On July 25th, 1866, under an act of Congress, four new Regiments of Cavalry were organized. The 7th through the 10th were to be stationed at various posts to restore order on the troubled frontiers. One of the Regiments, the 7th U.S. Cavalry, was assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas; its future duty was to protect the building of the Kansas Pacific Railroad against already menacing warlike Indian tribes. During August & September 1866, fort Riley was already a concentration of recruits, frontiersmen, fugitives, adventurers from the east, former Union soldiers with a few Rebels in disguise. The men were a rough looking lot, many of them Irish & German newly-immigrated from the "old country," all seeking a meal ticket and their fortune in the western expansion. Others, while awaiting only to be issued clothing, arms and a horse would desert at the first available opportunity.
November & December 1866, a casual flow of officers assigned to the 7th Cavalry was organized into a headquarters staff. All had served in the Civil War and could produce papers showing their services and combat records. As the officers reported, they were assigned quarters in one of the stone buildings on post. Officers take their quarters according to rank, and it was not uncommon that another officer, already established in quarters would have to vacate his quarters and give up his place to another who outranked him.. Among veteran officers this is so understood and accepted that no hard feelings or resentment occurred.
On the evening of November 3rd 1866. Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer arrived at Fort Riley reporting himself to Major Alfred Gibbs. Custer, a brevet major general and permanent captain, was appointed lieutenant colonel of the 7th Cavalry, and second in command to Colonel and brevet Major General Andrew Johnson Smith.
In April 1867, a meeting was held between the Army and a few chiefs of the Plains Indians. Due to a misunderstanding, when the Army moved their troops closer to the Indian encampment, the Indians feared an attack and they fled under the cover of night. Custer and the 7th Cavalry, given the task of tracking the Indians down, spent the entire summer in the attempt to find them. The only contact they made with the Indians were with small war parties, which constantly harassed the troops.
During this campaign, Custer later left his command in the field and travelled back to Fort Riley to visit his wife. Upon arrival there, Custer was placed under arrest for being Absent With Out Leave. On 15 September 1867, Custer was court-martialed and found guilty. He was sentenced to one year suspension from rank and pay. He went home to Monroe, Michigan where he waited out his suspension.
On 24 September 1868, Custer's court martial was remitted and he rejoined his troops on Bluff Creek (near present day Ashland, Kansas.). Almost immediately upon his arrival, the Indians attacked the camp. Custer and his troopers gave chase and followed the Indians' trail back to Medicine Lodge Creek, but found no Indians. Custer returned to his camp on Bluff Creek where, he and General Sheridan planned a Winter Campaign. Then heavy snows of winter would slow down the warriors, and their ponies would be weak and could not travel far. If the Indian villages were hard hit and their supplies destroyed, the Indians would have to return to the reservation or starve. They knew that during the winter months, the Indians would stay at one location which had good water and a source of firewood for heat; all they had to do was - to find it!
Sheridan's plan involved three columns: Colonel Andrew W. Evans with six troops of the 3rd Cavalry and two companies of the 37th Infantry were to travel down the South Canadian River. The second column consisted of seven troops of the 5th Cavalry under the command of Major Eugene A. Carr. They marched southeast from Fort Lyon, Colorado, and connected with Captain William H. Penrose and his column of five troops of cavalry. Then they scouted at Antelope Hills, along the North Fork of the Canadian River. The third column was to march from Fort Dodge under the command of General Sully and George A. Custer.
General Sheridan selected the 7th Cavalry, commanded by George Armstrong Custer, to take the lead. They were to move southward, and engage the Indians. This column was made up of eleven troops of the 7th Cavalry and five companies of the 3rd Infantry. Setting out in a snowstorm, Custer followed the tracks of a small Indian raiding party to a Cheyenne village on the Washita River. At dawn he ordered an attack. It was Chief Black Kettle's village, well within the boundaries of the Cheyenne reservation. Nevertheless, on 27 November 1868, nearly four years after the battle of Sand Creek, Custer's troops charged, and this time Black Kettle could not escape. In a subsequent battle of the Winter Campaign, the 3rd Cavalry under the command of Colonel Andrew W. Evans, struck another Comanche village at Soldiers Spring on Christmas Day. The Winter Campaign had been waged successfully against the Cheyenne in the Oklahoma Territory. The scattered remnants of the Cheyenne were decisively defeated.
