The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch Read Free Book Online

the Upper Arkansas and Custer assumed de facto command—a position he would hold until June 25, 1876. Enlisted recruits had arrived at the fort throughout the summer and fall, and by the end of the year the over eight hundred troops were joined by most of the officers.
    The enlisted cavalryman of Custer’s era was a volunteer who was paid thirteen dollars a month. Many young men had been attracted to military service by the prospect of romance and adventure, the shiny new uniforms they would wear, the pomp and circumstance of hearing the regimental band strike up a jaunty tune, and an escape from their mundane lives on the farm or apprenticeships in the city. There was romance and adventure to be found in the military, so they thought. Quite a number of them were emigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and England—which often posed a language problem—and many were Civil War veterans.
    These would-be soldiers reported to their duty station and found that their lives would be quite different than they had envisioned. They arrived at Fort Riley to discover a cluster of crude buildings in a remote location that was surrounded by a barren prairie covered with sagebrush that was scalded by the sun in summer and buried under snow and freezing temperatures in the winter. And they soon learned that upon signing up they had forfeited all rights as American citizens and were now under an alien jurisdiction that resembled a brutal dictatorship—and they were at the very bottom of this pecking order.
    Recruits were schooled in the manual of the saber, manual of the pistol, manual of the carbine, and principles of target practice. They were taught how to ride and care for their mounts and learned how to fight on horseback or dismounted. In garrison, they endured months of isolation, monotony, and rigid discipline, interrupted only by the occasional brief action against their enemy, the Plains Indians.
    Reveille typically blew at 5:30, with the first drill commencing at 6:15. That would be followed by stable call, guard mount, construction, woodcutting, and water details, inspections and dress reviews, and various forms of drill. Taps sounded at 8:15 and the men would retire to crude bunks fashioned with pole or board slats and a straw tick, or in some cases during warm weather they preferred to sleep outside.
    The cavalryman wore a dark-blue blouse, sky-blue trousers, a gray shirt, black boots, and a wide-brimmed hat of either army-issue blue or white straw during the summer months. His uniform was crisscrossed with leather straps that held certain necessities, such as cartridge pouches and his three-pound seven-ounce light cavalry saber. He was initially issued a seven-shot 56/50-caliber Spencer repeating carbine and a .44-caliber Colt or Remington percussion revolver, and later a .45-caliber Springfield Model 1873 single-shot breech-loading carbine and a six-shot .45-caliber Colt single-action revolver.
    The cavalryman’s campaign outfit consisted of his weapons, a shelter half, haversack, poncho, canteen, mess kit, and blanket, extra clothing, extra ammunition, a feed bag, fifteen pounds of grain, a picket pin and lariat, personal items, and several days’ rations—usually greasy salt pork or salt beef and hardtack washed down with bitter coffee. Occasionally soup made of hominy would be served at the mess hall in garrison, but vegetables and fruits were virtually nonexistent.
    And then there was the discipline aspect of duty. Orders from all officers and enlisted men of a superior rank were to be regarded as sacrosanct and were to be obeyed instantly and without question. Failure to obey even minor military rituals, such as saluting an officer or calling him sir, could result in punishment. The penalties could range from walking for hours while carrying a log of wood on your shoulder for being dirty to carrying around a saddle all day for not being present at an inspection at first call. For more