150 years later, the Brinton Museum examines the Battle of the Little Bighorn through Indigenous eyes

Monday, April 10, 1876. The Army enlists Curly, Denver celebrates with beer.

Colonel John Gibbon enlisted 23 Crow men at Crow Agency (then located on Mission Creek, present day Livingston, MT) to serve as scouts for his Montana Column moving east along the Yellowstone River.  

These included the famous Crow Scout Curly (Ashishishe).

He passed away of May 22, 1923.

Married twice, he had one daughter.  He has a large number of descendants.

Early Colorado brewers celebrated the centennial with a commemorative bock beer

This week in 1876: The Denver Brewing Company markets its ‘peculiar and superior beverage’ to local saloons

Last edition:

Sunday, April 9, 1876. Homestake.

Labels: 1870s, 1876, Mining, South Dakota (Lead)

A look at the later lives of Wounded Knees' Twenty Medal of Honor recipients.

Wounded Knee, the Massacre, has been back in the news this past week due to wannabe "War" Secretary Hegseth determining that the review of the Medals of Honor awarded for action there is over, and the now long dead soldiers will keep their medals.  We posted on that here:

Lex Anteinternet: Today In Wyoming's History: Reviewing the Wounded ...: Today In Wyoming's History: Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor. :  Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor. Sgt. Toy receivin...

But, what happened to the Medal of Honor recipients from Wounded Knee?  

Most thinking people recall the incident with horror, inkling, frankly towards a genocidal view of the massacre, and not without good reason.  But at the time, the Army honored those who participated in the battle at an unprecedented rate.

What became of them?

Let's take a look.

• Sergeant William Austin, cavalry, directed fire at Indians in ravine at Wounded Knee

William Austin has the unusual distinction of having been born in Texas (Galveston) but having entered the service in New York City.

Austin left the Army in 1892 to enter the cotton business.  He served again in the Georgia National Guard during the Philippine Insurrection, and then returned to civilian life and ultimately had an automobile dealership.  He served again as a Reserve Quartermaster during World War One.  He was married three times.  His first marriage to an actress ended in divorce, and he outlived his second wife.

He lived in California in his later years and died in Palo Alto in 1929 at age 61 by which time he looked quite old by modern standards.  All in all, he had lead a pretty successful life.

• Private Mosheim Feaster, cavalry, extraordinary gallantry at Wounded Knee;

Feaster was a career soldier who served until 1914, having served at some point as a lieutenant..  He died in 1950 at age 82.

Oddly, for a very long serving soldier who was commissioned at some point, finding details on him is next to impossible.

Or perhaps it's not so odd.  His commission was probably a wartime one, and he was a career enlisted man otherwise.

He was born in Pennsylvania, and died in California.

• Private Mathew Hamilton, cavalry, bravery in action at Wounded Knee;

Hamilton was a Scottish immigrant and was 25 years old at the time of Wounded Knee.  He had not, like many Irish immigrants, immediately joined the Army upon arriving in the United States.  He also wouldn't make a career out of the Army, leaving it, as a Sergeant, in 1899, having served in the Spanish American War.  He took his discharge from the Army while in Cuba, and then went to work as a packer contracter to the Army in Cuba.

His ultimate fate is unknown.

• Private Joshua B. Hartzog, artillery, rescuing commanding officer who was wounded and carried him out of range of hostile guns at Wounded Knee;

Hartzog rose to the rank of sergeant but did not remain in the Army.  Following his time in the Army, he returned to his native Ohio and married in 1894.  He moved to Alabama with his wife thereafter, but his wife soon died.  He remarried in 1918, but divorced and remarried again in 1923.  He died in 1939.

• Private Marvin Hillock, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee;

Hillock was born in Michigan to an Irish American family (his father was a Canadian).  He left the Army soon after Wounded Knee and became a miner in Lead, South Dakota.  He contracted sort of a shotgun marriage soon thereafter but it did not last long, although that may have meant that his spouse died.  He married again, albeit unsuccessfully, and seems to have relocated to Ontario for a time and then disappeared.

• Sergeant Bernhard Jetter, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee for "killing an Indian who was in the act of killing a wounded man of B Troop."

