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Dishonorable Service: Sympathy for Reno
We all love to read stories of heroic, honorable service. But not every soldier’s service is something they can be proud of, and their stories can be fascinating too.
Marcus Reno was almost certainly drunk at the Little Bighorn. And without a doubt, the inebriation of Custer’s second-in-command was a dereliction of duty and a foolish thing to do when he needed to be thinking clearly.
On the other hand, it may have been Major Reno’s only chance to remain sane as, following Custer’s orders, he charged his small battalion into the enormous, and furious, Sioux encampment.
As his attack commenced, Reno would look up and see Custer, sober as far as we know, wave him on from the nearby bluffs, just before the famous commander rode his own battalion four miles further to the north, into a swirling, desperate death, and into the pages of a thousand books.
As Reno’s attack faltered, realizing he was terribly outnumbered, he would retreat to the top of a hill, dig in, and refuse to move.
Reno did not suffer Custer’s fate, but he may have preferred it in the end. Though he was a decorated veteran of brutal Civil War battles like Antietam and Cold Harbor, battles he fought long before joining Custer’s 7th Cavalry, Reno would be labeled, for the rest of his life, a coward who failed to come to Custer’s rescue. For the rest of his life, he would have to fight for his reputation.
For the rest of his life, he would keep himself drunk.
A few of his fellow battle survivors would whisper criticism of him. But those men aside, none who would later bluster about Reno’s cowardice could honestly put themselves in his shoes on that baking hot day in June of 1876. They simply could not know what that day had been like for him.
In all his previous battles, the rush of adrenaline, the fast-moving action, the intense focus on the task at hand had shut out the fear and quieted his troubled mind. But that simply did not occur for Reno at the Little Bighorn. He had feared it wouldn’t. For days, as the inevitable battle approached, he had known, in his gut, that this one would be different.
It had all been so ominous. As the 7th Cavalry swept through the deep ravines and over the dry treeless bluffs of the Montana territory, looking for Sitting Bull’s camp of renegade Sioux and Cheyenne, trying to bring them to the reservation, or else destroy them, all signs pointed to a hostile force much larger than they had been told to expect. Their Crow and Arikara scouts were amazed at the size of the lodgepole trails in the grass, and of the abandoned camps. Worse, the trails seemed to be converging. In one of the abandoned camps, a white scalp had been found hanging on a pole.
Even the vain and decisive Custer, a man who seemed born for a mission like this, had not been himself. In a conference with Reno and the other officers two days before the battle, the typically self-assured Custer was unusually solicitous of his subordinates’ thoughts and opinions. The officers of the 7th Cavalry were a notoriously back-biting, jealous group. Custer and Captain Frederick Benteen were especially contemptuous of one another, each very eager to disparage the judgment and courage of the other in the press, to other officers, and to anyone else who would listen. Reno had his issues with Custer, too. It was a miserable duty in many ways, but prime among them was the constant need to watch your back, to worry about all the second-guessing that would come with any decision you made. But, now, here was Custer almost humble, seeming to honestly want to hear want his company commanders had to say. One of the officers left the meeting wondering what was wrong with him and confided in another, “I think Custer’s going to be killed.”
The scouts kept warning them that they needed more men. Reno could not escape the feeling that a disaster was on the horizon, but he could not see a way out. Events seem to drag him and the rest of the regiment inevitably into the coming catastrophe.
Early on the morning of June 25th, Sitting Bull’s village was finally located. Custer preferred to rest that day and then attack early the next morning. But then reports came in that they may have been spotted by the enemy, and Custer felt he had no choice but to attack right away. He split the column into three separate battalions, one under his own command, one under Reno, one under Benteen, to make sure the Sioux could be corralled no matter what direction they might scatter. The Crow scouts implored him not to divide his force. What if they didn’t scatter? But Custer refused to follow that advice, probably believing, again, that he had no choice. His job was to capture the village and bring the Indians there into the reservation. If he didn’t divide his force, he would not be able to prevent the Sioux from slipping away. Custer pressed on, bad omens or not. If anyone had a realistic alternative that could prevent the enemy’s escape, no one mentioned it.
In the anxious hours before the attack, one of Custer’s Indian scouts, Half Yellow Face, ritually sang a haunting song. When Custer asked him why he was doing that he said, “Because you and I are going home today, and by a path that is strange to both of us.”
