George Custer

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Old Print Article: “Home For Calamity Jane,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1901)

June 27, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Calamity” Jane died in Terry, South Dakota, on August 1, 1903.

One of the most storied of all American frontier legends was Martha Jane Canary, better known as “Calamity” Jane. A sharpshooter, she was a contemporary of “Wild Bill” Hickok and General George Custer. But the harsh elements can get the best of the heartiest soul, and Jane found herself on the decline as she neared her fiftieth birthday. A story about her published two years before her death in the July 12, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Anaconda, Mont.–Mrs. Josephine Winfield Brake of Buffalo, N.Y., authoress and Washington correspondent for a New York newspaper, has been in Montana for the past week searching for ‘Calamity’ Jane, the noted plainswoman. Yesterday Mrs. Brake discovered ‘Calamity’ Jane  in the hut of a negress at Horr, near Livingston. The poor woman was suffering with fever and was broken in spirit. The scene that followed the offer of Mrs. Brake to take ‘Calamity’ to her own home in Buffalo, where she could spend the remainder of her days in comfort, was pathetic in the extreme.

‘Calamity’ Jane has been on the frontier since she was a young girl. She was in the Black Hills at the time of the killing of ‘Wild Bill’ (William Hickok), and it was said that it was she who captured his murderer. She rendered valuable services to Custer, Reno, Egan and other Indian fighters. Of late years she has drifted about the state from place to place, making a livelihood as best she could. During the summer she sold pictures of herself to park tourists. During the past couple of years she has been ill a considerable portion of the time. The newspapers have largely printed severe articles concerning her, some of which attracted the attention of General Egan and others, who interested themselves in the woman’s plight. The result was that Mrs. Brake took steps to find Jane and the two women have now left Livingston for Buffalo.

‘Calamity’ Jane is about 50 years of age. Her maiden name was Canary and she is said to be from New York. She has been married more than once, her last husband being one Burke, a Livingston drayman.”

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“George Custer, Shot Through The Temple, Was Found With A Peaceful Expression On His Face”

April 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the things that interests me most about human beings is our tendency to self-delusion, those moments when we take a path so far afield, so confidently that it’s stunning. I don’t mean when we’re basing our decisions on faulty or incomplete information or when there’s a Taleb-ian black swan at play. I mean those times when we should certainly know better but our brains convince us otherwise. I would suggest that maybe it’s an evolutionary survival mechanism, except that such behavior can get us killed. And we all possess this ability to be block out the truth. We are wrong though we think we are right.

George Armstrong Custer, for instance, knew he was correct. From “It Was Only 75 Years Ago,” Life magazine’s 1951 retrospective of the Battle of the Little Bighorn:

“He pressed forward although his men were weary and his supply train far behind.

Even when, on the morning of June 25, his force sighted a huge smoke haze on the other side of the Little Bighorn, indicating an enormous Indian camp, Custer disregarded warnings of his officers and scouts that a great mass of enemy was near. (It was, in fact, the biggest Indian mobilization in U.S. history.)

Inexplicably Custer divided his small force into three. He sent 120 men under Captain Frederick Benteen on patrol of the south. He then ordered Major Marcus Reno and 112 men to move toward what he still stubbornly believed was only 1,500 Sioux. Benteen encountered nothing. Reno ran into several thousand Sioux, made a desperate stand, then retreated with hideous losses to the other side of the river. There, joined by Benteen, he was able to re-form. Custer, to the perennial mystification of historians, never came to Reno’s support but, after trying to cross the river, proceeded north. He sent back a last message: ‘Benteen: Come on. Big Village. Be quick. Bring packs.’

Knowledge of what happened after that exists only in the misty minds of a few old Indians. Some 20 miles from where he separated his command, Custer and his 225 men were overwhelmed by almost 6,000 vengeful Sioux. From battlefield evidence they attacked from the southwest, drove the cavalrymen up a little mound and there killed them, including Mark Kellogg, a Bismarck, N. Dak. Tribune correspondent whom Custer brought along (against orders) to chronicle his new triumph and whose dispatches were later found in his pouch. Some of the dead were horribly mutilated; most were stripped. But George Custer, shot through the temple, was found with a peaceful expression on his face. He looked like a man who, hungry for glory all his life, had finally found it.”

Pile of bones remaining on the Little Bighorn battlefield, 1877.

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