Bernhard Jetter was born in the Kingdom of Württemberg and first joined the Army in 1883.  He left the Army in 1896 with a "special" discharge, probably indicating a service disability, and married for a second time in 1916.  Nothing is known of his first wife, other than that she had died.  He moved to Brooklyn and died at age 65.

• Sergeant George Loyd, cavalry, bravery, especially after having been severely wounded through the lung at Wounded Knee;

Loyd was Irish born and joined the Army in 1866, the year after the Civil War at which point there was a huge turnover in the Army.  He had been at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

He killed himself, while still a serving soldier, at Ft. Riley in 1892, at which time the 49 year old Loyd was regarded as an old soldier.

• Sergeant Albert McMillain, cavalry, while engaged with Indians concealed in a ravine, he assisted the men on the skirmish line, directed their fire, encouraged them by example, and used every effort to dislodge the enemy at Wounded Knee;

McMillian is very unusual in that he was a school teacher, the son of a U.S. Senator, and had attended Princeton prior to his enlistment in the U.S. Army.  He seems to have been what some would refer to as a soldier of fortune.  He was court-martialed for using vile language towards a woman in 1892, and left the Army at the end of his enlistment.  He moved to  St. Paul, Minnesota and entered the University of Minnesota where he earned a Bachelor of Law degree in 1894, that being a "law degree" before reformist elements in the law converted the basic degree to a doctorate.  He worked for West Publishing Company, the premier legal publisher even today, thereafter as an editor.  He suffered a nervous breakdown at that time and his fortunes declined thereafter.

McMillian was likely a sensitive man, and he's  a 19th and early 20th Century example of PTSD.  He likely couldn't overcome what he'd witnesses, and had been awarded a medal for, at Wounded Knee.  He served as a Red Cross driver in World War One.

After Wounded Knee he requested that he be reduced to the rank of Private.  His request was refused.

• Private Thomas Sullivan, cavalry, conspicuous bravery in action against Indians concealed in a ravine at Wounded Knee;

Sullivan was an Irish immigrant who moved to the US at age 28 and immediately entered the Army.  He made a career of the Army and retired as a First Sergeant after 23 years of service, which would indicate that he likely retired early due to medical reasons.  He served in the Spanish American WAr and the Philippine Insurrection.

Sullivan married after he left the service and took up various employments, including policemen.  His wife Ellen was also an Irish immigrant.  He died in 1940 at age 80.

• First Sergeant Jacob Trautman, cavalry, killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and, although entitled to retirement from service, remained to close of the campaign at Wounded Knee;

Trautman was a German born Civil War veteran who retired from the Army in 1891.  He died in 1898 of a stroke at age 58 while living in Pennsylvania, which is where he had originally entered the service from, first serving in a Pennsylvania cavalry unit.

Information on Trautman is hard to find, but an interesting aspect of this is that his first and last name are most commonly associated with people of the Jewish faith.  That doesn't mean he was Jewish, but a person has to wonder.

• Sergeant James Ward, cavalry, continued to fight after being severely wounded at Wounded Knee;

Ward was a first generation American from an Irish family in Quincy, Massachusetts.  He was the second of seven children.  He left a bricklaying job to join the Arm in 1876 and had been first stationed at Ft. Laramie.  His last enlistment, the one he was on during Wounded Knee, was short, indicating that he was discharged for medical reasons.  He married after he left the service but his health continued to decline leading first to his paralysis, and then death in 1901.

• Corporal William Wilson, cavalry, bravery in Sioux Campaign, 1890;

Cpl Wilson is particularly unusual as he was black.  He was known as a marksman and for wearing a non regulation black leather coat and a broad brimmed hat.  He is the only black soldier to have won the Medal of Honor at Wounded Knee and the last black soldier to win it on American soil.

He deserted the Army in 1893, with  his rifle, after being detailed to a rifle match.  Desertion wasn't that big of deal at the time, and he returned to Maryland, where he married and had seven children.  He died in 1928 at the age of 58.

Desertion in the 19th Century Army was extremely common, although taking your firearms was regarded as bad form.

