Here’s another guest post by John Bullard. Today, June 25, is the 145th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Robert E. Howard was definitely a born story-teller, and in his letters to his author pen-pals, he definitely followed the rule to never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Since the anniversary of the battle has just passed, let’s look at what Howard had to say about it. In the middle of his August 9, 1932 letter to H.P. Lovecraft, Howard segues from talking about Texas gunfighters to the Battle of the Little Bighorn:

“I regret the fate of the brave unfortunate men with Custer, from whatever state they came, but as for that cold-blooded murderer, the only regret I have is that the dead lay over his corpse so thick that the Indians failed to find and scalp it. Long Hair, they called him, and his yellow locks fell to his shoulders. A few years hanging in the smoke of a filthy Sioux lodge would have tarnished that gleaming gold; would have more closely fitted the color of his soul.”

Howard then proceeds to talk about the battle and focuses on two participants, Lakota Chief Rain in the Face and Tom Custer¹, George’s younger brother. Howard pinned the bulk of his discussion on the killing of Tom Custer by Rain in the Face in revenge for Tom arresting him for the murders of two white men:

“The Indians didn’t often have a chance to glut their vengeance to the full as at the Little Big Horn. But it was a splendid galaxy of war-chiefs that confronted the blue-coats — Gall, Crazy Horse, Rain-in-the-Face, others almost equally famous. I suppose Sitting Bull should have some credit, though like most politicians and priests, he was making “big medicine” in a canyon some miles away while the real fighting was in progress. Rain-in-the-Face is my favorite of that group. I have nothing against Tom Custer, whose career he ended so bloodily, but I admire guts in any man, and Rain had enough for a regiment. You know in the Sun Dance, when the raw-hides tore through Rain’s flesh too quickly, Sitting Bull claimed that he had had no fair test of manhood and Rain bade Bull give him a test. The medicine man cut deep through the back muscles and passed the rawhide thongs through the slits, and they hanged him high. There he swung for two days, singing his war-chants and boasting of his bloody deeds — he boasted of murdering a couple of white men, a veterinary and a sutler, straggling from General Stanley’s expedition, and thereby hangs a tale, and Tom Custer’s doom was written in blood. At last they bound buffalo skulls to his feet, and by terrific efforts, the young brave tore free, rending the flesh and tendons in such a way that for years he had depressions as large as a man’s fists in his back. But his boasts had been overheard, and Little Hair — Tom Custer — arrested him and threw him in a guardhouse to await execution. White men imprisoned there helped him escape. He sent Tom Custer a bit of white buffalo hide, with a bloody heart drawn on it with the artistry of the Sioux. It was his way of saying he would eat the white man’s heart when next he met him.

“They met in the howling, blind, red frenzy of the Little Big Horn. Tom Custer was a brave man; none braver on all the frontier. But when he saw his enemy riding at him through the drift of the storm, naked, bloody, painted like a fiend, lashed to his naked steed, he must have frozen with the realization of his unescapable doom. Unaccustomed fear shook his iron hand, and his shots went wide — the painted rider raced in, a naked knife glittered in the dust, blood spurted — and out of the melee rode Rain-in-the-Face, holding a quivering dripping heart on high — blood trickling from the corner of his mouth — blood that was not his own.”

While this incredible version of Rain-in-the-Face’s revenge on Tom Custer is not true, one would think to chalk it up to Howard’s imagination running wild to entertain Lovecraft with a great story as he was want to do. However, Howard actually was relaying what was commonly accepted as having happened during the battle based on two sources: an account Rain-in-the-Face gave years afterwards, and remarkably enough, a poem by one of Howard’s favorite poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face”.

A Brief Synopsis of the Battle

The Battle of the Little Bighorn has long been written and argued over in the decades since the guns fell silent. As most of the men of the Seventh Cavalry who survived were 5 miles away from where the Custers met their fates and could not see what happened, stories ran wild about what transpired. The Native Warriors were reluctant to tell their side for fear of being prosecuted for years, until they began to trust the whites, and their stories began to come out and were checked against reports of what the soldiers found on the battlefield two days after the battle ended. Finally, the huge archaeological excavations that occurred after the massive grass fire that swept over the battlefield in the mid-1980’s further added to determining what happened. To keep this article short, I will give a brief synopsis of what are the generally agreed and substantiated facts of the battle to help the reader understand the timeline of the battle.

