George Armstrong Custer
United States Army officer and cavalry commander
1839 CE to 1876 CE
George Armstrong Custer (December 5, 1839 – June 25, 1876) was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars.
Raised in Michigan and Ohio, Custer is admitted to West Point in 1858, where he graduates last in his class.
However, with the outbreak of the Civil War, all potential officers are needed, and Custer is called to serve with the Union Army.
Custer develops a strong reputation during the Civil War.
He fights in the first major engagement, the First Battle of Bull Run.
His association with several important officers helps his career, as does his success as a highly effective cavalry commander.
Custer is eventually promoted to the temporary rank (brevet) of major general.
(At war's end, he reverts to his permanent rank of captain.)
At the conclusion of the Appomattox Campaign, in which he and his troops play a decisive role, Custer is on hand at General Robert E. Lee's surrender.
After the Civil War, Custer is dispatched to the west to fight in the Indian Wars.
His disastrous final battle overshadows his prior achievements.
Custer and all the men with him are killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, fighting against a coalition of Native American tribes in a battle that has come to be popularly known in American history as "Custer's Last Stand".
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Lieutenant Kidder was to deliver dispatches to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer from General William Sherman, but his party had been attacked by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne.
Custer and a search party will find the bodies of Kidder's patrol days later.
Custer had been appointed lieutenant colonel of the newly created U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment, headquartered at Fort Riley, Kansas
As a result of a plea by his patron General Philip Sheridan, Custer has also been appointed brevet major general.
He takes part in Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's expedition against the Cheyenne in 1867.
General George A. Custer and his troops attack Black Kettle's band of Cheyenne and Arapahos in Indian Territory at the Battle of Washita River on November 27, 1868.
Black Kettle has continued to desire peace and had not join in the second raid or in the plan to go north to the Powder River country.
He had left the large camp and returned with eighty lodges of his tribesmen to the Arkansas River, where he had intended to seek peace with the U.S.
Custer had chosen Osage scouts in his campaign because of their scouting expertise, excellent terrain knowledge, and military prowess.
Although his band is camped on a defined reservation, complying with the government's orders, some of its members had been linked to raiding into Kansas by bands operating out of the Indian Territory.
Custer reports killing one hundred and three warriors; estimates by the Cheyenne of their casualties are substantially lower (eleven warriors plus nineteen women and children); some women and children are also killed, and U.S. troops take fifty-three women and children prisoner.
Custer has his men shoot most of the eight hundred and seventy-five Indian ponies they had captured.
There are conflicting claims as to whether the band was hostile or friendly.
Historians believe that Chief Black Kettle, head of the band, was not part of the war party within the Plains tribes, but, he does not command absolute authority over members of his band and the European Americans do not understand this.
When younger members of the band had taken part in raiding parties, European Americans blamed the entire band for the incidents and casualties.
The Battle of Washita River is regarded as the first substantial U.S. victory in the Southern Plains War, and it helps force a significant portion of the Southern Cheyennes onto a U.S.-assigned reservation.
Custer had been court-martialed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, following the Hancock campaign, for being AWOL, after having abandoned his post to see his wife.
He was suspended from duty for one yea, but at the request of Major General Philip Sheridan, who wanted Custer for his planned winter campaign against the Cheyenne, Custer had been allowed to return to duty in 1868, before his term of suspension had expired.
Under Sheridan's orders, Custer had taken part in establishing Camp Supply in Indian Territory in early November 1868 as a supply base for the winter campaign.
The Northern Pacific puts down one hundred and sixty-four miles (two hundred and sixty-four square kilometers) of main line across North Dakota in 1872, with an additional forty-five miles (seventy-two kilometers) in Washington.
On November 1, General George Washington Cass become the third president of the company.
Cass had been a vice-president and director of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and will lead the Northern Pacific through some of its most difficult times.
Attacks on survey parties and construction crews building in Native American homelands in the region of present North Dakota have become so prevalent that the company has appealed for Army protection from President Grant.
In 1872 also, the Northern Pacific has opens colonization offices in Europe, seeking to attract settlers to the sparsely populated and undeveloped region it served.
Survey parties accompanied by federal troops, railroad construction, permanent settlement and development, along with the discovery of gold in nearby South Dakota, will all serve as a backdrop leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer in 1876.
A violent frontier town characteristic of the American Old West, it is the location of the original Boot Hill.
Several notable figures of the Old West live in Hays City at points, including George Custer and his wife Elizabeth, Calamity Jane, and Wild Bill Hickok, who had served a brief term as sheriff in 1869.
Hays City had become the county seat of Ellis County in 1870.
By 1872, many of the rougher elements of the populace had left, mainly for Dodge City, and Hays City had become more civilized.
A party from St. Louis, Missouri, led by one William Webb, had selected three sections of land for colonization near Fort Hays in late 1866, anticipating the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railway.
In June 1867, to better serve the railroad, the U.S. Army had relocated Fort Hays to a site near where the railroad was to cross Big Creek, a tributary of the Smoky Hill River.
Seeing a business opportunity, Buffalo Bill Cody and railroad contractor William Rose had founded the settlement of Rome, Kansas near the fort's new location.
Within a month, the population of Rome had grown to over two thousand.
Webb, meanwhile, had established the Big Creek Land Company, then surveyed and platted a town site, which he had named Hays City after the fort, roughly one mile east of Rome.
The railroad had reached Hays City soon thereafter and constructed a depot there.
The railroad's arrival, combined with a cholera epidemic that hit Rome in the late summer of 1867, had driven Rome businesses and residents to relocate to Hays City.
Within a year, Rome had been completely abandoned.
As the western terminus of the railway, Hays City had grown rapidly, serving as the supply point for territories to the west and southwest.
Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer is sent to the Dakota Territory to protect a railroad survey party against the Lakota.
On August 4, 1873, near the Tongue River, Custer and the 7th U.S. Cavalry clash for the first time with the Lakota.
One man on each side is killed.
"The Rees and Mandans should be protected same as white settlers", read the order from General Phil Sheridan.
Custer fails and the Lakota kill five Arikara and one Mandan.
Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer leads a force of one thousand men into the Black Hills to investigate reports that the area contains gold, even though the land is owned by the Sioux.
They find small amounts of gold in present day Custer, South Dakota, and look for better paying locations.
Custer’s announcement triggers the Black Hills Gold Rush.
Despite the advances of the Northern Pacific, the year of 1874 had found the company moribund.
Cass resigns to become receiver of the company, and Charles Barstow Wright becomes the fourth president of the company.
Frederick Billings, the namesake of Billings, Montana, formulates a reorganization plan which is put into effect.
This same year, ...
...Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer is assigned to Fort Rice, Dakota Territory, and charged with protecting the railroad survey and construction crews.
The Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota nation.
The rapid influx of prospectors to the region, a part of the Powder River territory not ceded by the Native Americans to the United States, and the attendant friction causes war to begin in earnest in 1876, the year that a combined force of Northern Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse annihilate Colonel George Custer and most of the US Seventh Cavalry.