our history: INDIAN FIGHTERS
Tale of Two Indian Fighters
BY MEL W RHODES
The very different lives and ends of George Armstrong Custer and Ranald S. Mackenzie
DECEMBER 2016
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
F
ourth of July and centennial celebrations
were at fever pitch when news of what
would come to be called “Custer’s Last
Stand” reached the East Coast in 1876.
Having disregarded orders to wait for
support to arrive, on June 25, Lt. Col.
George Armstrong Custer, a flamboyant
and much-lauded hero of the American
Civil War, led some 250 of his men into
the valley of the Little Big Horn where they
were annihilated by a vastly superior force
of Indians. Among the dead were Custer,
two of his brothers, a nephew and a brother-in-law.
Many historians would later conclude
that Custer’s gutsy acts on the Little Big
Horn were actually strategic blunders that
resulted in the massacre. The New York
Herald on Sept. 2, 1876, quoted President
U.S. Grant — who’d done a fair piece of
“generaling” himself — as saying: “I regard
Custer’s Massacre as a sacrifice of troops,
brought on by Custer himself that was wholly unnecessary — wholly unnecessary.”
According to his detractors, after the
Sioux cut down Custer and his men, a great
myth began to take hold of the American
imagination. Custer, who’d seldom missed
an opportunity to “toot his own horn,”
became the consummate American hero.
The controversy over Custer’s Last Stand
continues to this day, with some defending
him and others vilifying him. But no such
controversy exists around Gen. Ranald
Slidell “Bad Hand” Mackenzie, one of the
country’s most effective Indian fighters
whose passing was marked in public only
by the following:
“[Died] Mackenzie – At New Brighton,
Staten Island, on the 19th January, Brig.Gen. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, United
States Army in the 48th year of his age.”
— The New York Times, Jan. 21, 1889.
This from a newspaper that had vigorously reported on the general’s masterful
Indian fighting over the years. The “Fighting
Colonel,” as he’d once been called, had
been all but forgotten. His Spartan reports
and disregard for fame ensured he maintained a low profile, but those in the know
54
General Custer and his wife Elizabeth
knew well the debt owed Mackenzie.
“There was no editorial appraisal, not even a news item,” wrote
Mackenzie biographer Ernest Wallace in Ranald S. Mackenzie in the
Texas Frontier. “Surely the public would have appreciated a reminder
that Mackenzie in less than three years after graduation from West Point
had received seven brevets for gallantry in action [in the Civil War], six
severe wounds, and a major general’s cavalry command, that in three
years of campaigning he had cleared West Texas of Comanche and
Kiowa Indians, that he had brought quiet to the turbulent Rio Grande
border and order to the Comanche-Kiowa Reservation, that in three
months he had defeated one group of the Indians who had massacred