First, George Custer with his Seventh Cavalry out scouting ahead of the main body of the U.S. Army’s force that had been sent out to collect the “renegade” tribes and return them to the reservations finally caught up to the tribes’ trail. Custer’s scouts were able to spot the huge village on the Little Bighorn River from several miles away, and when told, Custer ordered an attack. He split his force up into 4 groups, one group commanded by Captain Frederick Benteen was to sweep to the west of the encampment for escapees and if he found none, to rejoin the battle; one group commanded by Major Marcus Reno was to attack and draw the attention of the Indians from the south of their encampment; the largest group, led by Custer, was to attack the village further up from the north and east; and finally, their supply train group was to follow along behind the three groups. Benteen, following orders, found no Indians to the south and west, and was en route back to rejoin the fight. Reno attacked the huge encampment from the south, and was quickly overrun by the unexpectedly huge mass of warriors. He then led his troops on a mad dash across the Little Bighorn River and up onto the bluffs overlooking the village, where he made his stand and was joined by Benteen and his troops.

Custer, not having seen the encampment from where his scouts first saw it, and not realizing how huge it was and how many warriors they were facing, finally saw the encampment from the bluffs looking down as Reno’s force was being overrun, and continued on his way with his group to find a place to cross the river and attack the village further up the river while the Indians’ attention was being drawn by Reno’s attack. Custer then further divided his own group with one force going further north and east to hold a hill as a base and apparently be reinforcements. The second group he sent to cross the river at a ford to attack the village, and it was repulsed by the Indians immediately. Finally, he took his last group with him further north, hunting for another ford to cross over and attack. These three groups, being dis-coordinated and very separated, attempted to rejoin each other as they were swarmed by the Indians, but were cut down in various positions with survivors making mad dashes to join the next nearest group on the next ridge or hill, and either being killed on their flights, or dying when the next group they made it to was overwhelmed by the Indians. Custer, his brother Tom, and his younger brother Boston Custer, and their nephew, Henry Reed all died on the hill forever-after named “Last Stand Hill”, with Tom’s body lying next to George’s. Tom’s body had been so badly mutilated by the Indians that he was only able to be identified by a tattoo of his initials on his arm. A doctor’s post mortem report on him said his heart had not been removed, and neither had George’s heart.

Where Howard Got His Version

Howard was a huge fan of Longfellow’s poetry. He mentions Longfellow’s poetry in letters to Tevis Clyde Smith in September, 1927, and May, 1928, and tells Lovecraft in an October 1930 letter that he had memorized “The Luck of Edenhall”: “In my early childhood I memorized Longfellow’s poem about it.”(Lovecraft, Oct. 1930). Longfellow’s name is in Howard’s list of his favorite poets that he gives to Lovecraft in a December 1932 letter. (Lovecraft, ca. Dec. 1932).

In “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face” poem, written in 1878, Longfellow writes that the Lakota chiefs were angry at the whites, and Rain-in-the-Face specifically calls their leader “the White Chief with yellow hair” in the poem, meaning George Custer, as Tom was a subordinate officer. The poem continues leading up to the battle, and the penultimate stanza says this:

“ And Rain-in-the-Face, in his flight
Uplifted high in air
As a ghastly trophy, bore
The brave heart, that beat no more,
Of the White Chief with yellow hair.”²

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clearly, Longfellow was writing that Rain-in-the-Face took George Custer’s heart, not Tom’s, as there is no mention of Rain-in-the-Face seeking revenge for his capture by Tom. So where did the idea that Rain-in-the-Face had sworn revenge on Tom Custer, and carved out his heart come from? Possibly from two stories that were reported to have come from Rain-in-the-Face, himself.

Rain-in-the-Face’s Two Versions of His Day of Battle

The first version that Rain-in-the-Face allegedly gave was in 1894, and reported by the writer, W. Kent Thomas, in a periodical in 1903³. In this story, Rain-in-the-Face meets Thomas and another man, McFadden. Thomas plied the warrior with liquor to get him talking. An interpreter was brought in, and the two men proceeded to question Rain-in-the-Face on how he had been captured by Tom Custer, “Little Hair” as the Lakota called him. Rain-in-the-Face tells them that he had killed the sutler and the veterinarian that Howard writes of on a dare to impress a woman. He was later captured by Tom Custer when Rain-in-the-Face went to the Indian Agency and Tom Custer and 30 men jumped him from behind and threw him in jail. Rain-in-the-Face escaped with a fellow white prisoner and sent the picture of the bloody heart on the buffalo skin to Little Hair to let Tom know Rain-in-the-Face was now gunning for him.

Rain-in-the-Face then narrates the battle after the two men question him about it. He comes to his interaction with Tom on that hot, June day:

“This time I saw Little Hair. I remembered my vow. I was crazy; I feared nothing. I knew nothing would hurt me, for I had my white weasel-tail charm on.* (He wears the charm to this day.) I don’t know how many I killed trying to get at him. He knew me. I laughed at him and yelled at him. I saw his mouth move, but there was so much noise I couldn’t hear his voice. He was afraid. When I got near enough I shot him with my revolver. My gun was gone, I don’t know where. I leaped from my pony and cut out his heart and bit a piece out of it and spit it in his face. I got back on my pony and rode off shaking it. I was satisfied and sick of fighting; I didn’t scalp him.”⁴

This version became widely known and was accepted as the truth of what happened. But is it really? As already stated, Tom and George still had their hearts upon a postmortem examination by Seventh Cavalry surgeon Dr. H.R. Porter.⁵ Perhaps, with the help of liquor, Rain-in-the-Face was creatively boasting to Thomas and McFadden of things he didn’t do to impress them and keep the liquor flowing. If he really did tell this version to them, he was definitely lying as the facts of the postmortem examination of the Custers showed otherwise. It could also be that Thomas created the story based on the prevailing legend that Rain-in-the-Face had killed and taken Tom’s heart from an incidental meeting with the old chief.

