Welcome to my Wild West!

South of Mandan, along the west bank of the Missouri, sits the remnants of Fort Abraham Lincoln. It’s a state park featuring some original buildings, a replica Mandan Village, and a rebuilt Custer House.

The first Custer House I encountered was in Fort Supply, a historic site in Oklahoma. I recall the tour guide saying something about the one in Mandan, North Dakota, being “not the real Custer house.”

I usually take such comments as someone fulfilling the inane desire for superiority. To this day, I don’t know if the officer’s quarters at Fort Supply is an original building. I never got the chance to take the tour, and the interweb is sparse on information. 

The Fort Abraham Lincoln Custer House is where Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer lived in the last days before the campaign that ended his life.

It was from this fort that the 7th Cavalry departed in May 1876 with orders to round up the tribes still roaming the plains. At this time, Dakota Territory included North and South Dakota and a chunk of Wyoming. The history leading to this conflict is long and intricate, but ironically, Custer played a key part in setting off the events that led to his death.

In 1868, the US government ceded this land to the plains tribes, which gave rise to the name “Dakota.” It was the second treaty signed at Fort Laramie, several miles northeast of Laramie, Wyoming, and it ceded much of the upper plains to the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes. This banned Europeans from settling in these areas, especially the sacred Black Hills.

Then, in July 1874, Custer set out with the 7th Cavalry to survey the previously uncharted Black Hills. That meant more than just mapping. It also meant looking for gold.

Once prospectors with the expedition found gold, it was a matter of time before word circulated and drew Europeans into the Hills, but Custer’s love of publicity sped up this process. He went nowhere without a reporter in tow. Shortly after they returned to Fort Abe Lincoln in August, word spread, and the prospectors flooded in.

Naturally, this violation of a promise to the Plains Tribes led to conflict. To say these prospectors were outlaws is both accurate and unduly flattering. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was law, but repeated evictions from the Black Hills put pressure on Ulysses S. Grant (one of the most corrupt presidents in US history) to take the Hills for European settlement.

Those who have seen Deadwood know how crossing the plains became a dangerous business. What the show doesn’t depict was the fact that the tribes were enforcing the law. Many tribes moved, displacing other tribes, causing further conflict. The Grant Administration explored avenues for a new treaty, but the tribes refused to give up their sacred land. Some refused to even discuss it.

By fall 1875, Washington decided to “whip them into subjection,” meaning the tribes. They gave an ultimatum for the different bands of the Lakota to return to the agencies, outposts that served as meeting places for tribal representatives. The intention was to force them into discussion, but the limited timeline made the demand unreasonable.

In early summer 1876, three different columns of soldiers marched against seven different tribes. Each column numbered roughly 600 soldiers. Indian agents estimated there were only a few hundred natives occupying the plains. In reality, they had no idea. Modern estimates of Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn range from 900 to 2,000, not including non-combatants.

Contrary to popular belief, Custer was not in charge of the column he marched with. General Alfred Terry was when they left Fort Abraham Lincoln with three companies of infantry. 

Custer disliked taking orders. He was a lieutenant colonel, riding his laurels from the Civil War, and thoroughly arrogant. Under his management, the 7th Cavalry went through periods of mass desertion and faced a court martial or two for repeated absences. Custer believed himself above the rules and invincible while heavily punishing his men. Makes sense they’d leave!

Whether Terry hesitated to send Custer and the 7th to scout the Rosebud ahead of a planned encounter with Lakota and Cheyenne on June 26th is a valid question. Terry ordered Custer to not engage with the “hostiles” but he allowed Custer to deviate from orders if he found it “sufficiently necessary.” That left room for interpretation.

Custer’s deviation from orders put him at Little Bighorn roughly a day early, with five hundred men versus nearly 2,000. He further split his numbers in order to surround the camp on Little Bighorn, shrugging off the warning of his Crow scouts that there were too many. These scouts changed out of their uniforms, refusing “to die in white man’s clothes.” 

Accounts from survivors indicate Custer wanted his Civil War glory back, and he possibly believed that the 7th could end the entire campaign in one day by repeating Chivington’s move against Black Kettle. Exactly what he was planning, he kept to himself.

Ask any US citizen born before the 1980s, and they’ve probably seen a movie about “Custer’s Last Stand.” One of my favorite movies as a kid was Disney’s Tonka, a fictional account of Captain Nelson Miles’s horse, Comanche. Watching it now, I laugh at the depiction of The Battle of Little Bighorn.

This simplistic depiction typifies the perception of an event that served as a turning point in conflict between Europeans and Native Americans throughout the country.

Elizabeth “Libby” Bacon Custer helped build the myth behind “Custer’s Last Stand.” In fact, the national battlefield held that name until Georg H.W. Bush renamed it in 1991, nearly 120 years later. Custer plunged into that fight on June 25, 1876, looking for personal glory. He ended up as a battle cry, and his widow carried that banner for all it was worth.

After decades of diplomatic negotiations for land, the US government forced all tribes onto reservations in the ten years following Little Bighorn. Media campaigns ensured that the Indian Bureau remained under funded. Its leadership comprised political appointees with no qualification or motivation to take their job seriously. Behind most of it, you’ll find Libby Custer talking to a newspaperman or politician.

As an Army widow, Libby had few financial resources. Keeping her husband’s name in the papers created a 19th century crowdsourcing to meet her needs. That required keeping up the image of “the boy general murdered by savages.” Anyone who spoke ill of her husband risked losing everything. Though Marcus Reno did little to help his own cause, he is the best example of Libby’s conniving ways.

Libby actively suppressed narratives about Little Bighorn that differed from the image she wanted portrayed. Until after her death, few accounts from the Lakota and Cheyenne or European survivors circulated.

A few years into my firefighting career, I read Richard Wheeler’s fictional account from Reno’s perspective, and another documentary book that I’ve forgotten the name of, and concluded that if Custer were a modern day multiple resource boss, the Little Bighorn would have gone down in history with Storm King, Man Gulch and Yarnell. 

Did Custer make mistakes? Sure he did! But he was last in his class at West Point for a reason, and his wife knew how to play the political game. He got lucky to live 36 years. We weren’t so lucky to live with his legacy.

As for the house at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Libby was evicted from it shortly after her husband’s death. It served as officer’s quarters until the fort was decommissioned in 1891. Local homesteaders cannibalized the lumber for sheds and houses in the area. In 1989, North Dakota State Parks and Recreation built a replica on the original site using plans revised by the Custers from 1874. It’s worth a tour if you’re ever in the Mandan area.

For further reading, check out Joseph M. Marshall, III’s The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn, and Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt, for Lakota and Cheyenne perspectives on the battle and aftermath. A fictional alternative telling from the Army side that I recommend is An Obituary for Major Reno by Richard S. Wheeler. For a biography on Libby, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth by Shirley A. Leckie is an excellent read.