Afterwards, most of the Cheyenes, Comanches and other tribes still on the plains returned to the agencies. In March 1869, the Comanche-Kiowa agency was relocated to Fort Sill, a new fort constructed in the Indian Plains Territory, and the Cheyenne-Arapaho agency was relocated to Darlington. Only the Kwahada were still on the Staked Plains. The Kiowa and other Comanches were on the reservation, but by the fall of 1869 small war parties were occasionally leaving to raid in Texas.
In September 1871, the 7th Cavalry was distributed by squadrons and company over seven Southern States to enforce federal taxes on distilleries and suppress the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Custer was assigned to Elizabethtown, Kentucky where his chief duty was to inspect and purchase horses for the Army.
In February 1873, Custer got the good news that the 7th Cavalry was being reunited and being sent north to Fort Rice in the Dakota Territory. His mission was to protect settlers in the region and the engineers of the Northern Pacific Railroad who were surveying a rail route across the Yellowstone River from the Sioux Indians.
In the last week of March 1873, the 7th Cavalry assembled at Memphis, Tennessee where they boarded steamboats for Cairo, Illinois. At Cairo, the regiment changed to overland rail and headed into the winter weather of the northwest. On 09 April 1873, traveling on the Dakota Southern Railroad from Sioux City, Iowa, the Seventh Cavalry Regiment arrived at Yankton, the Dakota Territorial Capital. They camped at Yankton, three miles south, on the Santch Creek for a number of weeks while preparing for their long march north to Fort Rice.
During their encampment in Yankton, a ball was given in honour of the general and his officers. The leader of the band was a lithe, trim, thirty-nine year old Italian named Felix Vinatieri, a Civil War Veteran, who led the band with gusto. General Custer thought the music sophisticated for a wilderness town and asked to meet the bandleader. The General quickly took a liking to Felix Vinatieri and that night, offered him the position of Chief Musician of the 7th Cavalry Regiment.
On 07 May 1873, the Regiment rode out of Yankton for Fort Rice. On a lead horse, was a proud Felix Vinatieri. The journey to Fort Rice was completed in a 300 mile march, arriving on 10 June 1873. Following his arrival at the fort, Felix Vinatieri travelled to St. Paul, Minnesota, to enlist for a three year period as Bandleader of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment.
The completion of the overland railroad link provided an easy means of transportation for gold seekers and farmers to come to the area. As the migration continued, trouble with the Sioux increased. On 20 June 1873 an expedition was ordered to move into the Black Hills of Dakota to provide protection for railroad construction parties. The expedition consisted of 1,451 troopers, 79 officers, and 275 wagons. As a focal point of scouting activities, a permanent encampment was established at Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Yellowstone Territories. From 1873 to 1876, Custer commanded the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Abraham Lincoln south of Mandan. In 1874, he led his troops south into the Black Hills, which six years earlier had been set aside as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. When Custer reported finding gold, the government offered to buy the land from the Sioux, but they refused to sell. The Army then allowed gold prospectors to come into the Reservation's hills by the thousands. The Army's action prompted many Sioux to leave their North Dakota reservations and join with other Sioux in Montana led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who were resisting white government control.
In 1875, the regiment escorted a railroad survey party into the Yellowstone Valley. This expedition brought the regiment into regular contact with the Indian raiding parties, however no serious battles or encounters occurred until the fateful expedition of 17 May 1876. General Alfred H. Terry was in overall command of an Army campaign to relocate the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians from the open plains to reservations. The 7th Regiment rode out of Fort Lincoln on 17 May 1876, with Custer along with the Arikara and Osage scouts leading the way, followed by 1,200 men and 1,700 horses and mules. The 7th Cavalry Band played "The Girl I Left Behind Me".
