Chicago has long been known as the city of prepaid justice, a place where trials are more often won with a wink and a nod than a citation from the Corpus Juris Civilis. Our judges regularly go from the bench to a jail cell.
Now comes Robert Nightengale with a claim that the Windy City may have hosted one of the most brazen miscarriages of them all– right up there with the Black Sox Scandal and Harry Aleman’s first murder trial–in this case, a backroom conspiracy to put the fix in on history itself.
By trade, Nightengale is a social worker in Minneapolis, but his real passion is Gen. George Armstrong Custer. He is one of a not-so-small army of amateur scholars who love, nay live, to debate what went wrong on June 25, 1876, in the valley of the Little Big Horn River, in what was then the Montana Territory.
“The quickest way to start an argument,” Nightengale likes to say, “is to bring up religion, politics or Custer’s Last Stand.”
Indeed, a generation of Americans was schooled to think of Custer as a courageous martyr by watching Errol Flynn in Hollywood’s version of the story, “They Died With Their Boots On.” After studying the battlefield where Custer and more than 200 of his soldiers were killed, professional historians often come to the opposite verdict, condemning him as a foolhardy glory seeker.
But in his new book, “Little Big Horn” (Far West Publishing, $35), Nightengale argues that the best place to start sorting out the fact from the fiction of the affair is neither a movie theater nor the site of Custer’s final encounter with the Sioux Indians.
According to Nightengale, the trail properly begins on Chicago’s State Street at the Palmer House Hotel. There, in January 1879, the U.S. Army held a monthlong judicial hearing into the battle of the Little Big Horn. Custer’s widow had been agitating for an official inquiry, convinced that an honest presentation of the facts would preserve the reputation her husband had won as a dashing Civil War cavalryman promoted to general at the age of 23.
On the hot spot in Chicago were Capt. Frederick Benteen and Maj. Marcus Reno, Custer’s principal lieutenants, who had failed to bring their detachments to their commander’s aid when he was pinned down by withering enemy fire three years earlier.
But Benteen and Reno were let off the hook by their fellow officers at the Palmer House hearings. By a process of elimination, Custer became the scapegoat, to be engraved thereafter in history books as having blundered into one of the worst military disasters in U.S. history.
Nightengale’s research has convinced a number of Western history devotees, including William Wells, who publishes a Custer buffs’ newsletter. “No intelligent scholar,” Wells says, “is going to be able to defend the Chicago hearings as justice.”
Nightengale also has persuaded Minneapolis attorney Edward Zimmerman to mount an effort, 118 years later, to reopen the inquiry. A retired Army officer, Zimmerman specializes in getting a new day in court for ex-GIs seeking medals they feel unfairly denied or trying to upgrade dishonorable discharges. Just as he has for hundreds of living veterans, Zimmerman recently filed an appeal on Custer’s behalf with the Army’s Board of Correction of Military Records.
The Pentagon brass haven’t replied yet. But when and if they do, Zimmerman and Nightengale could fill their ears with a litany of judicial abuses, including subornation of witnesses, falsification of documents and making darn sure critical pieces of evidence didn’t get heard.
Indeed, Nightengale isn’t the first to detect an odor hovering over State Street. A few years after the Palmer House hearings, Lt. Jesse Lee wrote a letter of apology to Elizabeth Custer. At the inquiry, Lee had been the recorder, the equivalent of a prosecutor in a civilian courtroom. But as the most junior officer involved, he hadallowed himself to be deterred from following lines of inquiry his seniors didn’t want to pursue.
“I want to say to you in all frankness,” Lee confessed to Custer’s widow, “that at one time I was in some degree influenced by the prejudiced opinions of those whose motives I did not then understand.”
According to Nightengale, the Army had motive enough not to give Custer a fair shake at the Chicago hearings. For instance, he had previously broken its code of silence — omerta being required etiquette for military officers no less than Mafia bosses.
Shortly before the Little Big Horn campaign, Congress had held hearings into allegations that federal agents were pocketing funds appropriated for Indian reservations. Summoned to Washington, Custer had verified those charges, his testimony badly embarrassing the secretary of war and some ranking generals.
Then Custer returned to the West, anathema to many of his fellow officers, and, ironically, assigned to fight a war caused by the malfeasance he’d just decried. Half-starved by being denied supplies due them, Indian tribes had left their reservations and were on the warpath.
“Custer’s tactics in the Little Big Horn campaign,” Nightengale said, “were textbook perfect.”
The Indians, he explained, practiced hit-and-run warfare. Custer knew that the trick was to reverse the element of surprise and catch them before they could strike camp and scatter. Accordingly, he divided his forces into three groups in hopes of encircling them.
His plan worked — up to a point. When he located a Sioux village, he ordered Reno to engage the Indians and sent word to Benteen to bring up his detachment, pronto. Custer then set about falling upon the Indians’ flank to catch them in a pincers.
Unfortunately, Reno panicked, sending his men into disorderly retreat. Benteen took his good time getting to the battlefield, so that when Custer charged, he found himself and his men confronting the enemy alone.
In short order, Custer and his troops were completely wiped out. Only one horse survived, to be paraded with an empty saddle for years thereafter when the Seventh Cavalry was on review.
According to Nightengale, the story of what had transpired at the Little Big Horn was significantly altered en route to the Palmer House inquiry.
“In his original battle report, Reno said he could hear the sound of gunfire from Custer’s direction,” Nightengale said. “But in Chicago, he changed his story, saying he hadn’t heard a thing. That covered his backside on the issue of why he didn’t go to Custer’s aid.”
Reno also enlisted others in that defensive strategy. He and his lawyer ran a hospitality suite in his hotel room, welcoming witnesses to Chicago with cigars and whiskey.
“There was much dining and wining all the time the trial was going on,” one participant subsequently told a reporter. “The whole object was to compromise certain of the witnesses.”
Indeed, an attempt to cloud the picture of what had happened at Custer’s Last Stand began immediately. Benteen and Reno offered a petition at the trial supposedly signed by their men at Little Big Horn saying their commanders’ behavior had been so exemplary they deserved promotion.
In the 1950s, the self-serving nature of the document aroused the suspicions of Maj. Edward Luce, then superintendent of the Little Big Horn battlefield site. He sent it to the FBI whose handwriting experts said many of the signatures had been forged.
“It was when I happened upon Luce’s investigation that I got hooked on the Custer story,” said Nightengale, who has spent 12 years unraveling its mysteries.
Of course, his conclusions have been far from universally accepted by scholars. Douglas Scott, an archeologist for the National Park Service, has excavated Indian bullets from the site, and, based on that evidence, thinks Reno was under too much heavy fire to advance.
Still Nightengale has his supporters, including Tom O’Neil, who runs a publishing house specializing in Western history. He thinks it inevitable that Nightengale would encounter flak.
“We have a lot of so-called Custer experts who don’t like having their ideas challenged by non-professional historians,” O’Neil said.
Yet even if Nightengale and Zimmerman are successful in prodding the government to reopen the case, they still face another battle in the court of public opinion, notes Paul Hutton, a historian at the University of New Mexico and editor of the “Custer Reader.” In this politically correct age, Custer has become not just a fall guy for one lost battle. He also is a convenient scapegoat for every injustice ever inflicted upon the Indians, and that kind of symbolic role, Hutton notes, can be impervious to logic.
Indeed, Gen. Nelson Miles, one of Custer’s few supporters among the top brass, suspected the same more than a century ago.
“It’s easy,” he observed after the Chicago hearings, “to kick a fallen lion.”
