|
Post by michigander1 on Aug 17, 2005 4:02:25 GMT -6
We must also ask ourselves if it worth to disturb the eternal sleep of a fallen soldier just to see if he had yellow or red hairs; and last but not least, maybe we even not had the true Custer at West Point. There is not a 100% sureness that the rest under the grave are Custer ones. We discussed this point.
|
|
|
Post by Diane Merkel on Aug 17, 2005 8:11:16 GMT -6
Troy --
Tom Custer is buried at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery (near Lawrence, Kansas) along with James Calhoun and George Yates. Kate Benteen, Frederick's daughter who died as a child, is there also.
One of our Australian members was at our conference in Rapid City. I told him that you live in Tasmania, and he would like to get in touch with you. Do you mind if I give him your e-mail address?
Diane
|
|
|
Post by markland on Aug 17, 2005 9:06:26 GMT -6
|
|
bhist
Full Member
Posts: 221
|
Post by bhist on Aug 17, 2005 9:26:44 GMT -6
We must also ask ourselves if it worth to disturb the eternal sleep of a fallen soldier just to see if he had yellow or red hairs; and last but not least, maybe we even not had the true Custer at West Point. There is not a 100% sureness that the rest under the grave are Custer ones. We discussed this point. I agree completely with you on this. It's amazing the number of people that have asked the National Park Service to open Custer's grave so they could determine the color of hair or for other bizarre reasons. The worst case involved the late W. Kent King. Don't know how many people visiting here are familiar with this man, but he wrote a series of self-published books (more like pamphlets) entitled "Tombstones for Bluecoats" which was a worthwhile study of where soldiers fell in relation to where their markers are today. King believed that the body taken back to West Point was not George, but TOM!! He kept pushing Neil Mangum, then Chief Historian at LBH, to open Custer's grave to see if the skull was intact or broken to smithereens. Neil told the guy to take a hike, in diplomatic terms -- the NPS is not responsible for the remains of whoever is buried at West Point and only the Custer family can open that grave. Believe me, they won't!! I personally believe Custer is still at LBH.
|
|
|
Post by Diane Merkel on Aug 17, 2005 16:31:52 GMT -6
Billy -- I forgot Smith -- thanks for the reminder. The photos are great.
When LBHA was at Fort Leavenworth during our 2003 conference, it was the first time the Benteen/Steves family had seen the gravestone of Kate. They had thought she was in an unmarked grave there.
All -- I'm slowly but surely finding as many gravesites of the 7th Cav as possible. Some people have sent me ones they've found in their areas. If you know of some that are not listed in our Seventh Cavalry section, please let me know. Photos will be appreciated, and you will get a photo credit and your name listed under "Sources" on the main 7th Cav page. (I know that's not a big deal, but it's all I can do.)
|
|
|
Post by michigander1 on Aug 17, 2005 17:39:26 GMT -6
Bob: your last statement: I agree totally with you. And hope it's so. I had always thought the place of Custer is with his men on the hill. Diane: I will search and hope to find some.
|
|
|
Post by El Crab on Aug 17, 2005 22:57:10 GMT -6
I would bet my life that the majority of Custer's remains are on Last Stand Hill, and not at West Point. Whomever's bones are at West Point, they are not anyone near a full skeleton.
|
|
|
Post by crzhrs on Aug 18, 2005 16:26:38 GMT -6
I would agree with Crab.
The 1877 "reburial" led by Capt. Sheridan encountered problems determining which body was Custer's. Sheridan's men found wind and rain had eroded many of the graves and the markers had been scattered. The remains had been more or less skeletonized. The soldiers exhumed 10 skeletons including one they believed was Custer. One member of the recovery team stated: "It was a disconcerting discovery to find that even the general could not be satisfactorily identified."
Also in those days it was more important to memorialize the dead, rather than worry about the corpse. Their attitude was "to go for for a skull, maybe some ribs, an arm or a leg, and that was enough."
|
|
|
Post by Melani on Dec 29, 2005 14:11:57 GMT -6
Very likely, given the 1877 condition of the bodies, there are bits and pieces of all the officers both at LBH and wherever they were buried. So they are all still with their men, as well as with their families.
|
|
|
Post by godagesil on Apr 24, 2019 15:09:16 GMT -6
As a student of history for over 50 years and of the LBH in particular I feel that people need to pull the rose colored glasses from their eyes and view things through the prism of reality.