• Private Hermann Ziegner, cavalry, conspicuous bravery at Wounded Knee;

Ziegner was born to Hugo and Lena Ziegner in Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and emigrated to the United States when he was 14 years old.  He enlisted in the Army in 1889. He left the Army after eight years of service and married, but served again in the Spanish American War where he was a sergeant and later the first sergeant of Company E, 71st New York Infantry. He went up San Juan Hill in the famous charge.  He died of service induced malaria in 1898 at age 34, his family being reduced to poverty as he suffered through it.

Whatever his service at Wounded Knee entailed, his service in Cuba was clear, and he, and his family, suffered for it.  Curiously, his tombstone notes only his service in the Indian Wars and his rank, at the time, of private.

• Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy.

Clancy is hard to find dentils on.  He was a New Yorker who joined the Army at aged 19 and he left the Army in 1894.  He died, oddly enough, at the home of the cavalry, Ft. Riley, in 1934 at age 64.

• Lieutenant Ernest Garlington, cavalry, distinguished gallantry;

Garlington was a West Point graduate who received accelerated advancement, at a time in which Army appointments were very much by regiment, due to the losses at Little Big Horn.  He served as inspector general in Cuba during the Spanish–American War and participated in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, obtaining the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.  He was retired from the Army as a General in 1917 due to age.  He died in 1934 at age 81.

• First Lieutenant John Chowning Gresham, cavalry, voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein. He was wounded during this action.

Gresham was a career soldier who retired as a Colonel in 1915, and then had a position in the California National Guard during World War One as a ROTC instructor.  He died in 1926 at age 74.

• Second Lieutenant Harry Hawthorne, artillery, distinguished conduct in battle with hostile Indians;

Hawthorne is perhaps the most eccentric of the Wounded Knee MoH winners as he was a Naval Academy graduate who after a brief hitch in the Navy, transferred to the Army.  He served in the Spanish American War and was the military attache to Japan from 1909 to 1911.  During World War One he served as the  Inspector General in the Panama Canal Zone and was awarded the Purple Heart (oddly) and a Silver Star. He retired as a Colonel in 1919 after World War One and died in 1948 at age 88.

• Private George Hobday, cavalry, conspicuous and gallant conduct in battle;

Hobday was an English immigrant who enlisted in the Army in 1868 and at the time of Wounded Knee was a very old soldier, being 48 years of age.  He died of pneumonia in 1891 while still a serving soldier.

• First Sergeant Frederick Toy, cavalry, bravery; 

Toy was a career soldier with an exemplary service record.  He served as an orderly to President Theodore Roosevelt and was recalled from retirement as a training officer during World War One.  He died in 1933 at age 67.

• Corporal Paul Weinert, artillery, taking the place of his commanding officer who had fallen severely wounded, he gallantly served his piece, after each fire advancing it to a better position

We know know that this fire may have resulted in many innocent deaths, including that of women and children.  Weinert probably knew that at the the time and stated upon being informed that he'd be awarded the Medal of Honor that he had expected to be court-martialed..

Weinert was a German from Frankfurt, he served two hitches in the Army, the second one during the  Spanish American War.  He died in 1919, at age 49.

So what can we draw from all of this?

Well, perhaps not much, but we can glean some interesting facts and make a few conclusions.

One thing is, and we'll start with the Weinert comment, at least some soldiers appreciated right at the time that the battle had turned into a massacre.  Weinert's comments showed that he appreciated that the "battle" had taken unnecessary lives and had descended into a massacre.  McMillain's request to be returned to the grade of private says something similar, as does his difficulties in life thereafter.

Not all of the soldiers, however, seem to have been bothered by what they experienced, which in spite of our modern assumptions to the contrary, if fairly common, and franky disturbing.  We'd like to think that we'd appreciate the horror of a thing right from the onset of it, but many people frankly don't.

The number of career soldiers who won the MoH is surprising. That is, it's surprising so many of them were career men.  Most soldiers in the Army have always been sort of passing through, but many of these troops were not and stayed in for as long as they could.

