Officer’s Letters Add to the Custer Saga

It’s the kind of thing a historian lives for: coming across never-published letters and postcards written in the field by an officer of the 7th Cavalry who fought at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The battle, in which Gen. George Armstrong Custer split his men into three battalions, resulted in the deaths of Custer and more than 200 of his men.

The correspondence, chronicling the battle on June 25, 1876, and the Army’s monthslong campaign against the Plains Indians, was written by 2nd Lt. George D. Wallace to his friend, Dr. Charles F. Knoblauch, an Army contract surgeon in Shreveport, La.

During the battle, Wallace was with a battalion commanded by Maj. Marcus Reno, which Custer had sent forward with assurance that he would follow in support. Reno lost a third of his more than 115 men.

Wallace detailed the battle in a letter to his friend, one in a series of correspondences written from the time he left Shreveport for Dakota Territory in April 1876 until March 1877.

The surviving letters and postcards kept by Knoblauch were handed down to Knoblauch’s daughter. She passed them on to her sons, one of whom lives in La Habra, upon her death in 1988.

“This material is as good as it gets,” said historian and publisher Doug Westfall, 47, of Orange, who learned of the letters’ existence in 1994 and has now published them in a book.

“Letters From the Field: Wallace at the Little Big Horn” (Paragon Agency; $18.76) contains transcriptions of Wallace’s correspondence as well as Knoblauch’s correspondence log and diary entries. Westfall has also provided a detailed glossary of names, places and arcane terminology.

Wallace’s most significant letter was written while the 7th Cavalry was camped at the mouth of the Big Horn River on July 4, 1876, the nation’s centennial. It was nine days after Custer and his men died and two days before news of the battle made national headlines. In the letter, the 25-year-old second lieutenant provides his friend in Shreveport with “a rough sketch of our last campaign.”

Nearly 121 years later, Wallace’s words remain as haunting as they must have been the day that Knoblauch first read them:

“The Indians surrounded us & poured in a deadly fire, but we had to lie still and take it. . . .”

“With less than 100 men, we were fighting the whole Sioux nation. . . .”

“During the day we moved our wounded to Gen’l Terry’s Camp and got our remnant ready for moving. The next morning we moved to the scene of Gen’l Custer’s fight, but the sight was too horrible to describe. We buried 204 bodies and encamped near Gen’l Terry. But the smell of dead horses forced him to move camp several miles.”

Historian James Willert of Oceanside, author of “Little Big Horn Diary,” which is considered the bible of the battle, said the Wallace correspondence is an impressive discovery.

Willert, who wrote the foreword to the book, said Wallace’s July 4 letter, in particular, was quite a find.

“It provides additional insights and understanding of the battle as seen by one of the major officers with the command. The other letters in the collection are extremely valuable too because they touch on the human side of the campaign.”

Willert, who has spent 40 years studying the Army’s 1876 campaign against the Plains Indians, said letters written by soldiers at the Battle of the Little Big Horn turn up from time to time. Another recently discovered letter, written in the field by 7th Cavalry Capt. Myles Moylan on July 6, 1876, was published in the Little Big Horn Associates newsletter a year ago.

Because there were no white survivors under Custer’s immediate command, the only eyewitness accounts of his part of the battle are from the point of view of the Indians who fought there. Historians say, though, that Indian accounts of the battle involving the other battalions a few miles away coincide with those provided by surviving soldiers.

“It’s always nice to find material that’s going to be appropriate to add to our knowledge of the campaign, especially the battle,” Willert said.

Westfall first learned of the Wallace letters while preparing a lecture on California history--his specialty--for a 1994 fund-raising event at a small museum. The museum had three pieces of Wallace’s correspondence pertaining to the Army’s Plains Indians campaign.

“I knew immediately that they had great historic value simply because Wallace himself had been at the Little Big Horn,” Westfall said.

When told that the owner of the letters, Joe Dew, possessed more of Wallace’s correspondence, Westfall contacted the La Habra man.

Dew, 77, a retired Rockwell International aerospace engineer, said in an interview he was well aware of the historical value of the letters he and his brother, Clifton Dew of San Antonio, Texas, had inherited from their mother.

