Portrait of a civilian 235ordered execution of a like number of
Custer's captive men, but the Southerners
blanched after carrying out half of the
brutal job and let the rest go. Twelve
years later, Custer himself wound up at
the mercy of merciless men and died
with scores of his troopers at the Battle
of the Little Big Horn.
James Barroll Washington became a
railroad president after the war and died in
- His father, Ella's husband, died in
1871, leaving the widow without many
resources. Ella used her Washington
connections to assist ex-Confederates in
procuring Federal pardons after the war.
When that lucrative but short-term business
died down, she subsided into genteel poverty
and died in New York in 1898.Lieutenant James Barroll Washington and Captain
George Armstrong Custer in 1862, while Washington
was a prisoner of war in the keeping of his old friend
from the US Military Academy. (Little Bighorn Battlefield
National Monument, National Park Service)