste and inclination for food away.

"Let us bury our dead and flee from this rotting atmosphere."

Not a pretty picture, and, together with the stress of their own desperate struggle against an enemy that probably numbered in the thousands, some who fought bravely through that miserable summer succumbed later to madness, suicide and alcohol.

There was no medical diagnosis then, no one capable of treating ailments now recognized as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

A vague condition described as "soldiers' heart" was a common diagnosis in the 19th century - just as "shell shock" and "battle fatigue" seemed to define the condition in the First and Second World Wars.

Many combatants went on to long, distinguished careers either as civilians or in the military. Winfield Scott Edgerly and Edward S. Godfrey, lieutenants under Custer's command, retired as generals. Some officers' careers extended to World War I.

Then there was William Ephraim Morris, who sustained a chest wound and was discharged a year and a half after the Little Bighorn for disability when he broke an arm in an alcohol-fueled brawl.

Described by his superiors as a private of "worthless character," Morris went on to become a judge in New York City and a captain in a National Guard infantry regiment. He died in 1933 at the age of 74.

The last Caucasian survivor, Pvt. Charles Windolph, was six months short of his 100th birthday when he breathed his last on March 14, 1950, in Lead, S.D. He'd spent nearly half his life working for a mining company in Deadwood.

But the lives of others embarked on a steep downward trajectory almost as soon as the blood dried on the battlefield.

Maj. Marcus Reno, second in command when Custer set off for the Little Bighorn, never escaped its repercussions. A court-martial for drunken behavior ended his career four years later. He died of tongue cancer in 1889 in Washington, D.C.

Capt. Frederick Benteen, third in the command hierarchy that day, didn't fall into the same level of despair as Reno, who became the scapegoat for many. But Benteen had his own struggles with alcohol. He apparently was a mean drunk, ranting and threatening and, according to an 1886 report, "very often thus disabled."

He was court-martialed for drunkenness and disorderly conduct and suspended from rank for a year at half-pay. He retired soon after in 1888.

Capt. Thomas Weir drank himself to death six months after the battle, and Capt. Thomas French did the same six years later.

Enlisted men probably did a similar dance with alcohol, but their lives were less well-documented.

One study in the 1880s said 41 of every 1,000 soldiers were hospitalized at some point as alcoholics. It may have been much higher in the 7th, assigned to isolated frontier posts where there was little else to do.

And, whereas most in the frontier Army saw little, if any, combat, the 7th battled the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and a little more than a year later were fighting the Nez Perce.

Even in remote reaches of Indian Country, alcohol was readily available. Traders loaded with whiskey and ale boarded the steamers that supplied troops in the field and set up shop at camps along the Yellowstone River.

Some officers and men of the 7th probably filled their three-pint canteens with whiskey at the mouth of the Rosebud before setting out for the Little Bighorn, said John Doerner, chief historian at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

Warriors reported finding canteens filled with whiskey in the aftermath of the battle, which wiped out five companies - about 210 men - under Custer's direct command, Doerner said. Survivors recharged their canteens and officers purchased booze in quantity when they arrived back on the Yellowstone.

"That was a chance to relieve a lot of stress," Doerner said. "Alcohol was about all they had, unless they could get their hands on laudanum or other opiates."

The ledger of traders John W. Smith and the Leighton brothers, who sold everything from toothbrushes to liquor while troops were on the Yellowstone in the summer of 1876, showed that the 7th outdrank every other unit in the field.

And Reno, fond of liquor before the battle and much fonder in its aftermath, vanquished all rivals at the bar. Between Aug. 1 and Aug. 22, he charged seven gallons and two demijohns of whiskey.

Reno's troops were the first to engage the Sioux and Cheyenne.

Custer split his command in three parts and ordered Reno and his three companies to attack the sprawling Indian camp in the Little Bighorn Valley. Soon overwhelmed, Reno ordered a retreat back across the river to the bluffs above, where he was joined by three companies under Benteen and the pack train.

Just before Reno ordered retreat, Bloody Knife, Custer's favorite Arikara scout, was shot in the head. Brain tissue and blood exploded in Reno's face, apparently unnerving the major.

On the bluffs, it was generally conceded that Benteen saved the day and that Reno was ineffectual and possibly drunk.

Near the end of his life, Reno still retained the images of defeat.

In an account published posthumously in 1912, he remembered crossing the river three days after the battle and riding into the Indian camp where he had launched his attack. The wounded had been left behind, and Reno feared from viewing what remained of them that they had been tortured.

"One ghastly find was near the center of the field where three tepee poles were standing upright in the ground in the form of a triangle, and on top of each were inverted camp kettles, while below them, on the grass, were the heads of three men whom I recognized as belonging to my own command," he wrote.

"These heads had been severed from their trunks by some very sharp instrument, as the flesh was smoothly cut, and they were placed within the triangle, facing one another in a horrible, sightless stare."