Whether that bothered Custer or not, we do not know. But we do know the serious possibility of death at the hands of the Sioux had crossed his mind. Custer was famous for his long flowing blond hair, which he curled and scented with cinnamon oil. Before the expedition, he had cut it short to devalue his scalp. His brothers, who would die with him that day, and some of his company commanders, who often imitated Custer’s audacious style, did the same. For Custer, at least, this turned out to be a wise decision, as the reports from those who found his body indicated that, although he was stripped and an arrow was shoved, mercifully postmortem, into his genitals, he was not scalped.
And so there sat Reno, an hour or two before that happened, with an oppressive mix of melancholy and fear twisting his gut and dominating his mind, taking a third of Custer’s force into the Sioux encampment.
Reno was told to charge the south end of the village, which stretched for miles along the Little Bighorn River. Custer had ordered the attack, promising that he would support Reno’s column, but he hadn’t provided any details as to how. Then, he had ridden his group off to the north with scant communication to his other officers. Reno had no idea what Custer was doing.
Perhaps it was because his throat was dry with fear, perhaps it was thirst from the intense heat, or perhaps it was to calm himself, but whatever the reason, Reno began taking swigs from his whiskey flask early in the battle. At first, his orders made sense. He charged the village but pulled up short as it became apparent the village was going to charge back. He had never seen such an enormous gathering of Indians. His paltry force of 140-odd men was obviously insufficient as perhaps 1,000 warriors came at them, intent on protecting their women and children. He ordered his men to dismount and take careful shots, again not a bad idea given the circumstances, but a clear concession of the initiative to the advancing warriors.
As his men began falling, and warriors swirled around to the left of his line and cut off the best line of retreat, Reno continued taking gulps from his flask. He began to lose his grip. He ordered the battalion to remount, only to order them to dismount again a few moments later. Confused and terrified, virtually leaderless, his men sought shelter in a grove of trees. It was here that Reno’s friend, the scout Bloody Knife, standing next to him, took a bullet to the head, spattering Reno with bits of brain and blood.
That was it.
All the pent up anxiety and fear of the last few weeks came cascading out of him. He saw an opening in the Indian lines and called for his men, or at least those who happened to be within earshot, to mount up and run for it if they wanted to live. He and his men fled the woods, desperately flailed across the river, and climbed a nearby hill. Reno set up no rearguard action to cover the retreat, and it became a bloody rout. Right and left, Reno’s men were shot off their horses and butchered on the ground.
By the time his battered force reached the top of the hill, they had lost at least a third of their men and the ones remaining were in no shape to go on the offensive. Fortunately, the Indians did not follow them up the hill, and though enough hung around to keep Reno contained, most of them rode off down the valley to the north. Dr. Porter, a surgeon attached to the battalion, found Reno at the top of the hill and remarked that the men seemed demoralized on the retreat. Reno, who by this time had lost his hat, his carbine, and his pistol, standing with a handkerchief tied around his head, responded pathetically, “That was a charge, sir!”
Captain Frederick Benteen arrived with his fresh column from the South, having been summoned by Custer. He found Reno barely coherent, obsessed with the absurd idea of sending a party out to bury a friend of his who had been killed down below near the river. Reno was despondent over the loss of so many of his men, almost apologetic. He refilled his flask from a keg brought along with the other supplies brought up behind Benteen’s column.
Soon, firing could be heard in the distance, indicating Custer’s force was engaged. Some of the officers wanted to head in that direction to help, but Reno refused to move. Benteen and the other officers had more or less begun to ignore Reno, but they deferred to him on this point.
There would be no serious attempt to join Custer. Captain Weir, a personal friend of Custer’s commanding one of Benteen’s companies, insisted on riding his company out for a closer look and ignored Reno’s order to stay put. Almost out of shame, it seems, Reno eventually decided to follow him. Weir got to a high point within 3 miles or so of Custer but by that time it was all but over. He was able to see a few warriors riding in circles and seeming to shoot at the ground, likely finishing off some Custer’s men. There was clearly no point in going any further.
Reno and Benteen remained in a defensive position all through that night and through most of the next day, fighting off periodic attacks, listening to the Indian’s celebration in the distance. The next day, General Terry’s column of infantry arrived from the North. The Indians moved on and with that, the battle ended.
Reno would spend years trying to restore his reputation, even requesting a court of inquiry to investigate the allegations of cowardice against him. It was no use. Although the court of inquiry could not, officially at least, conclude that he had acted dishonorably, that notion persisted with the public. Reno would never command another unit in battle. His life disintegrated. In 1880, he was dishonorably discharged for another, undoubtedly drink induced incident, in which he was accused of peeping through a window at another officer’s wife.
