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Post by Dietmar on Mar 19, 2006 15:44:03 GMT -6
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Post by George Armstrong Custer on Mar 21, 2006 6:16:27 GMT -6
Thanks for the interesting links, Dietmar! I was particularly interested in Spotted Wolf and his son White Elk's Little Big Horn souvenirs - 'matching white-handled pistols.' The only individual known to have carried such weapons, of course, was Custer himself. If the Cheyenne story is correct, then, these must be Custer's guns which were 'secreted away.'
What I'd be very interested to learn is this: When was the account of Spotted Wolf and White Elk having captured such unique weapons first recorded? If it was before Godfrey's 1896 letter detailing the guns carried by Custer was made public (firstly by Graham in 1953, as far as I'm aware), then the Cheyenne account gains hugely in credibility. One of those who captured the guns, Spotted Wolf, died in 1896, the year Godfrey wrote his account, but half a century before it was published. If the Indian participants had no way of knowing that Custer had carried such pistols before they reported the capture of an identical pair at LBH (and, indeed, the account reproduced below makes no mention of Custer in relation to the guns), then I think we must give serious weight to the possibility that Custer's guns remain 'secreted away' to this day - and how much greater 'medicine' will have been imparted to these battle trophies after the Cheyenne realised, post-1953, that these must be Custer's guns? Speculation, I know, but anyone have any thoughts on this?
Ciao,
GAC
RELEVANT TEXT FROM DIETMAR'S LINK:
"Eight days later, on June 25, 1876, General Custer and the U.S. 7th Cavalry attacked Indian villages camped along the Little Bighorn River. Spotted Wolf and his sons, now including his adopted Ute son, Yellow Nose, made their famed "brave runs" in front of the cavalry without being hit. The Spotted Wolf men fought with suicidal intensity to destroy the invaders on Last Stand Hill. Historians and Indian eyewitnesses would later recount their brave deeds in books and paintings.
After the Bighorn fight, both Spotted Wolf and his son White Elk came away with interesting, white-handled pistols and Yellow Nose captured the 7th Cavalry Guidon. On the day following the battle, the Northern Cheyenne held a special honoring ceremony in which Spotted Wolf was made a War Chief. Still dusty and covered with blood, he stood to receive this honor, although one of his eyes had been shot out by a soldier's bullet at point blank range.
The matching, white-handled pistols were secreted away and after the tribe returned to live on their ancestral lands along the Rosebud and Tongue Rivers in southeastern Montana, Chief Spotted Wolf went to Washington to meet with President Garfield. He then retired to a well deserved obscurity and died in 1896, but not before he had taught his youngest son, Patrick, born in 1888, all that he knew about horsemanship."
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Post by Dietmar on Mar 21, 2006 6:26:42 GMT -6
GAC,
according to Father Peter Powell White Elk told George Bird Grinnell about the captured six-shooters on August 27, 1909.
Dietmar
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