Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Captain Thomas Weir, 7th Cavalry

I forgot about Custer riding up to Pete and demanding his surrender!
That I surely can’t justify, won’t try to!
I believe that while Grant and Lee were working out the surrender, Custer was out in the McLean yard wrestling with his old friend Tom Rosser, who was on Lee’s staff.
Custer never got past the schoolboy stage when it came to old friends.
A little thing like a war was easily set aside when classmates from West Point were around!
I believe Custer crossed the lines to serve as Rosser’s Best Man at his wedding.
Reon

Journalistic license? Where is the detail of this event that describes it so accurately?

Did Sitting Bull and Crow King in reporting that the battle lasted three or four hours have a sense of how long an hour was? They didn’t grow up measuring their days by a clock. I’m thinking too, even among people who did grow up under “Captain Clock” ( as the movie Black Robe refers to 🙂), estimates of time during stressful events can vary widely.

Somewhere there’s an account where an Indian woman present at the LBH refers to the time it took the sun’s shadow to travel the width of a tipi pole, I’ll post it if/when I find it again. Whatever the relevance to the battle it’s an interesting way to refer to the passage of time.

Great post, possibly because it concurs with my own opinion of Custer.

I wouldn't have liked the guy, but congeniality isn’t often a necessary quality when it comes to winning.

In judging his performance at the LBH, one also has to ask, could he have had any reasonable expectation of there being that many Indians present in that camp?

The problem before had always been catching up to Indians who didn’t want to be caught. Surprise was essential, hence his haste.

Good point. (Who knows, they might of had a some sort of clock, through trading or spoils)



What’s amazing to me is the vast distances the Troops traveled. Then logistics, terrain, weather…

"The Seventh was divided into factions, and this I believe brought about the massacre of five companies, and the siege against the others.
I believe that had Benteen acted quickly upon the orders, he may have been able to save at least some of Custer’s battalion.
Benteen had a hard on for Custer, and he took it to the grave."

That sums it up, 7mm.

Wasn’t there a lone survivor from the LBH battle?

There were over 300 U.S. Army survivors in the 7 companies commanded by Major Reno but in actuality commanded by Capt. Benteen. They set up a defensive position and held it until the Indians abandoned the battlefield and headed for the hills.

There is reason to believe a soldier named Frank Finkel or Finkle with General Custer at last stand hill survived when his horse bolted and took off with him. He tells a fairly credible story and surfaced many years later. I think he died around 1930 in Washington state.

Reno didn't have command of 7 companies when he went dow on the Little Bighorn. He had 3 companies, Benteen had 3 companies with him and 1 company was left with the pack train. Custer had 5 companies with him. At the Reno/Benteen site, there would have been 7 companies combined at that point. Frank Finkle has been debunked. He and many others claimed escaping, but there is no proof.

In our research and discovery of previously unknown circumstances, we did find an account of a local kid that grew up on Reno Creek in the 1930's and claimed he had found the remains of 2 soldiers in a rock crevice 7 miles east of the battlefield. Our research is still incomplete, but we have discovered an eyewitness account from Custer's scouts that actually saw 2 Soldiers back near the Lone Teepee site and surrounded by 5 Sioux warriors. It is in the book by Walter Mason Camp "Custer 1876" This isn't rumor as so many stories are and many show up in discussions like this.

We have found indications of a possible skirmish 6 1/2 miles east of the battlefield that will support this as a real incident. Where and what we have done is well recorded and the hoops you have to jump through is more than a single person can take on. There is more information we have that doesn't permit recalling much of it here as there is so much and the people and technical equipment we have used there is beyond even what they used in the battlefield archaeology in the 1980's.

Outside resources have been studied extensively and most is 3rd, 4th and even 50th repeat of the same material with little real historical connection. Custer may be the most written about person in American History nest to Lincoln and finding real documented accounts are scarce. We have been able to weed them out, as we have been pursuing this for more than 40 years.

Here is the account by the Indian scout in "Custer 1876" by Walter Mason Camp. He interviewed every survivor of the battle that he could locate, both Indians and soldiers to find out the most he could on the battle. This supports our research into the possibility of the 2 soldiers seen in the rock crevice in the 1930's. My guess is this is the first time anyone here has even heard of such a finding...

Not arguing about it...just curious.


When you say Finkle was debunked, what do you mean?


As far as other claiming to have escaped....would there not have been records of the soldiers being in each company?

Finkle was not a survivor, he tried to claim he was someone similarly registered in the 7th Cavalry. Records in those days were not totally reliable, as many of the soldiers during the Indian wars were escaping nefarious lifestyles and other bad backgrounds. When you have hundreds of people killed on the frontier, evidently you don’t take roll and record the survivors and subtract the missing…

I read Custer sent a scout back and he was the only survivor

There is an interesting marker on the Rosebud Creek road maybe 10 miles south of the 94 for a body found there. This is not the road down to Colstrip but east of there, it’ll take you down to Ashland.
I wish I’d taken a picture of it but it implies it was a soldiers remains found on the prairie there. I believe it was found long enough after the battle that uniform or other identifications were gone.

Could it have been a combatant of the fight, maybe a messenger sent back before the fight? How would one know. As Shrap illustrates there could have been others but how would one establish if they were actually with Custers detachment or part of the others? Great puzzle for sure.
It seems very plausible that given the number of Custers overall force, when crap hit the fan some may have paniced and headed for the hills so to speak.

Being a conquered people and totally at the mercy of the victors within a year of this battle I think the natives were very guarded in answering any questions or making comments of that final battle. Sad that it was that way but nobody gave two shakes about posterity at that point, particularly the Indians.

Osky

I didn't know the records were so spotty.


Makes sense though. No background checks.

The Nathan Short marker?

Yes sir, I knew there weren't 7 companies until Reno, Benteen, and the pack train came in and combined, at which time from all accounts Capt. Benteen was in charge of organizing the defense even though Reno was the ranking officer present and nominally in command.

As to Finkle, Would it maybe be better to classify his account as unconfirmed rather than debunked? Records are pretty darn iffy for some of the troops and some of the immigrants used Americanized names.

I've been to the field 4 or 5 times.

I read somewhere that if Custer had actually had all the folks who claimed to be “lone survivors” , he’d have outnumbered the Indians!😀
IIRC from “40 Miles A Day On Beans And Hay”, company first sergeants kept roles of unit personnel. Since all the first sergeants of Custer’s battalion were killed, the records were lost too.
Reon

Years ago I read an article about Custer done by a research person pertaining to Custer's psyche. It was discovered that a short while before the battle that the Department of the Army had authorized Custer to equip his men with repeating type lever action rifles but he was such a sticker for old army protocol that he decided to stay with the 1873 Springfield in 45/70 caliber. Research showed that some of the rifles recovered were found with live ammo shoved partly into the chamber but could not be fully chambered because of black powder fouling!

Did Custer shoot hisself or did the injuns kill him??

Q got him with a space laser refracted off a chemtrail.