Other officers with an endless capacity for drink included Weir - who purchased three pints, two quarts and two gallons of whiskey, plus a bottle of brandy and three bottles of ale; and French - two bottles of brandy and a gallon of whiskey. Benteen does not appear to have purchased any liquor.

A good share of the 7th's men disappeared from history as soon as their discharge papers were signed. But incomplete as records are, the post-Little Bighorn 7th seemed replete with violence, disability and early death.

At least five who were injured in the Reno-Benteen siege died later of their wounds. Ten who survived the Sioux campaign were killed a year later in the 1877 Nez Perce chase through Montana at Big Hole, Canyon Creek and Bear Paw Mountain. Two others died at Wounded Knee in 1890.

It was all too much for some of the more than 300 troopers, scouts and civilians who returned from the Little Bighorn campaign.

Farrier John R. Steintker took his own life with an opium overdose in his quarters at Fort Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 28, 1876.

Others simply tried to walk away. Desertion was common in the frontier Army, so it's hard to say if it was higher for the 7th in the aftermath of the battle.

Eleven troopers deserted in the last five months of 1876, some almost as soon as the bodies were buried and in the thick of Indian Country, according to a compilation of soldiers' histories by John M. Carroll, "They Rode with Custer," and another compilation by Kenneth Hammond, "Men with Custer."

William Channel and Edler Nees deserted on July 26 near the Bighorn River. Channel was caught the same day, and Nees, two days later. Both were placed in irons and sent back to forts in North Dakota where they were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged on Oct. 30, 1876.

Others were never captured.

In 1877, with the Nez Perce campaign under way, 24 desertions were counted among the 7th survivors. There were only two in 1879; by then, many of the survivors had mustered out.

The frontier army was a rough bunch in a tough place. Recruits signing up under assumed names to escape legal or social obligations were not uncommon, and they did not always possess sterling characters.

At least four troopers were shot to death.

Pvt. James Weeks died in August 1877 of a pistol wound after an altercation at the Crow Indian agency; Pvt. John McShane was killed March 1877 while trying to escape the stockade at Fort Abraham Lincoln; Pvt. Elijah Strode died in an altercation with another soldier in a Sturgis, S.D., saloon in February 1881; and Pvt. John Pym was slain Dec. 6, 1893, in Miles City by a much younger cowboy who was apparently courting the same married woman.

A Louisiana lynch mob got Pvt. John H. Day on June 13, 1894. He was suspected in a series of arsons in Monroe.

After a court-martial, Sgt. Charles White was discharged at Fort Meade in 1879 for threatening to "gunsling" another soldier out of the Army. He later returned to the 7th and remained there until he died in 1906.

At least six with the 7th on the Sioux campaign of 1876 committed suicide later.

Steinker was the first when he overdosed a few months after the battle. Sgt. Olans Northeg reportedly took his own life at Fort Meade in 1882. Pvt. Joseph Bates swallowed a lethal dose of an insecticide called Paris Green in 1893. Pvt. Phillip Spinner died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at Camp Douglas, Wis., in 1894.

Dr. Charles A. Stein, a veterinarian, stayed at the Powder River Depot and did not accompany the 7th to the Little Bighorn, but Carroll quoted a steamboat captain as saying that after the battle Stein "was the most scared man" he had ever seen.

Stein resigned immediately when the campaign ended. He committed suicide by poison in 1891 at the age of 53.

Pvt. John Burkman, Custer's striker - the man who had saddled Custer's horse for the ride to Little Bighorn - mourned his hero throughout his long life, always lamenting the fact that he had not died at Custer's side.

Burkman spent much of the rest of his life alone in Billings. One afternoon in 1925, the 86-year-old veteran went to the porch of his rooming house at 112 S. 27th St. and put a bullet through his brain.

In the two years after the battle, at least 25 men of the 7th were discharged from the service for disabilities. Ill-defined heart illnesses killed many of them at an early age. Pvt. Michael Crowe, for instance, died of heart disease at Fort Yates in June of 1883. He was just 34.

Often they ended up in the U.S. Soldiers' Home in Washington, D.C., one of the few options for disabled and elderly veterans. Thirty-two 7th Cavalry veterans of the Little Bighorn are buried there.

Pvt. Daniel Mahoney died at the Soldiers' Home at the age of 33 in 1885, two years after his medical discharge. One of the causes of death was exhaustion.

Some went to the Soldiers' Home as young men and died there decades later.

Pvt. Patrick Corcoran, wounded in the shoulder, was discharged from the Army for heart disease in January 1877. Three months later, at the age of 33, Corcoran entered the home. He died there in 1922.

Pvt. William A. Marshall died there of kidney disease and exhaustion in 1892 at the age of 41. Disabled in 1880, Pvt. John McCabe died in the home at age 40. Pvt. John McCue, who lost an eye, entered the Soldiers' Home in 1893 and died there 30 years later.