Dew said he had lent one letter and two postcards to the museum for an exhibit. Among the correspondence not included was Wallace’s July 4 letter describing the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Recalled Dew: “I showed Doug the other letters and his eyes bugged out.”

Westfall, whose home-based publishing company, the Paragon Agency, specializes in publishing historical books and publications, asked for permission to publish the letters. In exchange, Westfall agreed to help Dew find a home for the correspondence so it could be protected and available to researchers.

The Wallace and Knoblauch material is now housed in the A.K. Smiley Library in Redlands, which has a major collection of Lincoln memorabilia, in addition to material on the Civil War and the Indian wars.

From Knoblauch’s correspondence log, Westfall knows that Knoblauch received at least 19 cards or letters from Wallace. From the log, he also knows that 11 of the 19 pieces of Wallace’s correspondence are missing. The book contains five postcards and three letters.

Among the missing letters is the last one Wallace sent to Knoblauch on March 23, 1877.

Westfall said the correspondence between the two men “stopped suddenly, and we don’t know why.” He has a theory, however.

As a cavalry officer, Wallace moved around a lot. And when Knoblauch’s contract with the Army in Shreveport ended in 1877, he moved to Texas. “It’s possible,” Westfall said, “that they both moved at the same time, not knowing where the other one was.”

Knoblauch died in 1919.

Wallace died in 1890, 14 years after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. He was one of 25 soldiers who died during the assault on a camp of 350 Sioux men, women and children--nearly all of whom were killed.

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As a historian, Westfall said it is the personal nature of the letters from Wallace to Knoblauch that makes them so fascinating.

“It’s two guys writing to each other. They’re 1,500 miles apart--40 days by mail. It’s a personal story about two men, and it gives us a real firsthand look at just some guy who happened to show up at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.”

As recounted by Wallace in his July 4 letter about the battle, scouts for the roughly 525-member 7th Cavalry led by Custer reported, on June 25, they had observed Indians ahead.

Riding about 10 miles farther, the 7th Cavalry stopped about a mile and a half from the Little Big Horn Valley, where, Wallace writes, they found a tepee and saw dust in the distance that the scouts said was a retreating village.

According to Willert, Custer had already ordered one battalion, led by Capt. Frederick Benteen, to try to cut off the escape of the Indians down the valley to the south.

The second battalion led by Reno--and the one Wallace accompanied into battle--was ordered to go into the valley and open the attack on the village. Custer said his battalion would follow.

Reno’s men had gone about two miles into the valley when the attack began.

Wrote Wallace: “Orders were given to mount and charge, and now was the terrible slaughter. If a man’s horse fell he was gone up. . . .”

Going in, they had no idea they would encounter the largest assembly of Plains Indians in history: An estimated 8,000 Indians, more than 3,000 of them warriors. The village was three miles long and half a mile to a mile wide. (Willert said Custer initially thought there would be no more than 1,500 Indians.)

For unknown reasons, Custer did not follow Reno into the valley. Instead, according to Willert, he tried to open an attack on the flank. But Custer and his men had to go several miles along the bluffs before they found a place to cross into the valley.

At that point, the Indians, who had been watching him, swarmed up the bluff--an estimated 2,000 warriors against Custer’s 212 men.

Within an hour, Custer and everyone else in his battalion were dead.

The two remaining battalions, unaware of what was happening to Custer, had assembled on a bluff about four miles away.

The desperate battle continued.

Then, Wallace wrote, “Night came on. We dug rifle pits. We could not move our wounded and had to stay. By daylight the next morning [the Indians] commenced and for five hours a man hardly dared to show his head.

“Bullets were thicker than hail.”

By late afternoon on June 26, the battle had ended and the Indians were moving south. (The implication, Willert said, is that the Indians were running low on ammunition and their scouts had seen another column of cavalry--about 400 men--coming from the north.

Wrote Wallace: “I was sent by Major Reno to meet them and escort them to our position, and it was only then that we learned that Gen’l Custer and [and his men] had been massacred.

“Not one man [was] left to tell the story.”

* Doug Westfall will sign copies of “Letters From the Field” from 2:30 to 5 p.m. Wednesday at PJ’s Abbey Restaurant, 182 S. Orange St., Orange. The book, which will be offered for sale at historical conferences and lectures, is also available by calling (714) 771-0652.