George A. Custer: Last at West Point, Belknap Hearings, Little Bighorn

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George Armstrong Custer grew up in Ohio under a Jacksonian Democrat father who prized toughness, then compiled 726 demerits at West Point and graduated 34th of 34. The Civil War rescued his career: he rode into the Chickahominy to show George McClellan its depth, became a brigadier general at 23, designed a velvet and gold-lace uniform with a red necktie so his men could find him in the smoke, and led the Michigan Wolverines against J.E.B. Stuart on the East Cavalry Field at Gettysburg. Philip Sheridan bought the Appomattox surrender table and gave it to Custer's wife, Libbie.

Peacetime exposed the same traits. Custer hid a seized racehorse from Grant, nearly provoked a mutiny in Texas, was suspended for going absent to see his wife, and in 1876 testified on hearsay against Secretary of War William Belknap and the president's brother Orvil Grant, which got him arrested and nearly removed from the Sioux campaign. After the Washita attack and his 1874 Black Hills gold announcement, he turned down extra cavalry and Gatling guns, ignored his scouts, and split the 7th Cavalry on June 25, 1876. He and about 210 men with him were killed, and the legend that followed was built by Libbie Custer and an Anheuser-Busch painting.

• Custer had cropped his thinning hair and taken off his buckskin jacket in the heat before the battle.
• At the Washita in 1868 he ordered the killing of hundreds of Cheyenne ponies and took women and children captive.
• Cheyenne oral history says two women pushed sewing awls into his ears so he would hear better in the afterlife, for breaking his promise not to fight.
• The Army recovered only a handful of his bones a year later for reburial at West Point.
• The site was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991 after American Indian Movement protests.