Lieutenant William W. Cook is remembered for scribbling George Armstrong Custer’s final orders at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But the man who wrote the last message of the most famous defeat in American military history began his career fighting against the United States, not for it. Cook was Canadian by birth, and he first took up arms as part of an audacious Irish nationalist scheme to invade his own homeland from American soil.
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a group of Irish-American veterans formed the Fenian Brotherhood. Their plan was to seize territory in Canada, then British North America, and use it as leverage to force Great Britain to grant independence to Ireland. In 1866, the Fenians launched a series of raids across the border. Cook, then about twenty years old, crossed into Canada and joined the Fenian forces as a private.
He fought at the Battle of Ridgeway, where the Fenians scored a temporary victory over Canadian militia units before the raid collapsed under political pressure and the intervention of the US government. The Fenian army disbanded and retreated back across the border, but Cook chose not to return to his Canadian home. He stayed in the United States. His military career, which would end with him dying for the American flag on a Montana hillside, began with him invading America’s northern neighbor.
The irony was total. Cook’s primary drive was clearly adventure and military life itself, not loyalty to any particular flag. His allegiance to the United States was earned through service. Had the Fenian raids succeeded, or had Cook simply returned to Canada, the famous last message from the Little Bighorn would never have borne his name.
Cook’s most recognizable feature was not his courage but his extraordinary flowing side whiskers, known in the era as Dundrearies or Piccadilly weepers. They were so long and prominent that contemporaries remarked on them constantly. But they were not a vanity. They were a promise.
Cook was engaged to a woman named Jean Corban, who lived in his native Canada. According to family tradition, Jean adored his whiskers and made him promise he would never cut them until they were reunited and married. He kept that promise through the Civil War and through a decade of service on the Western frontier, the whiskers growing ever longer as a symbol of his devotion and his hope for a future beyond the army. Cook died on Last Stand Hill.
When the burial party arrived days later, his body was identified primarily by those famous whiskers, as he had no other distinguishing wounds. A lock of his hair, undoubtedly from the whiskers, was cut off and sent back to his family in Canada, following the Victorian practice of creating mourning keepsakes from the hair of the deceased. That lock of hair still exists today, preserved in a museum in his hometown of Mount Pleasant, Ontario. The promise he never got to keep was buried with him on Last Stand Hill.
Captain Miles Keogh carried a different secret into the battle, one that likely determined how his body was treated after death. Before coming to America to fight in the Civil War, Keogh had been a soldier of fortune in the Papal States, fighting to defend the Vatican against Giuseppe Garibaldi’s forces in 1860. Pope Pius IX awarded him two of the highest papal military honors, and Keogh cherished the medals. He had one mounted and wore it on a chain around his neck under his uniform for the rest of his life.
When his body was found on the battlefield in 1876, Keogh was one of the few soldiers not mutilated by the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. This was a sign of respect often granted to a foe who had fought with exceptional bravery. The exact reason remains unknown, but many contemporaries and historians believe the warriors saw the papal medal around his neck and recognized it as a powerful sacred object, a medicine token marking him as a man protected by or in communion with the great spirit. They left the medal on his body.
A small token from a war on another continent sixteen years earlier had likely played the final crucial role in ensuring his enemies honored him in death. It connected the battlefields of Italy to the plains of Montana through the life of one man. The most famous horse in American military history came to fame through a similar twist of fate. Comanche is often called the only survivor of the Little Bighorn, but that is a simplification.
Comanche was found badly wounded two days after the battle, nursed back to health, and officially retired with orders that he never be ridden again. Yet Comanche was not even Keogh’s primary horse for most of his career. Keogh had a renowned favorite mount named Paddy, which he rode throughout the Civil War and many Indian campaigns. Comanche was the secondary, less famous horse.
Paddy had gone lame and was left behind at the fort during the Little Bighorn campaign. The sole equine symbol of Custer’s Last Stand was essentially the backup horse, thrust into history by chance. Captain Thomas Ward Custer, George Custer’s younger brother, led a life of audacity that ended in a uniquely grim fate. He was the first US soldier to be awarded two Medals of Honor, both for capturing Confederate battle flags during the Civil War, a feat of almost unimaginable bravery.
But the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors held a special enmity for him, and the mutilation of his corpse was targeted and ritualistic, far beyond the norm of plains warfare. According to an account from Lakota warrior Little Knife, a Cheyenne woman named Moving Robe Woman, also known as Mary Crawler, sought out Tom Custer’s body to avenge her brother’s death. Using an awl from her decorative pouch, she punctured his eardrums. Her reason, as told, was so that he might hear better in the afterlife, a deeply sarcastic spiritual punishment for a man who, in the native view, had not listened to their pleas and had been an aggressive pursuer in previous campaigns.
Most soldiers were scalped. Tom Custer’s head was flayed to the point of being unrecognizable, the skin removed in a single piece almost like a mask. The warriors knew of his two Medals of Honor and his reputation. By destroying his face so utterly, they were not just taking a trophy.
They were erasing his identity and denying him recognition in the afterlife. The only way the burial detail could identify his body was a small tattoo of his initials on the inside of one of his arms, a chilling intimate marking that survived the desecration. Not every secret of the Seventh Cavalry involves the battlefield itself. Major Marcus Reno’s story stretched decades beyond the Little Bighorn and ended in a clandestine act of rehabilitation.
Reno died in 1889 of cancer, following a court-martial and dismissal from the army for drunkenness and conduct unbecoming an officer. He was buried in an unmarked grave in a Washington, DC cemetery, a fittingly obscure end for a man many blamed for Custer’s defeat. For decades, Reno’s son Robert and a few supporters waged a quiet campaign to clear his father’s name. They argued Reno was a scapegoat whose actions on the hilltop, while not heroic, were a rational attempt to save his command from annihilation.
In 1934, the Army’s judge advocate general reviewed the case and concluded Reno had been unfairly treated. The army approved his reburial with full military honors at the Custer battlefield. To avoid public controversy and protests from Custer’s still powerful supporters, the exhumation and transfer were conducted in absolute secrecy. On September 9, 1934, Marcus Reno was reburied at the Custer Battlefield National Cemetery.
The ceremony was small and discreet. The man who spent his life haunted by Custer’s shadow was laid to rest forever on the very ground that defined his legacy, a quiet admission by the institution that had cast him out. Captain Frederick Benteen carried a more private agony. In October 1866, while stationed at Fort Dodge, Kansas, his wife Kate died suddenly.
The official cause was typhoid pneumonia, but rumors spread among officers’ wives that she had committed suicide by taking poison, driven to it by her husband’s harsh treatment and neglect. Benteen was devastated, writing to his father that her death was a thunderclap from a cloudless sky. Just over a year later he married Kate’s cousin, fueling further gossip. This private grief and shame shaped the acidic, cynical officer who hesitated so fatally when he received Custer’s desperate plea for help at the Little Bighorn.
Benteen was also likely the source of the most damning smear against Custer’s character. In 1878, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat published scathing anonymous letters from a source calling himself “A Spotter” that viciously attacked Custer’s military competence and personal character. Biographers have overwhelmingly concluded the author was Benteen, citing his insider knowledge of the regiment, his specific grievances, and his unique sarcastic writing style.
Benteen’s secret was not a single event but a lifelong burden of grief, guilt, and silent accusation that made him one of the most complex and tragic figures in the Seventh Cavalry.