Custer, Washita, and Black Kettle

Wednesday, November 27th, 2002

​George Armstrong Custer was awake in the earliest morning hours on this day, November 27, 1868, one hundred and thirty-four years ago. He was down in Indian Territory on the Washita River in what is now Oklahoma – just east of the Panhandle. There was a foot of snow, and it was cold. Long before dawn, the men of the Seventh Cavalry were up, waiting, and quiet. Today the 800 men of the Seventh would attack a Cheyenne village. They were nervous – especially when the morning star broke so bright from the parting clouds that they thought it was a rocket – one of those arrows with gunpowder the Sioux up north used as rocket signals. But the Sioux were at peace – at least a treaty had been signed at Fort Laramie a couple of weeks before on November 6th, ending the two-year war on the Plains over the Bozeman Trail to gold in Montana. Three days before that, General Grant had been elected President of the United States.

Custer was in Indian Territory at the orders of General Philip Sheridan. He wanted the roaming Indians of the Plains subdued once and for all. Custer intended to crush the sleeping Cheyenne, to kill as many as possible. Later, after he had come up to Fort Abraham Lincoln on the confluence of the Missouri and Heart Rivers in what is now North Dakota – the place from whence he rode to his his demise at the Little Big Horn in 1876, Custer wrote at length about why he wanted to punish the Cheyenne and their Arapahoe confederates in his book My Life on the Plains -- and how carefully he tried to make sure that only warriors would be killed, not women and children. Wrote Custer,

Begin Custer Quote
Before engaging in the fight orders had been given to prevent the killing of any but the fighting strength of the village; but in a struggle of this character it is impossible at all times to discriminate, particularly when, in a hand-to-hand conflict such as the one the troops were then engaged in the squaws are as dangerous adversaries as the warriors, while Indian boys between ten and fifteen years of age were found as expert and determined in the use of the pistol and bow and arrow as the older warriors. . . .

. . . .

Many of the squaws and children had very prudently not attempted to leave the village when we attacked it, but remained concealed inside their lodges. All these escaped injury, although when surrounded by the din and wild excitement of the fight and in close proximity to the contending parties their fears overcame some of them and they gave went to their despair by singing the death song, a combination of weird-like sounds which were suggestive of anything but musical tones. As soon as we had driven the warriors from the village and the fighting was pushed to the country outside I directed Romeo, the interpreter, to go around to all the lodges and assure the squaws and children remaining in them that they would be unharmed and kindly cared for; at the same time he was to assemble them in the large lodges designated for that purpose which were standing near the center of the village. This was quite a delicate mission as it was difficult to convince the squaws and children that they had anything but death to expect at our hands.
End Custer Quote

Why the Cheyenne were signaled out for destruction isn’t certain – a couple of months before, southern Indians had waged war – there had been 147 settlers killed, 57 wounded, 15 women raped and 426 children and women captured. But the chief of the village on the Washita was the 67-year-old Black Kettle, known for his efforts to make peace. There’s a Black Kettle Museum at Cheyenne, Oklahoma – unfortunately, it’s going to be closed from December 23, 2002 to February 28, 2003 because of a lack of funds. The nearby “battle” site is part of the National Park Service. There’s a grave style stone at the entrance to the Black Kettle National Grassland in Oklahoma which offers a different summary:

Text of Marker
The Battle of the Washita, a major engagement in the Plains Indian War which established the western expansion of the United States was fought on this site. Col. George A. Custer’s command of 500 troopers from the 7th cavalry, and a detachment of scouts including the famed Ben Clark and the Osage, Hardrope, destroyed Chief Black Kettle’s Cheyenne village here on Nov. 27, 1868.
Black Kettle, peace leader of the Southern Cheyennes, had sought military assurance that he would not be attacked here. There were in his camp, however, young men who had taken part in war parties raiding in Kansas.
Custer’s command left Camp Supply on November 23. His scouts located the Cheyenne village on the night of November 26, after a forced march through a bitterly cold blizzard and deep snow. Custer deployed his command to surround the village, and at dawn, with the regimental band playing “Gary Owen,” swept in to attack the sleeping Cheyennes.
The number of Indians killed in the fighting is a point of controversy. Custer claimed 103 warriors. In the report to the secretary of the interior (1869 - 70) Cheyennes set the total at 13 men, 16 women, and 9 children, including Black Kettle and his wife. Captain Louis Hamilton, grandson of Alexander Hamilton, was one of two officers killed. Major Joel Elliott and a squad of troopers in pursuit of fleeing Cheyennes were trapped on Sergeant Major Creek beyond a mile from the village and killed to the last man.
The Cheyenne lodges and winter supplies of food and buffalo robes were burned, while 875 of their horses were slaughtered. At nightfall, the cavalry returned toward Camp Supply, with 53 women and children captives.
End Marker Text

