Lieutenant William W. Cook is remembered as the man who scribbled George Armstrong Custer’s final orders at the Little Bighorn, but the most remarkable part of his story began more than a decade earlier, when he crossed the border into Canada to fight against the United States. Cook was a Canadian by birth, and his first military allegiance was to the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish American veterans who, in the aftermath of the Civil War, plotted to seize Canadian territory and use it as leverage to force Great Britain to grant Ireland its independence. In 1866, the Fenians launched a series of raids across the border into Canada.
Cook, then about twenty years old, joined them as a private and fought at the Battle of Ridgeway, where the raiders won a temporary victory over Canadian militia. The success was short-lived. The raids collapsed under political pressure, and the United States government moved to stop the Fenians. The army disbanded and retreated across the border.
Cook chose not to return home. He stayed in the United States and eventually enlisted in the US Army. The man who would become a decorated officer in the Seventh Cavalry began his military career as an invader of America’s northern neighbor. His loyalty to the United States was not rooted in patriotism but in a taste for adventure and military life itself.
His service would earn that loyalty later. If the raids had succeeded, or if he had gone back to Canada, the famous last message from the Little Bighorn would never have borne his name. Cook’s most recognizable feature was his extraordinary side whiskers, known in the day as Dundrearies or Piccadilly weepers. They were long, flowing, and impossible to miss, a defining trait mentioned by nearly every contemporary who described him.
The whiskers were not vanity. They were a promise. Cook was engaged to a woman named Jean Corban back in Canada, and according to family tradition, she adored his whiskers and made him swear he would not cut them until they were reunited and married. He kept that promise through the Civil War and through a decade of frontier service, his whiskers growing ever longer as a visible symbol of his devotion and his hopes for a life beyond the army.
Cook died on Last Stand Hill. When the burial party reached the field, his body was identified primarily by his whiskers. A lock of hair from them was cut and sent to his family in Canada, a common Victorian practice for mourning jewelry. That lock survives to this day, preserved in a museum in his hometown of Mount Pleasant, Ontario.
A promise of a peaceful future was erased on a Montana hillside, and the man with the most famous whiskers in the Seventh Cavalry kept his word to the end. Miles Keogh carried a secret of a different kind. Before coming to America to fight in the Civil War, he had been a soldier of fortune in the Papal States, fighting in 1860 to defend the Vatican against Giuseppe Garibaldi’s forces. Pope Pius IX awarded him two of the highest papal military honors, including the Pro Petri Sede medal.
Keogh cherished the medal, mounted it, and wore it on a chain around his neck under his uniform for the rest of his life. When his body was found at the Little Bighorn, he was one of the few soldiers who had not been mutilated. This was a sign of respect often granted to an enemy who had fought with exceptional bravery. The exact reason is unknown, but many contemporaries and historians believe the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors saw the papal medal around his neck and recognized it as a sacred object, a powerful token marking him as a man in communion with the great spirit.
They left the medal on his body. A small emblem from a war on another continent, sixteen years earlier, likely played the final crucial role in ensuring he was treated with honor by his enemies. The legend that Comanche was the only survivor of the Little Bighorn is a simplification, but the truly unknown secret is why that specific horse became so famous. 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.
But Comanche was not Keogh’s primary mount. For most of his career, Keogh rode a renowned favorite horse named Patty through the Civil War and many Indian campaigns. Patty had gone lame and was left behind at the fort during the Little Bighorn campaign. Comanche was the backup horse.
The most famous symbol of survival from Custer’s last stand became famous by a twist of fate. Thomas Ward Custer led a life of incredible audacity, but his true secret lies in what happened to his body after his death. Thomas was the first US soldier to receive two Medals of Honor, both for capturing Confederate battle flags during the Civil War. The Lakota and Cheyenne warriors held a special enmity for him, and after the battle, what they did to his corpse went beyond the already brutal norms of plains warfare.
A specific account comes from the Lakota warrior Little Knife. He stated that a Cheyenne woman, Moving Robe Woman, also known as Mary Crawler, sought out Thomas Custer’s body to avenge her brother’s death. Using an awl from her decorative pouch, she punctured his eardrums so that he might hear better in the afterlife, a sarcastic spiritual punishment for a man who, in the native view, had not listened to their pleas and had aggressively pursued them in previous campaigns. His head was flayed to the point of being unrecognizable, the skin of his face and head removed in a single piece.
The warriors knew of his two Medals of Honor and his reputation. By destroying his face so completely, 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 confirm which body was his was a small tattoo on the inside of one arm bearing his initials. Thomas Custer was not just another soldier.
He was his brother’s most trusted and aggressive lieutenant, perceived as a ruthless extension of Custer’s will. What was done to his body was a targeted ritual meant to punish his soul and serve as a dark form of justice for a man they considered deaf to their plight. Major Marcus 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, an obscure end for a man many blamed for Custer’s defeat.
For decades, his son Robert and a few supporters quietly campaigned to clear his name, arguing he had been made a scapegoat and that his actions on the hilltop 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, 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 had spent his life haunted by Custer’s shadow was laid to rest on the very ground that defined his legacy, a quiet admission by the institution that had cast him out. Captain Frederick Benteen carried a private tragedy for over two decades.
He married Katherine Kate Norman Benteen in 1862, and by all accounts it was a loving marriage. In October 1866, while stationed at Fort Dodge, Kansas, she died suddenly. The official cause was typhoid pneumonia, but the circumstances were highly suspicious. The widespread belief among officers and their wives was that Kate had taken poison, driven to it by Benteen’s harsh treatment and neglect.
Benteen was devastated. He wrote 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, he married Kate’s cousin Jeanie, a practical move to care for his motherless son that only fueled further gossip.
This personal catastrophe shaped the famously acidic and 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 a series of scathing anonymous letters from a source calling himself “A Spotter.
” The letters viciously attacked Custer’s military competence and personal character. Historians and biographers have overwhelmingly concluded the author was Benteen, based on insider knowledge of the Seventh Cavalry’s movements and personalities, the specific grievances raised, and a sarcastic writing style matching his known correspondence. His 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 of the Seventh Cavalry.