The intent of General Terry was to trap the Indians between Custer and Major General John Gibbon in the Little Big Horn Valley. Custer had been ordered to move a band of Indians toward the large cavalry force. Custer was to pass all the way down the Rosebud Creek and cross over to the Little Big Horn Valley and move north, in a blocking manoeuvre to prevent the Indians from escaping south. Custer marched with approximately 700 soldiers, moving south for several days, identifying Indian camp signs all along the way. After making visual contact with the Indians on 23 June, Custer ordered the column to turn west and march toward the Little Big Horn Valley. On 24 June, the Arikara and Osage Indian scouts identified a party of Sioux following them. The Sioux fled when approached and Custer did not want any of the members of the Sioux encampment to escape. On the evening of 24 June, Custer outlined the battle engagement plan for the next day.
Within a short period of time, Custer and his troops were annihilated by the full might of an estimated 5,000 Sioux Indians who were led by Chief Sitting Bull and Chief Crazy Horse. Four days later, the other two battalions of the regiment were rescued by supporting cavalry troops under the command of Generals Terry and Gibbon.
In the search for survivors of Custer's forces, not one of the 264 troopers under Custer's command was found alive. Five members of the Custer family were killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn; the General, his brother Captain Tom Custer, brother-in-law Captain James Calhoun, younger brother Boston, and nephew Autie Reed. Both Boston and Autie were civilians. Only one horse, with seven arrows in his body, was found in a thicket. The horse, named Comanche, was a gelding ridden by Captain Keogh, one of Custer's officers.
The sixteen members of the band were spared, as Custer had left orders with band leader, Felix Vinatieri, that the band was not to engage in battle, but to remain on the supply steamboat, "Far West", moored on the Powder River. Subsequently, the Far West served as a floating hospital with all of the band members assisting in transporting and loading the wounded on the boat. They served as medics as the Far West turned around and headed back for the fort at Bismarck, making the journey in fifty-four hours.
A note written during the battle, by Lt. Cooke, to Capt. Benteen, urging him to bring his men to join up at the Indian Village. Custer sent trumpeter John Martin (who spoke little English and became the last surviving white man to see Custer alive) to deliver the orders. The note reads:
Benteen
Come on. Big Village.
Be quick. Bring packs.
W. W. Cooke
P.S. Bring Packs.
Custer's original note is at the bottom, and was later rewritten at the top by Benteen for legibility.
In 1867, one of Custer's first official acts with the Seventh Cavalry was to organize a regimental band. The reason that "GarryOwen" was adopted as the regimental song, as the story goes - one of the Irish "melting pot" troopers of the 7th Cavalry, under the influence of "spirits", was singing the song. By chance Custer heard the melody, liked the cadence, and soon began to hum the tune himself. The tune has a lively beat, that accentuates the cadence of marching horses.
In March 1867, when Indian attacks became more and more violent in the high plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado, Custer and the 7th Cavalry was given their first opportunity to see what fighting Indians was all about. Under the command of General Hancock, they marched from Fort Riley to Fort Larned, Kansas where they were joined by 6 infantry companies and a battery of artillery, creating a task force consisting of over 1,400 men.
When Custer's regiment reached the Sioux encampment on 25 June 1876, he made a decision to attack and fight the Cheyenne, Sioux Indians. One of the most chronicled tragic battles in the military history of the American West was the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn, otherwise known as Custer's Last Stand. Travelling up Rosebud Creek, at 12:07 Custer split his command into three battalions. Major Reno, in command of companies "A", "G", and "M", was directed to attack the southern most end of the village in the valley. Captain Benteen, in command of companies "D", "H", and "K", was directed to explore the area in a south-westerly direction and to "pitch into anything that he might find". Captain McDougall was assigned with "B" Company to guard the pack train. Custer took the five companies of "C", "E", "F", "I", and "L" to make a frontal attack on the encampment.