Only the passage of a great deal of time could have helped Reno recover. The truth is that, had Reno done what his detractors said he should have, and ridden out to try to rescue Custer, he and the rest of the regiment almost certainly would have been annihilated. There is no reason to believe he and Benteen, with perhaps 250 to 300 men, could have fared any better than Custer against the 2,000 warriors in the village. Many men and future generations of those men’s families owed their lives to Reno’s alleged cowardice. Ironically, a sober, wise, composed commander in Reno’s position might well have made the same decisions Reno made while drunk and frazzled, and with the same results.
Sometimes it’s not what you do, but how you do it.
As it turned out, Reno didn’t have much time. In 1889, cancerous tumors developed in his mouth. Following surgery to remove a tumor on his tongue, he developed pneumonia. Alone, in a hospital in Washington DC, he died in disgrace. He had few, if any, mourners, and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Custer’s widow, Elizabeth, made it her mission after her husband’s death to guard his reputation. Since he could not be blamed for the disaster, it had to be pushed on Reno and Benteen. In 1926, near the 50th anniversary of the battle, there were discussions of placing a monument on the battlefield, and even a suggestion that, after all that time, perhaps Reno should be included in the memorial. Elizabeth, then in her 80’s, objected, calling Reno, “the one coward of the regiment.” Reno had no one to speak for him. His wife had died in 1874, two years before the battle.
In truth, the disaster was Custer’s fault. His leadership of the 7th Cavalry, at least in terms of keeping a group of officers working as a team, was abysmal. He ignored frequent warnings about the size of the Sioux village. He divided his force and then neglected to communicate his battle plan to the other officers. He put Reno in a completely untenable position. If there was anyone who could have broken the chain of events dragging the regiment into the abyss, it was Custer.
Finally, in 1967, enough time had apparently passed for Reno’s legacy to be reevaluated. While no one could say his service at the Little Bighorn was honorable, it was at least finally possible to step back and view his service as part of the bigger picture of American history, to appreciate what his story has to say about human nature, about how a man can be pushed to the breaking point. A military review board reopened Reno’s 1880 court-martial and, perhaps recognizing that the court-martial may well have been rigged by friends of Custer to embarrass Reno, reversed his dishonorable discharge. Reno’s remains were disinterred, and he was finally buried, with honors, where he really died – at the Little Bighorn battlefield.
Published in General
Interesting bit of history.
Thank you. This is a wonderfully written bit of history and how and why it evolves.
I recall that as a History undergraduate in 1979, my European professor history had 20th century history, as history, ending after WWI. After that it was opinion and political science.
Gripping post, D.A.!
Like the story of J. Bruce Ismay.
Great post, D.A. V!
Thanks for the post!
I love reading these tidbits of history . . .
Could you tell us what source(s) you are using for that telling of the Little Big Horn expedition?
Back in 1998 I was at a local museum/archive in Monroe, Michigan (Custer’s home town). If I was researching anything, it would have been the militia company from Monroe that was activated during the Black Hawk War, but I don’t have any records showing that I actually accomplished anything on that trip besides being a tourist. Maybe I just made some preliminary inquiries. (On the way there my bicycle had broken down, about 70 miles from home, so this wasn’t even a bicycle expedition anymore.)
At one point the woman in charge of the museum told me about a recent finding by one of the Custer researchers. I don’t know why she told it to me – these people don’t usually share that kind of information out of the blue – and I don’t think she told me the researcher’s name. (I have had local archivists present me with good stuff beyond what I was looking for. These people often know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. But this was different.) I won’t tell the details, but it had to do with a letter Custer had written to Libby. I’ve been waiting ever since for that little tidbit to appear in a book, but to my knowledge it has not.
But I don’t know the Custer literature very well. The last book on Custer that I read (listened to on audio, actually) was Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (2015). I came away thinking that he was so close to the topic that if he didn’t mention it, I wonder if I just imagined it all.
Your telling of the battle itself and of Reno’s involvement includes information I hadn’t read before, so if this is based on a book or two, I think I should read them.
My main source was a book called, “A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn – The Last Great Battle of the American West” by James Donovan.
I found it to be a great re-telling of the whole expedition. It is, or at least seems to be, very well researched, given the extensive endnotes and huge bibliography. A huge number of primary sources are referenced and Donovan explains why, when there was a discrepancy, he chose certain versions over others.
I don’t recall specifically letters from Custer to Libby being mentioned, but its certainly possible they are mentioned in the book. He certainly talks a lot about their relationship.
Thanks. It would have been tempting to get this on audio, but I ordered a dead tree version so I can read the footnotes.
D.A.,
All of this is interesting and I think Custer is an interesting subject. I personally have written about him because I think his civil war service has gone almost unnoticed in recent years solely on the basis of Little Big Horn. However, I think a short review might actually shed some light.