That might partially be because so many of these men were immigrants, eight out of the twenty, and several more were first generation Americans.  The Army had been a haven for immigrants, and in particular Irish and German immigrants.  These awards show that.

Some disappeared.  It'd be difficult for a Medal of Honor recipient to do that today, but as we've noted, the Medal of Honor was not as rare then, as it is now, being the only medal the U.S. awarded.

We'd like to think the men were haunted by their roles in what is now widely regarded as an atrocity.  But, most don't seem to have been.  The number who left the service and then returned for later wars suggests that they retained either a loyalty or some sense of fondness for military life, in spite of the horrors they'd participated in.  Only McMillain seems to have been the exception.

Pretty Nose. 1851-1952.

She fought at Little Big Horn.

Yellowstone. A really radical idea.

A really radical idea that won't happen, but maybe should.

There have been really horrific floods, as we all know, in Yellowstone National Park. Roads in the northern part of the park may be closed for the rest of the summer.  Here's a National Park Service item on it:

Updates

• Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance.
• Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.
• The National Park Service will make every effort to repair these roads as soon as possible; however, it is probable that road sections in northern Yellowstone will not reopen this season due to the time required for repairs.
• To prevent visitors from being stranded in the park if conditions worsen, the park in coordination with Yellowstone National Park Lodges made the decision to have all visitors move out of overnight accommodations (lodging and campgrounds) and exit the park.
• All entrances to Yellowstone National Park remain temporarily CLOSED while the park waits for flood waters to recede and can conduct evaluations on roads, bridges and wastewater treatment facilities to ensure visitor and employee safety.
• There will be no inbound visitor traffic at any of the five entrances into the park, including visitors with lodging and camping reservations, until conditions improve and park infrastructure is evaluated.
• The park’s southern loop appears to be less impacted than the northern roads and teams will assess damage to determine when opening of the southern loop is feasible. This closure will extend minimally through next weekend (June 19).
• Due to the northern loop being unavailable for visitors, the park is analyzing how many visitors can safely visit the southern loop once it’s safe to reopen. This will likely mean implementation of some type of temporary reservation system to prevent gridlock and reduce impacts on park infrastructure.
• At this time, there are no known injuries nor deaths to have occurred in the park as a result of the unprecedented flooding. 
• Effective immediately, Yellowstone’s backcountry is temporarily closed while crews assist campers (five known groups in the northern range) and assess damage to backcountry campsites, trails and bridges.
• The National Park Service, surrounding counties and states of Montana and Wyoming are working with the park’s gateway communities to evaluate flooding impacts and provide immediate support to residents and visitors.
• Water levels are expected to recede today in the afternoon; however, additional flood events are possible through this weekend.

Here's an idea.

Don't rebuild the roads.

For years, there have been complaints about how overcrowded Yellowstone National Park has become.  A combination of a tourist economy and high mobility, and frankly the American inability to grasp that the country has become overpopulated, had contributed to that.  For years there have been suggestions that something needed to be done about that.

Maybe what is needed is. .. nothing.

Well, nothing now, so to speak.

Yellowstone was the nation's first National Park.  It was created at a time when park concepts, quite frankly, were different from they are now.   Created in 1872, its establishment was in fact visionary, and it did grasp in part that the nation's frontier was closing, even though the creation of the park came a fully four years prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn.  There was, at the time of its creation, a sort of lamentation that the end of the Frontier was in sight, and the nation was going to become one of farms and cities.

Nobody saw cities like they exist now, however, and nobody grasped that the day would come when agricultural land would be the province of the rich, and that homesteading would go from a sort of desperate act to something that people would cite to, in the case of their ancestors, as some sort of basis for moral superiority.  Things are much different today than they were then.

Indeed, in some ways, the way the park is viewed is a bit bipolar.  To some, particularly those willing to really rough it, Yellowstone is a sort of giant wilderness area.  To others, it's a sort of theme park. 

