Custer's Last Stand has been portrayed in many paintings, and here is another. I've been doing a lot of reading about this period and have found many references to Custer. His story is an incidental result, though, because I'm more interested in the people around him. When he left Fort Abraham Lincoln for his massacre just a couple miles south of where I write, he took along quite a gathering of men, animals, material, and equipment. Twelve hundred men, 1600 animals, 250 wagons, private contractors to freight food and supplies, etc. General Terry, head of the two mile column, said that the 16oo animals ate at the rate of 12,000 pounds and more of grain per day which was equivalent to the contents of three of the heavy wagons. In another of his diary entries he said they found ground very soft in places and the mules had great difficulty in pulling the wagons. Only by doubling up the teams could they get through.
Other sources talk of some unmounted cavalry who were not issued horses because of the shortage marched like the infantry, but their riding boots were very unsuited to walking. Rattlesnakes existed in profusion. Hooves and boots balled up with soft gumbo. Food was bad. Hailstorms badly bruised them. Stampedes needed to be dealt with, etc. It was not an easy march.
The first poet to write and publish poetry in what is now the state of North Dakota was Enoch George Adams, a captain in the 1st U. S. Volunteer Infantry stationed at Fort Rice which is situated just a few miles south of Fort Lincoln. Here is one of his poems published in 1865 which expresses his displeasure with the life:
What the American Eagle Thinks of Dacotah
The American eagle has flown to the West,
Leaving the land that she loveth best,
Has gone to Dacotah to dwell in the wild,
A land on which God in his mercy ne'er smiled,
Which Missouri flows through with its river of mud,
Where no flowers ever blossom or trees ever bud,
Save the cottonwood mean or the willow so tough;
If you've split them or burnt them you know well enough.
And there she has perched on a wild deseert cliff
To take of the air that's around her a sniff.
She hears an old wolf that comes out of his den;
He switches his tail and then burrows again.
She sees a small prairie dog come forth to bark,
Then retire once more to his hermitage dark.
Then she spies in a thicket of cottonwood brush
An elk through the wilderness go with a rush,
Then a buffalo herd canter by with a roar,
Shake their tails and their horns till she sees them no more.
Then an Indian at last in his skins and his paint
Gives the air that's around her a repulsive taint.
A flock of lean buzzards wheel off in the blue
To add to the desolate cast of the view.
The earth it is bare wherever she looks.
She sees neither fountains nor clear water brooks
And plains like Sahara where simoons have swept
And hills on whose summits no dew ever wept.
"If this is the land of Dacotah," she cries
"I pity the 1st U. S. V. at Fort Rice."
Then plumes her gay wings and soars far from the scene
To lands more delightful and skies more serene.