Fact: The Indians returning from Canada ten years after the battle were afraid of retaliation. Those like the Cheyenne who were available for interview not long after the battle told interviewers what they wanted to hear. This has been established by many recanting their earlier accounts years later.
Fact: the corpses were reported as having blackened due to decay and rot after several days in the sun. Nearly ALL corpses had been stripped. Most had been badly mutilated by the Indian women as was their custom. Archaeological finds at nearly all excavated markers showed fragments of fractured craniums due to blunt force trauma, which jibes with eye witness accounts that most bodies had crushes skulls or were decapitated which correlates with Indian paintings of the battle and its aftermath.
Fact: The Indians had no idea who they were fighting, indeed they though it was the force under Gen. Crook who they had recently fought on the upper Rosebud.
Fact: This was the 19th Century and Victorian sentiments still ruled. Officers were gentlemen and "other ranks" were no better than the horses they rode in the eyes of the officers. Hence there was no qualms about giving gory details about mutilations of the common troopers. Officers were another matter. I personally think that yes, they did try to identify officers because of their status, but I doubt very much that they had any more luck identifying officers than they did the average trooper. Imagine trying to ID someone who had had their head smash reducing it to a mashed puddle of skin and brain. Then imagine it being blackened and bloated and covered with flies. How long do you think you'd spend poking around in the reek and sickening slaughter? Ever been around a dead dog, multiply that by four, just for the larger body size and then by 200 by the number of corpses, and throw in another multiplier for the dead horses. While doing geological field work in Texas I once stumbled onto a isolated pasture hemmed in by trees where around a doze dead steers had been pulled and piled up. The head was nearly up to my shoulders and the smell and writhing mass of maggots was beyond description. Needless I did not stay around long. That kind of rank odor and decay can be tasted in your mouth when you breathe. It is no wonder that bodies only got a modest burial and a year later the reburials were still haphazard.
No one was going to report the true condition of Custer's body even if the could have identified, him. The bodies were tossed about during their stripping and I doubt the Squaws put them back the way they found them. They just laid the out and went to work with knives, clubs and even rocks. Now the way I understand it, the greater the enemy the greater the mutilation. The Indian did not want to face a tough whole enemy in the afterlife especially after he demonstrated what he could do in this life. This was amply demonstrated after the Fetterman Fight where the two civilians armed with Henry rifles were singled out for expecially brutal mutilation. They had their brains and eyes pulled and laid on the granite rocks from behind which they had fought. The number of frozen blood pools around their position testified to the toll they extracted from their killers.
So considering all these things, I don't think Custer was identified and if he was it was probably by facial hair. I have little doubt that he was mutilated just like most of his command. Osteological examinaton of bones on the battlefield and in exhumed bones indicate that dismemberment of feet, hands, heads, legs and arms was common on the battlefield. Cut marks on the bones tell the tail. The book They Fell With Custer by Scott et all details examination of many partial skeletons they found at select markers that had not been recovered during the many slipshod attempts to recover remains. Over the years many skeletons from both the Custer battlefield and the Reno Valley fight were found and moved to the National Cemetery where they were exhumed by Scott et al and examined by experts.
Truth be told we don't know if bones of Custer or other officers removed from the battlefield were actually them. During this period feelings of the loved ones trumped getting to the bottom of things and the remote and hostile environment precluded much in the way of scientific analysis for identification.
I've read accounts where remains were identified by initials cut in boots, or written in socks. Still other had the initials in the socks cut out precluding identification. Really? Why do you think the Indians would take the time to cut the names out of a sock? To add a bit of mystery or misery for the soldiers who found them? Seriously? Having been stripped it was probably impossible to know which corpse had been who, especially in the mutilated and dismembered state they were said to be in.
I'm a scientist by training and not much of a romantic. I have walked the Battlefield back in 1985 right after the first archaeological field season. I did it again in the 1990's and again in 2002. I can only imagine having to ride over the ground trying to locate the bodies spread over a few square miles. Smell might have helped but imagine the troopers detailed to do it. I imagine their hearts were not much in it especially when you realize that looking at the cadavers reminded them that they might end up in the same condition one day.
Identification was probably best guess, and by association. Color of horses might have aided in identification of the various companies, and officers might have been assumed to lie among tight clusters of men. Keogh was supposedly identified by his sideburns, recognizable amid the brains and gore of his stove in head no doubt.
