The man who would one day write George Armstrong Custer’s final orders at the Little Bighorn began his military career fighting against the United States. Lieutenant William W. Cook was Canadian, and he first crossed into American affairs not as a soldier for the republic, but as an invader of its northern neighbor. In 1866, at roughly twenty years old, Cook joined the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish-American Civil War veterans who launched raids into British North America, hoping to seize Canadian territory and use it as leverage to force Great Britain to grant independence to Ireland.
Cook fought as a private in the Battle of Ridgeway, where the Fenians briefly defeated Canadian militia before the entire scheme collapsed under political pressure and American intervention. The Fenian forces disbanded and retreated, but Cook chose to remain in the United States. He eventually enlisted in the regular army, and his loyalty was earned through years of service rather than born of any original patriotism. Had the Fenian raids succeeded, or had Cook returned to Canada, the famous last message from the Little Bighorn would never have carried his name.
Cook is remembered as the tall, mutton-chopped adjutant who scribbled Custer’s final orders on that Montana hillside. His most recognizable feature, however, was not his height or his rank but his extraordinary flowing side whiskers, known in the day as Dundrearies or Piccadilly weepers. They were so long and prominent that contemporaries rarely mentioned him without noting them. The secret of those whiskers was not vanity.
He was engaged to a woman named Jean Corban, who lived in his native Canada, and according to family tradition, she adored his whiskers and made him promise not to cut them until they were reunited and married. Cook kept that promise through the Civil War and through a decade of frontier service, his whiskers lengthening as a visible symbol of his devotion and his hope for a future beyond the army. He died on Last Stand Hill, and when the burial party found his body days later, he was identified primarily by those whiskers, as he had no other distinguishing wounds. A lock of his hair was cut and sent back to his family in Canada, a common Victorian practice used to create mourning jewelry from the hair of the deceased.
That lock of hair, a relic of a promise he never got to keep, is preserved to this day in a museum in his hometown of Mount Pleasant, Ontario. The man history remembers as the bearer of Custer’s last message carried a private token of love that survived his death on a Montana hillside. Another officer carried a token of an even older war. Before coming to America, Miles Keogh had served as 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 the Pro Petri Sede medal and the Medaglia di Benemerenza, two of the highest papal military honors. Keogh cherished these medals so deeply that he had the Pro Petri Sede medal mounted and wore it on a chain around his neck, hidden under his uniform, for the rest of his life. When his body was found on the Little Bighorn battlefield in 1876, he was one of the few soldiers not mutilated by the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. In the brutal warfare of the plains, this was a sign of respect often granted to a foe who had fought with exceptional bravery.
While the exact reason is unknown, many contemporaries and historians believe the warriors saw the papal medal around his neck and recognized it as a sacred or medicine object, a powerful totem marking him as a man protected by a great spirit. They left the medal on his body. A small token from a war fought on another continent sixteen years earlier had likely played the final crucial role in ensuring his body was treated with honor by his enemies. The story of Comanche, the famous cavalry horse, also involves a stroke of fate.
It is often said that Comanche was the only survivor of the Little Bighorn, but that is a simplification. Several cavalry horses were captured by the warriors. 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. What is less known is that Comanche was not 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 his secondary, less famous horse. Paddy had gone lame and was left behind at the fort during the Little Bighorn campaign. The most famous horse in American military history, the sole symbol of survival from Custer’s Last Stand, was essentially the backup horse.
No officer at the Little Bighorn was more hated by his enemies than Captain Thomas Ward Custer. Thomas was George Armstrong Custer’s younger brother and the first U. S. soldier ever awarded two Medals of Honor, both for capturing Confederate battle flags during the Civil War, a feat of almost unimaginable bravery.
But his courage, celebrated by the army, was seen as brutal arrogance by the plains tribes. He had fought fiercely in earlier campaigns, and the warriors viewed him as the little Custer, a ruthless and effective extension of his brother’s will. His death was followed by a uniquely severe act of ritualistic desecration. According to a specific credible account from the Lakota warrior Little Knife, a Cheyenne woman named Moving Robe Woman, also known as Mary Crawler, sought out Tom Custer’s body.
Fighting to avenge her brother’s death, she took a sewing awl from her decorative pouch and 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. Most soldiers were scalped, but Tom Custer’s head was flayed until it was unrecognizable. The skin of his head and face was removed in a single piece, almost like a mask.
It is believed the warriors knew of his two Medals of Honor and his reputation, and by destroying his face so utterly, they were not simply taking a trophy. They were erasing his identity and denying him recognition in the afterlife. The mutilation was so extensive that the burial detail could only confirm his identity by a small personal tattoo, his initials T. W.
W. C. , inked on the inside of one arm. That small intimate marking became the primary way his body was identified.
The fate of Thomas Custer was not random battlefield violence. It was a targeted ritualistic act meant to punish his soul, erase his identity, and serve as poetic justice for a man his enemies considered deaf to their suffering. Major Marcus Reno’s story did not end on the battlefield either, but in a long, cold aftermath. 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, D. C. cemetery, an obscure end for a man many in the army and the public blamed for Custer’s defeat. For decades, Reno’s son Robert and a few supporters quietly campaigned to clear his father’s name, arguing that Reno had been a scapegoat and that his 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 done in absolute secrecy. Reno’s remains were disinterred from the D.
C. cemetery without public notice. On September 9, 1934, Marcus Reno was reburied at the Custer Battlefield National Cemetery, now Custer National Cemetery, in a small, discreet ceremony. The man vilified in life was, decades after his death, covertly dug up and given a place of honor among the very men he was accused of failing, a quiet admission by the institution that had cast him out.
Captain Frederick Benteen carried a private burden that shaped his entire personality. In 1862, he married Katherine Kate Norman Benteen, and by all accounts the marriage was loving. They had a son. In October 1866, while Benteen was stationed at Fort Dodge, Kansas, Kate died suddenly.
The official cause of death was listed as typhoid pneumonia, but the circumstances were highly suspicious and fueled immediate rumors. The open secret among officers and their wives was that Kate did not die naturally. The widespread belief was that she had committed suicide by taking poison, and that Benteen’s own harsh treatment and neglect had driven her to it. Benteen was devastated, writing to his father that her death was a thunderclap from a cloudless sky and that life had lost its chief charm for him.
He never publicly addressed the rumors. Just over a year later, Benteen married Kate’s cousin Jeanie. While this may have been a practical move to care for his motherless son, it fueled further gossip among his peers, who saw it as confirmation of callousness or an attempt to cover up a scandal. This private grief and public shame likely shaped the resentful, uncooperative officer who hesitated so fatally when he received Custer’s desperate plea for help at the Little Bighorn.
It may also have driven his most damaging act against Custer’s memory. In 1878, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat published a series of scathing anonymous letters from a source calling himself “a Stan Patter,” or one who thirsts for knowledge. These letters viciously attacked Custer’s military competence and, most damningly, his personal character.
Historians and biographers have extensively analyzed the letters and overwhelmingly concluded that the author was Benteen. The evidence is compelling. The author possessed insider knowledge of the Seventh Cavalry’s movements, personalities, and specific incidents, knowledge only a high-ranking officer like Benteen would have. The vitriolic tone, the specific grievances, and the unique sarcastic writing style match Benteen’s known correspondence perfectly.
Benteen’s secret was not a single act, but a lifelong burden of grief and silent accusation that made him one of the most complex and tragic figures in the Seventh Cavalry. The battle on the Little Bighorn took the lives of some of the army’s most colorful officers and left the survivors, and the dead, marked by secrets that only emerged long after the last shots were fired.