Am I the only amateur student of this battle who thinks that if Reno had shown a bit more fortitude in executing Custer's order, then Custer's strategy might have worked, in spite of the fact that there were many more "hostiles" facing him than he had been led to expect?
Would welcome discussion.
TGOC
Playing the game of "What If?" is an entertaining way to pass a few hours, but as far as it concerns history, it is pretty useless. Once you have changed one historical fact, the rest degenerates into fiction.
So let's play "What If?" anyway.
Reno and his men charged a very large village armed with the six shot Colt revolvers and the single shot Springfield Trapdoor rifles. While both weapons are accurate and reliable weapons, neither of them are easy to reload while charging on a horse through a field littered with prairie dog holes while being attacked by a large number of Indians.
By my count, reloading the Springfield Trapdoor rifle requires five steps before it is ready to shoot again. Reloading the Colt revolver requires eighteen.
After the first few minutes of battle Reno and his men would have been charging this village armed with Victorian Era clubs. My guess is that if they had continued their charge none of them would have made it back across the river much less up the hill that provided them shelter over the next couple of days.
Let's assume that Reno and his men did continue their charge into the village. Outnumbered by somewhere around three to one and armed with weapons that could not be easily reloaded on horseback, my guess is that they would have been wiped out to the last man before they got very far.
This would not have changed the outcome of Custer's Last Stand, but it probably would have changed the rest of the battle.
When Captain Benteen arrived at Reno Hill with somewhat more than one hundred men, he found Reno and roughly one hundred sixty soldiers in a reasonably defensible position, with the pack mules carrying the extra ammunition and forty more men following about a half an hour later.
Had Reno continued his charge and been wiped out, Benteen would have found a large number of pissed off and very confident Indians, who would have forced him to dig in at the first possible location. The pack mules with the extra ammunition would have been wiped out before they got to him.
Between the large number of Indians and the loss of the extra ammunition, Benteen and his command would have been overwhelmed sometime during the next day.
So my version of "What If?" says that by failing to complete his charge of the village, Reno saved half of the Seventh Cavalry from certain death.
Custer reportedly knew that Reno had stopped his charge and dismounted to fight the Indians. Several witnesses from Reno's command reported seeing him watch from a nearby hill as they took up their initial defensive positions and signal his approval. They had assumed that he was going to swing around the village and charge from another direction, which would throw the Indians into chaos, which is probably what he intended to do.
Custer's strategy was brutal but effective. Surprise a village and charge into it, overwhelm its defenders with superior firepower, round up the survivors, destroy their supplies, and capture their ponies.
The fatal flaw in Custer's battle preperations was not in underestimating the number of Indian combatants, but in his assesment of what they were doing that afternoon. He assumed that the Indians knew he was coming and were in the process of scattering.
He sent Benteen to the far side of the village to cut off any Indians who would try to escape in that direction. Benteen didn't find any escaping Indians because they did not realize that the Army was there until shortly before Reno began his charge, so they had no time to flee, but they did have enough warning to mount a defense.
As far as strategy is concerned, the Indians defense was crude but effective, aided by Custer's decision to split up his forces and the terrain which prevented the different commands from communicating with each other.
It turns out that if he had not divided the Seventh Cavalry and charged the village as a single unit, he might very well have won the battle.
But then, I'm playing "What If?" again.
This was fun.
Dear nd,
Thank you for your posting. Yes, this sort of thing is fun.
My initial theory, or question, was whether or not a more determined charge on Reno’s part, even given the disadvantages of his weapons which you so accurately enumerate, by its sheer momentum might not have thrown the Indians into disarray, thus allowing Custer’s flanking movement to complete the process, perhaps driving them into Benteen’s backstop. There are precedents in military history for a small number of disciplined cavalry routing much larger irregular forces. As a strategy, in the circumstances, this plan has always seemed to me to be fairly sound. Obviously, however, if this was his plan, Custer had second thoughts when he sent the message to Benteen to “come quick.”
