The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn Read Online Free PDF Page B

squabbling had to do with Custer’s need to go his own way. Eventually, however, the two officers reached an understanding. Stanley gave Custer the independence he required, and in two skirmishes with the Sioux, he proved that he was still a brave and skillful cavalry officer. By the time the Seventh arrived at the newly constructed Fort Lincoln in September, newspaper accounts of what came to be known as the Yellowstone campaign had already circulated throughout the country, and Custer was once again a hero.
    The following year, Custer’s expedition to the Black Hills only added to his fame. But by May 1876, with his ill-advised testimony in Washington threatening to turn even General Sheridan against him, he was in desperate need of yet another miraculous stroke of Custer luck.

    U pon his arrival at Fort Lincoln on May 10, Custer immediately decided to divide the Seventh into two wings: one led by his second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno, the other by the regiment’s senior captain, forty-two-year-old Frederick Benteen, the same officer who had, eight years before, dared to criticize his conduct at the Washita.
    It was an unusual move. Benteen had made no secret of his continued contempt for Custer, and an appointment to wing commander was the last thing he had expected. The next day, Custer called him to his tent, where Custer was attending to regimental business with his wife, Libbie, by his side. It quickly became clear, at least to Benteen, what his commander was up to.
    Custer explained that while he was in Washington, D.C., he’d run into one of the most powerful newspapermen in the country, Lawrence Gobright, cofounder of the Associated Press. During the Civil War Gobright had worked directly with the Lincoln administration in controlling the flow of war news to the American people. This was just the kind of man any ambitious military officer needed to have on his side.
    Much to Custer’s surprise, Gobright had proven to be “wonderfully interested” in Frederick Benteen. It turned out that the two were cousins. “Yes,” Benteen replied, “we’ve been very dear friends always.” Suddenly Benteen understood the reason behind his elevation to wing commander. “Custer perhaps feared,” he wrote, “that I might possibly bring influence to bear at some time.” After almost a decade, Custer, who enjoyed being the perennial darling of the press, now had a reason to cultivate the friendship of his nemesis.
    Benteen had blue eyes, a round cherubic face, and a thatch of boyishly cropped hair that had, over the course of his tenure with the Seventh Cavalry, turned almost preternaturally white. Unlike Custer, who spoke with such nervous rapidity that it was sometimes hard to understand what he was saying, Benteen had an easy, southern volubility about him. Lurking beneath his chubby-cheeked cordiality was a brooding, utterly cynical intelligence. His icy blue eyes saw at a glance a person’s darkest insecurities and inevitably found him or her wanting. Custer was, by no means, the only commander he had belittled and despised. Virtually every officer he served under in the years ahead—from Colonel Samuel Sturgis to General Crook—was judged unworthy by Benteen. “I’ve always known that I had the happy facility of making enemies of any one I ever knew,” he admitted late in life, “but what then? . . . I couldn’t go otherwise—’twould be against the grain of myself.”
    Even before this conversation about Lawrence Gobright, Custer had made overtures to Benteen. “I always surmised . . . ,” Benteen wrote, “that he wanted me badly as a friend.” Benteen dismissed these gestures as part of a calculated attempt by Custer to elevate his own standing, both within the regiment and, ultimately, with the American public, and he would have none of it. Custer’s co-conspirator in this constant quest for acclaim was Libbie, whom Benteen regarded as “about as cold-blooded a woman as I ever knew, in which