In a later second version of the events of the battle, Rain-in-the-Face tells a different story just before his death in October, 1905, of what happened to a friendly white doctor, which sounds more like the truth of his deeds. Rain-in-the-Face says that he was involved in the fight and gives a general account of what happened. He says he was going to join the fight against Reno’s group at the south-end of the encampment, when they caught sight of Custer’s group heading North along the bluffs looking for a way to cross and attack the village. Rain-in-the-Face then joined the large group of warriors that crossed the river to attack Custer’s force. He relates that the fighting was fierce, and even gives a compliment to the doomed cavalrymen:

“I had always thought that white men were cowards, but I had a great respect for them after this day.”⁶

Rain-in-the-Face then says that the widely accepted story that he is alleged to have related years earlier of his causing the death of Tom Custer was not true:

“Many lies have been told of me. Some say that I killed the Chief [George Custer], and others that I cut out the heart of his brother [Tom Custer], because he had caused me to be imprisoned. Why, in that fight the excitement was so great that we scarcely recognized our nearest friends!

Everything was done like lightning. After the battle we young men were chasing horses all over the prairie, while the old men and women plundered the bodies; and if any mutilating was done, it was by the old men.”⁷

Conclusion

Apparently, the myth of Rain-in-the-Face’s revenge on Tom Custer took on a life of its own. Obviously, it can’t all be laid at Longfellow’s poem, as he was clearly writing about George and not Tom in it. But, somehow Longfellow’s poem became attached to Tom’s demise, and was fairly widespread enough that the first appearance of Rain-in-the-Face talking about his actions on that day were tied to his interactions with Tom Custer. Howard, more than likely in his fondness for Longfellow, read the poem and fixed it to his mind that this is what happened to Tom Custer. He also may have heard the first version that Rain-in-the-Face allegedly gave, possibly by reading the book it was widely available in, Indian Fights and Fighters, and when he wrote about it to Lovecraft, Howard only embellished the story a little. Howard thereby further passed on a “legend”.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”—from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

NOTES

1. Tom Custer had won two Congressional Medals of Honor during the closing days of the American Civil War, when he had grabbed two Confederate standards during Lee’s attempt to escape Grant’s pursuing army after the Fall of Petersburg in two separate engagements. During the second attempt, Tom was shot in the face, and carried the scar for the rest of his life.
2. From “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face”, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Longfellow: The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face, Keramos and Other Poems (hwlongfellow.org) a Maine historical society website, accessed June 24, 2021.,
3. Bruce Brown: “It originally appeared in Outdoor Life, Vol. XI., No. 3, for March, 1903.” Rain In The Face’s Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn #2 (astonisher.com) . It was later included in Indian Fights and Fightersby Cyrus Townsend Brady, McClure, Philips & Co., New York, NY,1904 p 279 – 292. 
4. 100 Voices from the Little Bighorn: Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Arikara and American eye-witness accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Annotated) Kindle Edition, by Bruce Brown (Author)
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Sources

Letters

To Tevis Clyde Smith: ca. mid- to late-September 1927, ca. May 1928.

To H.P. Lovecraft: ca. October 1930, August 9, 1932, ca. December 1932

Texts

Brown, Bruce. 100 Voices from the Little Bighorn: Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Arikara and American eye-witness accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Annotated) Kindle Edition.

Roehm, Rob, and Bullard, John. (Eds.) (2021), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Vol. 1 1924-1929, (2^nd edition), REHF Press

Roehm, R. (Ed.) (2007), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume Two: 1930-1932, REHFP

Websites

Brown, Bruce. Rain In The Face’s Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn #1 (astonisher.com) . Accessed June 24, 2021.

Brown, Bruce. Rain In The Face’s Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn #2 (astonisher.com) . Accessed June 24, 2021.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: A Maine Historical Society Web Site (hwlongfellow.org) Accessed June 24, 2021.

John Bullard is a retired attorney who lives in Texas, and has updated The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard for The Robert E Howard Foundation Press, which will soon be available for purchase. He became a life-long Howard fan upon reading his first Howard story in an anthology of horror stories in 1974. While working on the Letters, he started seeing the subject matter of this post and has written it up for the education and edification of other Howard-ophiles. John is currently working on several projects for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.