Custer was only 23 at Gettysburg when he was given a battlefield rank of Brigadier General. He led a wild charge outnumbered 10 to 1 against Jeb Stuart’s famed cavalry. In this battle, he surprised Stuart and confused Stuart’s troops long enough for other Union cavalry to come into the battle. This was a critical moment as Stuart could have flanked the Union line causing chaos at the moment of Pickett’s Charge.
What is important to remember is that at Little Big Horn 1876 Custer was now 36 years old and had been to Washington DC shortly before for a congressional investigation during which he may have offended Grant who was President at the time.
With this background and your narrative history, we are getting a picture of Custer not as the risk-taking commander of Gettysburg but as someone who was suicidal. Custer cutting his hair suggests that he knew what was coming. This would have been the last thing he would have done at Gettysburg as his flamboyant dress & hair was very much an act to give his men courage. Seeing Custer cut his hair would have had the reverse effect on the men at Little Big Horn.
I have no interest in blaming Reno to get Custer off the hook for Little Big Horn. Of course, the alcoholic Reno (the alcoholism can’t be blamed on Custer) is not very sympathetic, to begin with, but this is no excuse. The problem is that your narrative suggests not how reckless Custer was but that he was suicidal at Little Big Horn.
This is a very interesting historical question. Let’s keep asking questions. Good post.
Regards,
Jim
Well done. Thank you.
The Stiles book is one that has a lot about his Civil War service, and perhaps less than usual about Little Big Horn.
Ret,
I’ll try to check it out. Thanks.
Regards,
Jim
Jim,
Thanks, and you are right about Custer’s Civil War service, which was incredible.
I don’t really think Custer was suicidal at the Little Bighorn. I think it is undisputed that he cut his hair before the expedition. I’ve seen that in a couple of different places. When I say “devalue his scalp” I also mean, in addition to preventing from it becoming a trophy, that he intended to make himself a less conspicuous target for the warriors. I’ve seen one source that says it was Libbie’s idea. But, it’s possible he just didn’t want to deal with long hair in the summer heat.
What really prompted me to write this was trying to figure out what was going on with Reno. Reno had been a good officer in the Civil War. His service was not as spectacular as Custer’s of course, but Reno, too, had risen to the rank of a Brevet Brig. General. His gravestone lists that as his rank.
So what prompted his breakdown? It may just be the sources I’ve read, but I get the impression he went into the battle, having observed all of these ominous signs, including among the many other things mentioned, Custer’s odd conduct, with a terrible feeling that something was going to go wrong. I think that awful gut feeling, along with Custer’s poor leadership that day, which just confirmed his worries, were the major factors. I agree that Custer’s hair cutting would have been disconcerting. So, in looking at things from Reno’s worried perspective, I went with that darker interpretation.
The book I read, which I mention to Reticulator, above, is pretty harsh on Reno. But I mostly came away from it feeling sorry for the guy.
Thank you very much for this. Articles like this make Ricochet worth reading.
That is not at all evident from the history. He may have possibly been drinking, but it’s likely that he was not drunk. We have no way of knowing and therefore cannot claim that he “almost certainly” was drunk.
If I were in that idiot Custer’s unit, and I saw the scouts ceremonially preparing for death after figuring out the size of the enemy force, I would almost certainly have thought about getting wasted.
From what I’ve read, the Indian scouts (mostly Crow, I think) were positively impressed with Custer, and that was one reason why they chose to serve with him. (The other reason being the traditional conflict between their own tribes and the Sioux.)
Perhaps they were impressed with his personal courage and didn’t really get a chance to evaluate some of his less-positive characteristics…
I’m aware there was some disagreement on that point, but from what I’ve read, I’m fairly convinced. I’m not saying he was drunk the entire time, of course, but at some point, I think he would have blown somewhere above .08. You could really go down a whole rabbit hole on the subject, but this is my take on it.
Unbelievably, still to this day there are pro-Custer, pro-Reno partisans out there. They show up in the book reviews on Amazon.
But, in all honesty, I make that point in support of Reno. I think it helps explain his odd actions. As I hope is clear from the post, I sympathize with the guy, and I think, even if he was drunk, he was unfairly blamed for the disaster.
Title line had me thinking this was going to be about Janet Reno.
This detailed reflection, first on events and then on judgments about events, followed long after by further judgment on the earlier judgment, reminds us that history is made of service by flesh and blood, not cartoon characters.
This post is part of the November theme, “Service.” There is one late opening, the 30th, first come first seated!
Outstanding post. Thanks.