Excuse me if I sound cynical, I'm just being realistic. The Indians had no idea who they were fighting and had no reason to spare anyone the treatment their religious beliefs demanded that they mete out.
|
|
|
Post by fred on Apr 25, 2019 1:15:28 GMT -6
I do not know if you noticed or not, but no one has posted on this thread for more than thirteen years. There is not a single person on the thread’s three pages who is active here any more—except Diane, and she owns the thing—and a couple of them are even dead. You claim to be a student of history, a scientist, a geologist, a cynic, not very romantic, and based on your comment about officers and “other ranks” something of a psychologist—maybe even a military man—clearly a realist, and someone who wears no Ray-Bans with a certain tint. In fact, so far, the only thing you have not revealed is the meaning of an indecipherable avatar.
If I read your post correctly, you believe the Indians all lied, the Victorian-bred whites all obfuscated, and none of the dead were identifiable because of putrefaction. If you add in that no movies were taken of the battle and therefore we have no idea what occurred—other than there were a lot of dead guys found on the high prairie—I wonder why you even bother being on this site: the anecdotal evidence is worthless, the physical evidence is useless, thereby rendering the archaeological evidence questionable (I thought I would throw that in there for those eschewing the Fox-Scott-Connor-Harmon work). It must be frustrating… a prime reason for a cynic to move on.
Thanks for showing up.
Best wishes, Fred. (I am not really fred… I just said that)
|
|
|
Post by montrose on Apr 25, 2019 10:44:46 GMT -6
I do not even know where to start. I guess we go with fact and opinion have different meanings.
I welcome new participants in the LBH discussion. But maybe you want to read your post, and understand that no one will take you seriously, based on your own words.
How about a reboot, introduce yourself, and tighten down your contributions here?
Very Respectfully,
William
ODA576
|
|
|
Post by tubman13 on May 1, 2019 7:45:08 GMT -6
godagesil,
I will go with two exceptions, to the above rant, Montrose's favorite participant, Capt. Keogh. He was not mutilated, his papal medal was in place, the wound in his leg matched the wound on his horse. Kellogg as I understand it, was un molested after death, probably due to his location, fairly far from primary action.
I am going to go back and give you a thumbs up for your post, because of some of your thoughts, even though it was blanket, maybe not by design. Oh, and by the way Trooper Thomas Tweed was found not far from Kellogg and his company was not near, his was Company L but was also easily recognized.
Fred, Tom(CRHRS) is still here, not dead, and growing good gardens in New England. I only gave 3 and we know of many more that were recognizable.
Regards, Tom
|
|
|
Post by noggy on May 3, 2019 12:21:08 GMT -6
I remember thinking the removal of names/initials from clothing was weird too. The Indians wouldn`t try to remove a piece of identification, and they probably didn`t know what these strange markings were. Most likely they saw the letters and names for what they were to them; strange drawings or markings or symbols they could cut out and for example sow into their own clothing. There are numerous pictures showing Native Americans who have some sort of "white man`s clothes" sown or in other ways added to their own traditional clothes, making very interesting hybrids.
All the best, Noggyhontas
|
|
|
Post by crzhrs on May 3, 2019 12:51:27 GMT -6
godagesil, Fred, Tom(CRHRS) is still here, not dead, and growing good gardens in New England. I only gave 3 and we know of many more that were recognizable. Regards, Tom Yes, I am still loitering around, not as much as in the past but check in every now and then. And also Yes, we are getting our gardens ready but it's been cool, damp, rainy for most of April and now into May. Custer's body was laying in the heat, sun, wind and other considerations like scavengers, insects, etc., not to mention any battle wounds. Just like every other soldier's body . . . I doubt Custer looked like he was sleeping as described by some, probably to protect Libbie, but also maybe the country. It was bad enough Custer was dead, but to have his remains described as one soldier said ". . . like a scene of sickening, ghastly horror . . ." would have been to much for the nation to bear. His two wounds, one to the chest and one to head could have been in any order. Possibly the chest wound then maybe another soldier shooting him in the head to keep from being captured and who knows what after. Or: Indians going around the battlefield and making sure all soldiers were dead. Then there is the Cheyenne story of women going around the battlefield, discovering Custer and recognizing him from their time on the reservation and puncturing his eardrums with sewing needles so he could hear better in the next world (the Cheyenne had warned him he would die if he fought the Cheyenne) and Custer didn't listen . . .or so the story goes.
|
|