Scott Mansch

smansch@greatfallstribune.com

It was a March morning 140 years ago when soldiers left Fort Shaw on foot amid snow-covered trails and freezing temperatures.

Three months later, the “Montana Column,” a 450-man fighting force led by Col. John Gibbon, became famed first witnesses to a very different scene dominated again by a white landscape — this one made by pale lifeless bodies left behind near the Little Bighorn River.

The journey’s aim, they doubtless had thought, was a celebratory battle. Instead it was a funeral detail.

“That cuts to the chase, yes,” said Ken Robison, a noted Montana historian living in Fort Benton.

Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s demise on June 25, 1876, is a story known throughout the world. He and 265 men died with their boots on that day after attacking a village of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe that numbered thousands.

Soldiers from Fort Shaw, located 24 miles west of Great Falls, were witnesses to history. What became the Electric City has several other ties to the famous fight that, except for old houses, crumbling fort structures — and graves — are not readily visible.

Yet here they are.

“There are tentacles of the story all around,” Robinson said. “All sorts of pieces tied to this area.”

Association with Great Falls roots

Robert J. Ege was a writer and author who lived at 1904 2nd Ave. N. in Great Falls and 50 years ago helped start an organization called “Little Bighorn Associates, Inc.”

“We study the life and times of George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn,” said Bill Blake of Woodstock, Ga., the group’s current chairman. “The vast majority of our members are very passionate about Custer. In fact, I think there are some of us within the organization that are still fighting the battle.”

Ege, who died here in 1977 and was cremated, was among the handful who started the group and for a time wrote its newsletters. Bruce Liddic, who has belonged to the organization for nearly 50 years, knew the Great Falls man well.

“He was a writer and also a radio commentator,” Liddic said. “He was very civic-minded, with (three sons and a daughter). His wife (Dorothy) was for a time the executive director of the YWCA in Great Falls.”

Liddic, of Lancaster, Pa., is now director emeritus of the Little Bighorn Associates.

“I know that the first issue of our newsletter was 20 printed copies, and it was done on a stencil machine in Bob Ege’s kitchen there in Great Falls,” he said. “In 1966, we had 12 members. Now we have 1,000, give or take, and we meet all over the country.”

Why, Blake was asked, has the group grown through the years? That’s easy, he said.

Does Custer matter today? Depends who you ask

“It’s Custer and his charisma,” Blake said. “He was such a flamboyant individual. He was well-known, he was well-respected, and he was a great cavalry officer. He did a phenomenal job at Gettysburg. Some people say he actually turned the tide at that battle.

“You could say he was arrogant to a certain extent. But he was well-admired, and he got the job done. It was as simple as that. Some people criticize him for being so quick to engage the Northern Cheyenne and Sioux. And he may have made some mistakes. I guess that’s what people like to study. What if? What if? What if? Like I say, we’re still fighting the battle.”

Liddic and friends are Custer Buffs to be sure. It’s not quite hero worship, though.

“We must always remember that George Custer was a man just like everybody else,” Liddic said. “He put his pants on the same way we do, one leg at a time. And remember, he was following the dictates of the Grant administration. Whether he believed in those dictates or not, he was an Army officer and followed the orders of the president of the United States.

“When he went to the Little Bighorn, his tactics were what was the standard at the time. Terry, Gibbon … all of them thought the Indians would run. And they did not.”

Sisters knew Custer well

Maria Adams Dutriueille and her sister, Mary, were black women from Kentucky who worked for Custer and his wife, Elizabeth. Maria, who lived at 605 8th Ave. S. in Great Falls from 1913 until her death at age 86 in 1939, is buried in the city’s Highland Cemetery.

Along with a secret or two from the famous 7th Cavalry campaign of 1876.

The plan was a three-pronged attack devised by Custer’s commander, Gen. Alfred Terry, to subdue the “hostiles” of Sitting Bull. Custer and the Dakota Column marched from Bismarck, N.D., to the east, while Gen. George Crook and the Wyoming Column were to travel from Fort Fetterman to the south.

Gibbon’s Montana column, with many of the soldiers on foot, marched from Fort Shaw to Cascade to Fort Ellis near Bozeman, and then east along the Yellowstone River.

“Gibbon in essence was to be blocking force on the north,” Robison said.

Crook was stymied at the Battle of the Rosebud to the south. Though Gibbon was on time and would have been in proper position to provide plenty of military muscle, Custer did not wait to attack.

For that, of course, Custer’s been vilified. His command was largely wiped out.

The sisters Mary and Maria, however, had evidence to exonerate the famed Boy General.