They spent their final years among comrades there, probably debating what went wrong and who was to blame.

A few members of the 7th wound up in asylums for the insane.

Sgt. Thomas F. McLaughlin died in the North Dakota Hospital for the Insane 10 years after the battle at the age of 39.

Pvt. James W. Severs died at age 61 in the State Hospital for the Insane at Rock Springs, Wyo. Severs had been known by his friends in the 7th as "Crazy Jim."

Pvt. William Logue was apparently declared insane at some point, but remained with the Army until 1884 when he was accidentally shot in the toe. He died at the Soldiers' Home on June 25, 1919, the 43rd anniversary of the battle.

Syphilis, another scourge of the frontier Army, claimed its share of the 7th. It contributed to the demise of at least six.

Accidents killed at least three of the Little Bighorn survivors who stayed in the military. Pvt. Richard Wallace drowned exactly a month after the battle while crossing the Bighorn River to go on guard duty. Pvt. Abraham Brant accidentally shot himself in the abdomen while handing his revolver to his sergeant on Oct. 4, 1878. Pvt. Markus Weiss died of a head injury on Nov. 15, 1879, while working on construction of a new building at Fort Meade.

It's impossible to tell from incomplete records and a growing distance in time how heavily the Battle of the Little Bighorn weighed on the lives of the survivors. For some, its effects were more obvious than on others.

Many of the casualties didn't wear uniforms.

When the Far West docked at Fort Abraham Lincoln on July 5, 1876, it carried the news that at least 22 women were widowed and 32 children would have no fathers to help guide them through life.

The government showed little compassion. There were no death benefits for the families of those killed in action, and the Army allowed them just 30 days to vacate their homes.

One of the saddest casualties may have been Grace Harrington, widow of Lt. Henry M. Harrington and mother of their two children.

She could not accept that that her husband was dead. Convinced that he was somewhere wounded or captive, Grace Harrington left her home in the East to visit relatives in Texas, apparently intending to search for him. En route, she disappeared.

The story goes that nothing was heard of her for two or three years, after which she turned up in Fort Worth, suffering from amnesia and pneumonia.

Contact Lorna Thackeray at lthackeray@billingsgazette.com or 657-1314.

http://www.billingsgazette.net/artic...-survivors.txt
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oracle

[dc dalton]

Well as interesting an article as it is I see a lot of it as 'revisionist history' and can find NOTHING patriotic or even worth a passing thought, unless that thought was the slaughter of damn near an entire race of people by a cold hearted, land snatching imperialistic government .... our government.

If there is anything people in this country should be disgusted by it is the fact that we took without asking, we slaughtered women, children and men of a once proud and powerful race, all so we could take damn near ever inch of land they owned...... this era in our history shows exactly how human being can in fact become nothing more than parasites, all under the excuse of 'manifest destiny'.

[MOUNTAINORACLE]

The reason I posted this article wasn't to glorify, To use DC Dalton's words "the slaughter of damn near an entire race of people by a cold hearted, land snatching imperialistic government .... our government" or 'manifest destiny'.

The soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were, as the soldiers, in Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Nam, etc, just following their orders.

Politics was not the reason for this post period!!!!

The reason for this post was to show the effects of war on the soldier:

In 1876=soldier's heart......WWI=shell shock.....WWII=Battle fatigue.....Nam=Post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Soldiers having problems with abuse of alcohol both in today military (read several articles on the use of alcohol in today's military being on the up swing) and the one in 1876; alcohol used to relieve stress.

Soldiers in 1876 having canteens full of alcohol going into battle & soldiers using drugs (Yes I can make this statement as I was there) going into battle in Nam.

The atrocities that occur in war. Civil War had it's Andersonville, WWII had it's Holocaust, etc.

Number of soldiers that committed suicide after the discharge.

And soldiers from all war that are shipped off to the Soldiers' Home are forgotten. Out of sight is out of mind,

These are the effects of war on our young soldiers and will always be.


oracle

[larrymeyer]

To put it mildly Custer screwed the dog he split his command and only took 5 columns with him. He watched Reno getting his ass kicked and never went to help. The survivors told a different story then the Army. And they were never called to testify. The survivors were White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin and I forget the third scouts name. And I believe President Regan set aside Reno's court-martial and found there was no way he could have helped Custer

[dc dalton]

Originally Posted by larrymeyer

To put it mildly Custer screwed the dog he split his command and only took 5 columns with him. He watched Reno getting his ass kicked and never went to help. The survivors told a different story then the Army. And they were never called to testify. The survivors were White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin and I forget the third scouts name. And I believe President Regan set aside Reno's court-martial and found there was no way he could have helped Custer

Bingo! As I said, revisionist history

As far as 'soldier stress' yes I get that but the article doesn't mention the whole damn thing could have been avoided had a few officers had gone by the book.