As you say, with the benefits of hindsight, it looks as if Custer would have been better off keeping his force together. But who are we to second-guess him, an experienced Indian-fighter? The bottom line is that I just don’t think that he deserves the apparent contempt with which he has been treated –irresponsible glory-hound and so on. Things turned out against him, but he was no kind of buffoon.
What if his men had been armed with Martini-Henrys, which were much quicker to reload?
Yours,
TGOC
I do not think a charge by even the most determined, most aggressive, and most courageous officers and men could have worked that day.
Custer's plan was based on two accurate pieces of information, that there was a very large village on the river and that the Indians knew that soldiers were in the neighborhood.
His plan was also based on assumptions formed by a decade of fighting Indians, that Indians usually went out of their way to avoid combat with the army, and that if the Indians in a village knew that the army was nearby, they would scatter and flee.
Unfortunately for the Seventh Cavalry, those assumptions were wrong on that Sunday morning. The previous week these same Indians had gone out of their way to pick a fight with General Crook on the Rosebud River even though the soldiers outnumbered the Indians by a significant factor.
While General Crook was technically correct when he declared the battle a victory because it was the Indians who ultimately left the field, his victory would have had more credibility had he actually pursued the Indians rather than halting his march on the Indian village and engaging in a prolonged camping vacation.
Also that week, during the Sun Dance, Sitting Bull had his vision of a great battle in the village with the Army that the Indians would win with few casualties.
Finally, even though the Indians knew that the army was coming, they did not learn this early enough to scatter and flee, so they had no choice except to fight.
So Major Reno was neither charging into a sleeping village that was unaware of his presence, nor a panic-stricken village that was desperately trying to escape, but rather five hundred or so really angry Indian warriors who had just won a major victory over General Crook and been told by Sitting Bull that they were going to win this fight.
Moments after Reno began his charge, the Indians charged him. Anger, victory, a sense of indestructability, and superior numbers are a difficult combination to defeat. I do not believe that the charge could have been successful if a different officer had led it.
I do not believe that better or different weapons could have made a difference, short of issuing M-16s to each trooper and officer, but this would have delayed the battle by some ninety years or so.
I do not think that the Gattling guns Custer had refused to take would have helped much in the charge since they were essentially artillery pieces traveling on wagons not suited to chasing Indians through the hills of Montana, but after Reno's men had dismounted at their original skirmish line they could have played the decisive role in winning the decisive battle, but here I am entering into "What If?" territory.
And the Gattling guns traveled so slowly that they would not have reached the battlefield until the next day.
The contempt for Custer began as soon as the original reports of the battle were being written. In life he had been a polarizing figure. The Army had just suffered its worst defeat ever, and at the hands of illiterate savages. A fall guy was needed and Custer, by virtue of being dead and unable to defend himself, was convenient.
Dear ND,
You seem to have a grasp on this battle that puts my own amateurish perspective to shame. In view of that, let me ask you, outright, was Custer a glory-seeking ego-maniac, or was he just unlucky? I would value your judgment on this matter.
Yours,
TGOC
TGOC
Thank you for the kind words.
I would like to claim those thoughts on the battle as my own. They are more appropriately the synthesis of the work and research of several dozen authors whose work has come into my library, beginning with "Custer: Fighter of the Plains", a book I found as a ten year old in my school library when I was given an assignment to write a book report on a book of my own choosing.
Should you ever find a copy of this book, be assured that my taste in both literature and research has become somewhat more sophisticated over the last four decades.
To answer your question, Custer wanted desperately to be a military hero, he wanted to win important victories in war, and he craved the glory that would follow. He had seemingly inexhaustable bravery, energy and stamina, and he expected his command to follow him. He was able to make decisions quickly, and usually correctly. These are normally considered to be desirable qualities in an officer.
This puts him good company with most of our nation's successful military leaders.
No, he was not a glory seeking maniac.
No, he was not unlucky.
He was a soldier serving his country, and one of the risks a soldier takes involves death.
Dear nd,
You will not get any argument from me about what you say of Custer. My only issue with him has been the question of his relationship with his primary subordinates: Reno and Benteen. There would seem to have been a certain lack of mutual respect and understanding between them all, a state of affairs that a commanding officer should have done something about. Granted, his senior officers were not necessarily of Custer’s choosing, but perhaps things might have gone differently if he had made some effort to make a “Band of Brothers.” Who knows?