“In the critical last meeting, the night of the 21st of June (near the steamboat the Far West at the mouth of the Rosebud River), there was a lot of controversy over exactly what orders Terry gave Custer,” Robison said. “For a long time it was said that Terry had put Custer on a tight leash. That Custer had gone against orders to conduct the attack without real authority.”

It’s been discovered that Mary Adams was also at the meeting.

“To quote her,” Robison said in an opinion that’s shared by several authors and historians, “Terry had actually ordered Custer to use his own judgment, to do whatever he thought best should he strike the Indian trail. ‘And whatever you do, Custer, hold onto your wounded.’

“It’s pretty well (established) that he did not violate orders.”

This story was discredited for years because it was known that Maria Adams was back in Bismarck, N.D., with Custer’s wife. She could not have been with Custer on June 21. But Mary apparently was. She later gave testimony about the meeting.

The sisters eventually came back to Montana.

“Mary died about a year and a half after coming here,” Robison said. “She worked for a doctor in Fort Shaw. But her sister Maria lived on and married a barber, Duke Dutriueille. They lived for years in Helena and then in Belt, where he was a barber.”

After her husband’s death, Maria moved in with a daughter in Great Falls and lived her remaining years.

“It’s yet another connection to this area that’s pretty fascinating,” Robison said. “Mary’s testimony actually is pretty well-accepted by scholars today and sort of rewrote that bit of Custer history. It’s very important to understand. Whether Custer was really under tight restrictions or allowed to use his own judgment, as Mary testified.”

Custer reaped what he sowed

Native Americans can hardly be blamed for caring not about Custer’s motives or tactics.

Dr. Leo Killsback, a Northern Cheyenne and professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, helped design the Indian Memorial that was completed at the Little Bighorn Battlefield two years ago and has written extensively about the time period.

He grew up in Busby, just east of the battlefield.

“Custer had a particular history with us, in that he was responsible for killing a number of Southern Cheyenne people (Battle of Washita in 1868),” Killsback said. “Custer had agreed with Cheyenne chiefs and spiritual leaders to never kill our people again. He sat down and smoked a peace pipe in 1869, I believe, after Chief Black Kettle was killed. That history shows that the Cheyenne and Custer had made a peace agreement. They said if he were to break that agreement, he would be killed.

“That’s something the Cheyenne remember. Because he broke that treaty.”

Killsback is a historian. If only, he said, that there were more in Montana today.

“That’s something you can’t avoid when you’re living in Montana,” he said. “We must learn about what happened in our state. All of us. It’s very, very positive for building relationships between our peoples. It’s something I advocate and is something that opens people’s minds in a positive way.”

Jeremy MacDonald is a highly successful basketball coach in his hometown of Box Elder. He is part Blackfeet and Chippewa Cree, and enrolled in the Rocky Boy Agency.

He said the Custer battle must be considered a source of pride for Native Americans.

“It’s a testament of the military strength that tribes had when they could muster up enough warriors,” MacDonald said. “They were very formidable when they had the numbers and firepower. In that case they had both.”

But, he added, the sad saga of the Indian Wars provides for plenty of heartbreak on both sides.

“It’s a historical tragedy that American society and Tribal society couldn’t find a better solution than military violence,” MacDonald said.

It shook up the nation

Burnette Batista, a lifelong resident of Fort Shaw, is president of the Sun River Valley Historical Society. While a young girl in school she never heard about Gibbon’s Montana Column.

“We were not taught any of the history of the area. It was not in our curriculum,” she said. “You know, if you don’t preserve the history, it gets lost.”

Dick Thoroughman works closely with Batista. His ancestors came to Montana in 1863 and settled in the Fort Shaw area in 1865, 11 years before Gibbon marched to the Little Bighorn.

“They say the Custer battle and the battle of Gettysburg are the two most written-about stories that had anything to do with the United States,” Thoroughman said. “I read once where in the entire history of the New York Times there have only been two stories that took up the complete front page. One was the Apollo 11 moon landing and the other was the Custer massacre.

“For the time and place,” Thoroughman added, “it was about like Pearl Harbor. Because it shook up the nation like you wouldn’t believe.”

Coming to grips with 1876

To make sense of it all 140 years later is not easy.

Robert Ege and Maria Dutriueille could probably help, but they’re in their Great Falls graves. Many of the men who marched from Fort Shaw are buried at the Custer National Cemetery at the Little Bighorn Battlefield.

There is a cemetery, too, a half-mile west of the old Fort Shaw, the military installation which was in existence from 1867-91. Several soldiers are buried there, plus dozens of Indian children who succumbed to disease. All the graves are treated with the utmost of respect.

“I sympathize with the Indians,” Batista said, “because we took their country away from them. It wasn’t any one person’s fault, white or red, and this is 140 years later. It’s just what happened, and we can’t do anything about it, except to honor the dead from both sides.”