The appreciation of the need to preserve wilderness existed then, but what that meant wasn't really understood.  The park was very much wilderness at first, and some things associated with wilderness went on within it, and of course still do.  Early camping parties travelled there.  People fished there, and still do.  Hunting was prohibited early on, which had more to do with the 19th Century decline in wildlife due to market hunting than it did anything else.  This has preserved a sort of bipolarism in and of itself, as fishing is fish-hunting, just as bird hunting is fowling. There's no reason in fact that Yellowstone should have not been opened back up to hunting some time during the last quarter-century, but it is not as just as the park is wilderness to young adventurers from the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, and hearty back country folks of all ages, it's also a big public zoo for people from Newark or Taipei.  

Since 1872, all sorts of additional parks have been created. Some are on the Yellowstone model, such as Yosemite.  Others are historical sites such as Gettysburg or Ft. Laramie.  All, or certainly all that I've seen, are of value.

But they don't all have the same value.

Much of Yellowstone's value is in its rugged wilderness.  Some cite to the geothermal features of the park, but that's only a small portion of it.  And for that reason, much of Yellowstone today would make more sense existing as a Wilderness Area under the Wilderness Act of 1964, the act that helps preserve the west in a very real way, and which western politicians, who often live lives much different than actual westerners, love to hate.

A chance exists here to bring back Yellowstone into that mold, which it was intended in part to be fro the very onset, and which many wish it was, or imagine it to be, today.

Don't rebuilt the roads.

That would in fact mean the northern part of the park would revert to wilderness, truly.  And it means that many fewer people would go to the park in general.  And it would hurt the tourist communities in the northern areas, and even in the southern areas, as the diminished access to the park would mean that the motorized brigade of American and International tourists wouldn't go there, as they wouldn't want to be too far from their air-conditioned vehicles.

But that's exactly what should be done.

October 15, 1878. Edison Electric LIght flips on the switch.

 A long time ago I started a series of posts that riffed off a George F. Will column, in which he stated:

In many ways, the world of 1870 was more medieval than modern. Three necessities — food, clothing, shelter — absorbed almost all consumer spending. No household was wired for electricity. Flickering light came from candles and whale oil, manufacturing power from steam engines, water wheels and horses. Urban horses, alive and dead, complicated urban sanitation. Window screens were rare, so insects commuted to and fro between animal and human waste outdoors and the dinner table. A typical North Carolina housewife in the 1880s carried water into her home eight to 10 times daily, walking 148 miles a year to tote 36 tons of it. Few children were in school after age 12.

I can't recall if I ever expanded on the whale oil lighting specifically, but I did generally, in this post here:

I don't dispute the details that Will recites here, but I do doubt the "more medieval than modern assertion.  Indeed, some of these things argue, I think, the other way around.  Still, it taps into what we're discussing here.  This is just the sort of thing that this blog exists to explore, particularly given that the time frame that Will is discussing, 1870 to 1970, fits right in with the time frame, sort of, that this blog is looking at, as earlier noted. 

Whale oil chandelier, photo from the Library of Congress.  Up until the Will entry, I'd never even considered there being such a thing as a whale oil chandelier.

What Will noted was quite true, but was this Medieval in character?  I'd assert not.  I don't really know, however.  Whaling has taken place to some extent since ancient times, but the widespread use of whale oil, I suspect, didn't come about until well after the Medieval period.  Indeed, it doesn't seem to have been done in an appreciably large manner until maybe the 17th Century, although whaling itself does go back much further than that.  Whale oil, once it became a common commodity, did see use in lamps in candles in an appreciable manner.   Starting in the 19th Century, however, kerosene began to come in.  Whale oil reached its peak in 1845 and then began to fairly rapidly decline thereafter as kerosene became more common, although whale oil would continue to see some use up until electrical generation replaced it in the early 20th Century, a fairly remarkable fact.

That post was entitled:

They could get by without electricity

Well, today is the day that started changing, in 1878.  Today is the anniversary of the Edison Electric Light Company commencing business.

To put this slightly in context, George A. Custer and the men under his immediate command at Little Big Horn had only been in their graves in Montana for two years at this point.  Most of Central Wyoming completely remained Indian territory and the big Texas and Oregon cattle drives to that region of the state hadn't yet commenced.  Rail transportation hadn't penetrated into most of Montana and was only in Southern Wyoming.

Put a slightly different way, for context, when this anniversary reached its centennial, I was in high school.