My own serious interest in this battle was sparked by a book by John Gray called “Custer’s Last Campaign.” It made me think that Custer’s strategy in the battle made sense.
Do you take an interest in other battles of this, or any other, kind? If so, I would recommend that you look at “Rourke’s Drift”, the basis for the film “Zulu.” It was a fine battle, and those red-coats who fought there deserved their country’s thanks.
Yours,
TGOC
Some things I read a couple of years ago seemed to condemn Custer's actions a little more than you say.
Some of the differences:
The village he was attacking was almost twice as large as he thought. If he knew the exact size, he might have used a different battle plan.
One of the tactics used by the cavalry was to attack a village directly, while having another group attack from the back. The Indians would back off the fighting to keep their women and children safe. Thus, they could beat an Indian army that outnumbered them.
Reno and Benteen did not like Custer at all and Reno was certainly not happy with his assignment: taking the brunt of the battle while Custer attacked behind the main Indian force.
The courier Custer used was an immigrant who spoke very little english and could not add any pertainent information to Custer's hastily written note to Benteen. (Honestly, this one makes little sense to me. Why would a commander trust vital communications like this to someone who spoke little english, especially in the heat of battle).
The main point always seemed to be that Custer wanted to be the one that defeated the Indians and win the war by himself. This may explain some of the rash decisions he made. Certainly, it would have been more prudent to wait until other forces arrived before charging recklessly into battle.
I do not argue these items as facts, only other viewpoints that have been offered.
Dear Picasner,
Many thanks for your thoughts on this issue, and I think that you have a sound understanding of it.
I think that the consensus of opinion is that Custer did not know how many Hostiles he was facing, but that that would not probably have changed his mind. He had reason to believe, on past experience, that, in this situation, most Indians, when attacked by cavalry would have dispersed. What he did not know was that these particular hostiles were in a state of great anger over the Black Hills betrayal. Custer was competent but, in this case, unlucky.
Yours,
TGOC
Some sources say that part of the reason the Army so badly underestimated the number of warriors opposing them was bad information from the Indian Agents running the various reservations. These agents were often corrupt, siphoning off funds and supplies intended for the Indians. As more and more Sioux left the reservations to join Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Gall, the reservation agents did not report the Indians who departed. If they had reported the unauthorized departures, the agency rations and budgets would have been cut, leaving less for the agents to steal. So the agents continued to report high numbers of Indians on the reservations, preserving their ill-gotten gains, but depriving the Army of vital intelligence needed to assess the threat posed by the hostile bands.
shareDear Ahope:
What you say tallies with much that I have read. Never trust a government official; they are all bad.
But it also seems to me that poor Custer might not have come to grief if he had been better informed about the exact numbers of the "hostiles." I am inclined to believe that his tactics would have worked against a smaller number of foes and if Reno had done what he was told to do. What think you?
Yours,
TGOC
I have seen counter arguments to what I am about to write, but anyway:
The Seventh Cavalry were supplied with Gatling guns. Custer had them left behind as he thought they would slow him down. Had he taken the Gatlings into battle he would have considerably increased his firepower. He may still have lost the battle but he would have had a better chance of winning.
The Gatling guns were pulled by condemned cavalry horses which did not have much stamina.
Of course any person or group of persons who was not poor and was interested in using the Gatling guns as well as possible could have bought teams of stronger horses or mules to pull the Gatlings faster than broken down cavalry horses could. Perhaps two or more teams for each Gatling gun to take turns.
And when the campaign was over they could sell any surviving horses and get some of their money back. It might have been possible to rent horses and get insurance to cover any payments they might have to make to the owners for lost or injured horses.
On a larger scale, the Department of Dakota had a shortage of cavalry. Possibly General Terry could have arranged to buy and/or rent hundreds of horses and mules and mount an entire regiment of infantry to augment his mounted forces. Of course Terry would have had to get more wagons and more animals to pull them for the extra supplies.
