This Day in Western History (Custer’s Waterloo at Little Big Horn)

June 25, 1876—Libby Custer got her wild man of a husband to swear off drinking completely, and she induced him to reduce his swearing. But she was less successful at curbing his gambling instinct, and that tendency led Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer to be slaughtered with his men at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Black Hills of Montana, in one of the worst military disasters in American history.

For a battle that everyone agrees took no more than two hours--and, according to more recent reconstructions of Custer and his surrounded, panic-stricken 200-odd men, quickly disintegrated into a chaotic melee with no command or organization--Custer’s Last Stand has resulted in countless books, articles, and depictions in all kinds of media to match its endless controversy. Such fine historians as Stephen E. Ambrose (Crazy Horse and Custer), Evan S. Connell (Son of the Morning Star) and, most recently, Nathaniel Philbrick (The Last Stand) have weighted in.

(If you’d like some helpful discussions of how the big screen has treated the event, you can read essays by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. and Dee Brown on, respectively, They Died With Their Boots On and Fort Apache, a film with a fictional character strongly suggestive of the colonel, in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.)

You really can drown in all this ink, no matter how fascinating. But as the first paragraph in this post implied, there’s another way to think of the Custer controversy, one really out of left field, one that, nevertheless, is more relevant than you think: women. (Or, as one of my friends--and he knows who he is--might write: WOMEN!!!)

When Colonel Custer died with every one of his men in his ill-fated campaign against the Lakota Sioux led by Sitting Bull, there was one obvious candidate for responsibility for this devastating loss sustained by the U.S. Army: himself. He was a glory-hound of epic proportions, the Union Army’s youngest general in the Civil War but now dying to make his status permanent. (He was only a “brevet” general in the war--meaning that his title was temporary--and had become a colonel in the regular army after Appomattox.)

If he could achieve victory over the Sioux, Custer believed, he could not only receive that long-desired promotion but maybe even propel himself to the White House. It was hardly a pipe dream: from George Washington to the current President, Ulysses S. Grant, Americans had always loved a man on horseback.

That burning ambition led Custer to disregard the wishes of the Commanding General of the Army, William T. Sherman, who warned Custer’s superior office, General Alfred Terry: “Advise Custer to be prudent, not to take along any newspapermen.”(Said newsman, Mark Kellogg of the Bismarck Tribune, died in the battle, too.)

Custer’s frustrated ambitions led him to discipline his men harshly, drive them relentlessly (especially on the 300-mile road trip across grasslands, badlands, mountains, and rivers that took him to the Little Big Horn), and take chances with their lives.

The biggest gamble of all came when, upon stumbling across a Sioux and Northern Cheyenne encampment on the Little Big Horn, he decided: a) to divide his force on ground he didn’t know in the face of an enemy he couldn’t see, b) to ignore the intelligence of his Indian scouts, who warned that Sitting Bull’s forces outnumbered his; and b) to attack said enemy immediately, thereby disobeying orders that he wait until Terry’s force linked up with him.

And there was this, going several years back: the general was given to impetuosity, having been found guilty by a court martial for being absent without leave--a conviction that could have led to his being unceremoniously drummed out of the Army, but for the urging of General Grant that Custer’s sterling Civil War record with the Union cavalry be considered in the sentencing.

The table was set, then, for Custer, with some great degree of justification, to be tabbed as the cause of his own death. It didn’t help that President Grant, annoyed when the general testified about corruption in his administration, had only agreed to him joining the Indian campaign after intercession by Sherman and mentor Philip Sheridan.

Enter Elizabeth Bacon Custer, a.k.a. Libby. She had been the reason why her husband had gone AWOL in the first place. To her, his 60-mile ride to be with her wasn’t abandonment of his post, but rather proof of his devotion.

So now, in the aftermath of the battle, grief-stricken Libby picked up the standard on behalf of her husband. For the rest of her 57 years, she pleaded his case insistently, not only in personal appearances but in three books. Probably no well-known American general had as careful a minder of a flame as Custer had with his Libby.

Well, maybe I should reconsider that. There might be one other contender for devoted widow: Sallie Ann Corbell “LaSalle” Pickett. You might not know her name, but there’s a good chance you know her husband: George E. Pickett. Yes, the leader of another suicidal charge that ended in mass deaths on a ridge, at the Battle of Gettysburg. Pickett wasn't responsible for that slaughter--that, despite generations of Lost Cause wishes, rested squarely on the shoulders of Robert E. Lee--but he was involved with another disaster that doomed the Confederacy.

Pickett and Custer shared some similarities. Their paths intersected in April 1865, when the rebel leader’s foolish decision to leave his troops while he attended a shad bake led to the crucial Union breakthrough on the path to Richmond, aided, in no small measure, by Custer’s pressing of the advantage. Like Custer, Pickett made for a dashing picture with his long locks. Like Custer, he ran afoul of his commander, being relieved of duty by Robert E. Lee just before the surrender at Appomattox. Like Custer, he found postwar life stultifying (probably more so, in Pickett’s case, as he became involved in the insurance business). Like Custer, he died while still young, in the mid-1870s.

And now we turn to the soldiers’ widows.

Like Libby Custer, LaSalle was a pretty young thing who turned her husband into a fool for love. The two women married their mates during the war, and went to bat on behalf of their husbands when they could no longer defend themselves. And both women died in the 1930s, more than 50 years after the deaths of their men.

If there was one good, even historically accurate, aspect of They Died With Their Boots On, it was the casting of Olivia DeHavilland, one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most intelligent and vibrant actresses, to play Libby. The widow was everything the actress could want in a role: beautiful, intelligent (valedictorian of her class), and devoted to her husband.

How devoted? So devoted that Libby lectured on her hero throughout the world. So devoted that she ended up writing three books that formed a collective shrine to her husband.

The effect of these should not be underestimated. Historians have, by and large, accepted Grant’s assessment of battles and junior commanders in his Personal Memoirs. Given the failings of Custer I discussed just now, there was no reason to think his negative view of Custer wouldn’t take permanent root as well. But Libby’s advocacy assured this wouldn’t happen. In fact, Custer became in popular memory not a fool, nor even a victim, but a gallant martyr in America's westward expansion.

Amazingly, though, LaSalle Pickett trumped Libby. Libby might have been indefatigable, but she wasn't excessively creative with facts. But it’s now been pretty much conclusively established that LaSalle’s books contain what can only be called whoppers--starting, but not ending, with the tall tale that Congressman Abraham Lincoln championed her husband's entrance into West Point.

We also now know that LaSalle Pickett was a fabulous fabulist who concocted two entire collections of wartime letters supposedly written by the Confederate general.

It all makes you wonder about this quote--written in overheated prose right out of a romance novel--by her husband that she hauled out, in her nonfiction account Pickett and His Men, supporting her conclusion that he could not have been drunk at Gettysburg: "I promised the little girl who is waiting and praying for me down in Virginia that I would keep fresh upon my lips until we should meet again the breath of the violets she gave me when we parted."

Unlike Pickett, Custer would not be accused of drunkenness at crucial instances in his career: He gave up booze permanently in 1862, after an embarrassingly public debauch endangered his courtship of Libby.

Ironically, it was another man more credibly accused of heavy drinking while on duty, President Grant, who, for all the unjust accusations of him as a "butcher," was far more careful with his men's lives than the teatotaling "Son of the Morning Star."

(Incidentally, the image accompanying this post shows the battle as recalled more than 20 years later by a Native American survivor, Kicking Bear. It’s not as well-known as the white-created depictions of the calm, sharp-shooting Custer and his men, but it is very likely far more truthful.)