All things considered, there probably wasn’t as much of a fight as Custer described – and the men of the Seventh were anything but gallant that day. One newspaper reporter described the scene as looking like a “slaughter house pen” with the blood-covered bodies of Indians and animals lying on top of the snow. Some of the soldiers took scalps that day as well. Evan S. Connell in his masterful Son of the Morning Star concludes that

Begin Connell Quote
The fight in the village lasted only a few minutes, although several hours were required to finish off isolated warriors who hid in gullies and underbrush. Custer’s tally listed 103 fighting men killed. In truth, only 11 could be so classified: Chief Black Kettle, Chief Little Rock, Cranky Man, Blue Horse, Bear Tongue, Red Teeth, Blind Bear, Little Heart, Red Bird, Tall Bear, White Bear. The other 92 were squaws, children, old men. A New York Tribune story by an unidentified witness compared the devastated camp to a slaughter pen littered with the bodies of animals an Indians smeared with mud, lying one on top of another in holes and ditches. It sounds as though Black Kettle’s village lay in the path of Genghis Khan.
End Connell Quote

Connell also writes that Custer was so bent on complete surprise -–something that he managed because the Cheyenne sentry, Double Wolf, was sleeping on the job that cold wintry morning – that he ordered the dogs that followed the men from the camp killed, including one of his favorite staghounds, Blucher. Another of the dogs killed was a mongrel named Bob – described by Sergeant Ryan as “harmless as a kitten.” Unlike those who were muzzled and then stabbed or strangled, a trooper tried to dispatch Bob by driving a picket pin through his head (a picket pin is the stake used to anchor the rope for grazing horses). Records Connell, Bob survived and rejoined the Seventh several days later – he lived on for a couple of years, only to commit suicide: “Bob lived another two years, probably suffering terrible headaches. He accompanied the Seventh from Fort Hayes to Kansas City on an express train when the regiment was ordered south to intimidate the Ku Klux Klan and on this trip he committed suicide. A soldier known as ‘Telegraph Smith’ got drunk and became so abusive that little Bob jumped out a window. ‘ . . . and thus ended his career’, says Ryan, although any dog that could survive a picket pin through his head should have no trouble jumping off a train.”

Custer kept strict account of what he destroyed at the camp – in his effort to demoralize the Southern Cheyenne, he ordered that everything be burned – according to Connell, “573 buffalo robes, 241 saddles, 47 rifles, 35 revolvers, 390 bullet molds, 75 spears, 12 shields, 35 quivers, numerous hatchets, lariats, bridles, 300 pounds of tobacco, and so forth.” Included were several bags of flour labeled “Department of Interior.” The Indians of the village had been at Medicine Lodge making peace in 1867.

General Sheridan considered Custer’s action at the Washita a great victory. It didn’t do much to bring the Plains Indians to the peace table, however. We don’t talk a great deal about Custer at the Washita here in Dakota, but we make much to do about him – after all, there’s reconstructed Fort Abraham Lincoln with Custer’s house. Along about this time a year, folks go out and enjoy a Custer Christmas – with George and Libby there to greet them in period costume. His books and those of his wife sell pretty well – but Connell’s book does as well.

We would do well here in beautiful Dakota to remember what happened when the band played “Garryowen” 134 years ago this morning the next time we take our kids out to Fort Abraham Lincoln to the Custer House. As is true of most of us humans, there is part of Custer’s legacy that not particularly laudatory – and no small evidence that he took quite seriously the business of cultural and actual genocide of those pesky Plains Indians in the nineteenth century. It didn’t work, but not because Custer didn’t try.

Ev Albers