But it would have saved paying for rushed reinforcements after the Little Big Horn.
And on an even larger scale, General Sheridan and General Sherman should have considered buying or renting hundreds or thousands of horses and mules to mount infantry regiments to reinforce the three columns for the summer campaign.
And they and their civilian leaders should have considered asking foreign governments to lend regiments of infantry and cavalry for garrison duty to free US troops to reinforce the three columns. This was the US centennial so neutral foreign governments might have agreed to it as a friendly gesture.
I once made a list of times in the western Indian wars when it was possible for the army to be totally defeated, but the soldiers escaped disaster by chance.
If you remember Steptoe's defeat in 1858, he lost only nine soldiers killed, but if things had gone just a little bit different his entire command of about 150 men might have been killed. Thus it was certainly possible for the warriors of the tribes involved to have killed 16.666 times as many men as the largest number of soldiers they actually did kill in a single battle.
If generals had taken a ratio of fifteen to one between the most soldiers killed by a tribe in a previous battle and the most soldiers they could possibly kill in a single battle if chance favored them, then they could estimate the largest possible force that a particular tribe could annihilate and at least try to always send larger forces against them.
For the Sioux, the Grattan Massacre of about 29 men would suggest that it was possible that the Sioux could annihilated a force of 435 men, and the Fetterman Massacre of 81 men would suggest that the Sioux could annihilate a force of 1215 men if things went right for them.
And there were several times in the Indians wars when forces from the size of a company up to a battalion or a regiment or even a brigade were in danger of being destroyed and slaughtered, but were favored by chance factors. General Sheridan had had years to find out about the capabilities of the plains tribes by the time he was planning the Sioux campaign in 1876.
And yet Sheridan estimated that nine hundred cavalry would be enough to handle the greatest number of Sioux likely to be encountered. And then he let the Montana Column take to the field with only about 400 men, the same size as Baker's command which narrowly escaped being surprised and massacred by the Sioux in 1873. Sheridan's three columns had a total of only twice the nine hundred cavalry he estimated was enough to handle the largest likely Sioux force, and Sheridan did not expect that the infantry in those columns would keep up with the cavalry and take part in the fights.
I just watched this for the first time in a long time, luv the movie, and discussions like this.
I've studied the big Horn campaign somewhat so ley me add a few things
The tactics
Were the same tactics that had been sucessfull elsewhere, no matter the size of the village:
Initiate and attack, on foot, while another force does an end around, scattering the pony herd, captureing women and childrenm and old folks to force the warriors to cease fighting. The Warriors would not stand toe to toe with the soldiers, and didn't favor fighting on foot
The warriors changed tactics a week or so before, and fought Cook to a standstill
It still almost worked as when Custer entered fringes of the village there were few warriors left, haveing been drawn to the sound of the guns of Renos charge, This is when Custer may have been hit in the side, almost unhorsed, his contingent escapped to last stand hill
Reno and Benteen
Custers 2nd, and 3rd in command hated him, Benteen rountinley disobeyed his orders. Reno was a drunkard and was in his cups the day of the battle, had ordered his troops to mount and dismount a couple times in the space of minutes
Benteens last written order, dilevered by an immigrant was to come quickly and bring ammo. he was in charge of the ammo/baggage train
Weapons and Ammo
The 7th did not carry sabres into battle, having packed them away at the start of the campaign
The 7th had been issued the new Springfield carbine weeks before the start of the campaign. They had little time to practice with them and the army did not allow a whole lot of practice shooting anyway, budget restraints. And it was an underpowered carbine round---the 45/55---NOT the 45/70 rifle round, so it was a little bigger than the pistol round,still not bad----BUT it was copper cased, not brass, so when you fired 3-4 rounds rapidly, the casing would heat up, expand and not reload leaving you with a club, had they kept the old Spencer carbine they would have been better served
Gattling Guns-------Custer didn't take them because the type approved by the army was wheeled, like a piece of artillery, he would have spent more time changing broken axles than chasing Indians
In a world where a carpenter can be resurrected, anything is possible.