The less than romantic truth about Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn

George Custer’s middle name of Armstrong automatically suggests Ulster-Scots descent.

Born in 1839 in New Rumley, Ohio, he was so named in honour of a clergyman much admired by his mother.

Marie Ward Kirkpatrick (1807-1882), his mother and his father’s second wife, was of English and Scots-Irish descent. Ambitious for her son, she entertained high hopes of him becoming a minister, but it was not to be because the young Custer wished to become a soldier.

His father, a blacksmith and farmer, was of German origin. Thus, either becoming a minister or an army officer would represent upward social mobility.

Custer entered West Point as a cadet in July 1857, as a member of the class of 1862.

His class had 79 cadets embarking on a five-year course of study. With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, the course was truncated to four years, and Custer and his class graduated in June 1861.

He was 34th in a class of 34 graduates: 23 classmates had dropped out for academic reasons while another 22 had already resigned to join the Confederacy.

During his four years at West Point, he amassed a record total of 726 demerits, one of the worst conduct records in the entire history of the academy.

Custer believed there were only two places in a class, the head and the foot, and since he had no desire to be the head, he aspired to be the foot. Custer was wholly indifferent to whether he knew his lesson or not. It didn’t cost him a thought.

In normal circumstance Custer’s career prospects would have been bleak. The best he could have expected would have been some obscure posting from which he could never hope to progress but his graduation coincided with the outbreak of the US Civil War. The Union Army’s urgent need for a great many junior officers came to his rescue.

Although Custer did not shine in the classroom, bizarrely he excelled on Civil War battlefields.

After joining the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry following his graduation, he attracted attention for his daring cavalry charges, bold leadership and tactical brilliance. As a result, he was brevetted brigadier general of volunteers at age of 23.

Custer had an uncanny knack of being at right place at the right time throughout the conflict.

As he led from the front, wore his hair long, dressed flamboyantly and had as many as 11 horses shot from under him and was wounded only once, how he managed to survive is a mystery.

Only a few days after his promotion, he fought at Gettysburg, where he commanded the Michigan Cavalry Brigade (usually known as the Wolverines) and, despite being outnumbered, repulsed JEB Stuart’s attack on the third and final day of the battle.

In 1864, Custer served in Grant’s Overland Campaign and in Philip Sheridan’s army in the Shenandoah Valley, defeating Jubal Early at Cedar Creek.

His division obstructed the final retreat of Robert E Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and received the first flag of truce from the Confederates. Custer was even present at Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox.

Philip Sheridan purchased the table on which Lee’s surrender was signed and presented it to Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Custer’s wife as a tribute to her husband whose abilities he rated very highly.

As the post-Civil War army drastically contracted, Custer reverted to being a humble captain with little immediate prospect of promotion.

After considering various post-war careers, including Congress, in July 1866 he accepted command of the newly created 7th Cavalry as a lieutenant colonel.

In 1874 he led an expedition that discovered gold in the Black Hills which were sacred to the Cheyenne and Sioux and which were protected by treaty. The Black Hills gold rush exacerbated tension between the Native Americans and the whites.

The government reneged on the treaty and sought to remove the Native American population elsewhere.

In 1876, Custer was ordered to lead the 7th Cavalry in a campaign against a coalition of Plains Indians led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

He found them encamped in the valley of the Little Big Horn and attacked on June 25 1876 without waiting for reinforcements. Rashly, he pitted his 650 or so troops against perhaps 2,000 warriors, probably the largest force of Plains Indians ever assembled.

Astonishingly, the Plains warriors were better armed than Custer’s men.

The Native Americans attacked with Winchester, Henry and Spencer repeating rifles as well as bows and arrows.

As most of Custer’s men were armed with Springfield single-shot carbine rifles and Colt .45 revolvers, they were easily outgunned.

In less than an hour Custer and his men were surrounded and wiped out in an action which is romanticised as ‘Custer’s Last Stand’. There was nothing very romantic about it at all.

Some, perhaps correctly, dismiss Custer as a reckless glory hunter. Others, notably Custer’s widow, a prolific and able guardian of her husband’s posthumous reputation, hold him up to be a capable field commander dogged by bad luck, a view which enjoyed widespread currency up until Libby Custer’s death in the early 1930s.

Objectively, Custer enjoyed more than his fair share of good fortune throughout his career but at Little Big Horn his luck evidently ran out. Defeat conferred an immortality upon him which victory would never have done.

Let us leave the last words to two of Custer’s protagonists that day.

Crazy Horse observed: ‘They say we massacred him, but he would have massacred us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the death.’

Custer’s body was found on what is now known as Last Stand Hill, alongside the bodies of 40 of his men, including his brother and nephew, and dozens of dead horses.

Sitting Bull embellished the legend by recalling: ‘Where the last stand was made, the Long Hair [Custer] stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.’