Wild West – June 2019

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS

WILD WEST JUNE 2019

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brave and capable first lieutenant in George Armstrong Custer’s 7th

U.S. Cavalry, James Ezekiel Porter is memorialized on two headstones—

each standing over an empty grave.

Porter was born on Jan. 12, 1847, in Strong, Maine, the eldest of four sons of Rachel

(née Hunter) and Jeremy Wyman Porter, a Maine senator and trustee of the state re-

form school. James attended the Maine State Seminary (present-day Bates College) in

1842–43, transferred to Norwich University for a year, then in 1864 was appointed

to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point by U.S. Representative Sidney Perham.

Porter graduated 16th out of 39 in Class of 1869.

The second lieutenant was promptly appointed to the recently formed 7th U.S.

Cavalry, nominally commanded by Colonel Samuel D. Sturgis, though in fact led

in the field by Lt. Col. Custer. A Yankee hero, Custer had risen to the rank of brevet

general during the Civil War, though Porter’s appointment came on the heels of the

A BLOODY JACKET,

AN EMPTY GRAVE

KILLED AT THE 1876 BATTLE OF

THE LITTLE BIGHORN, 1ST LT. JAMES PORTER

WAS BURIED IN SPIRIT IF NOT IN BODY

BY JOHN KOSTER

Lieutenant James Ezekiel Porter’s body was

never found. Regardless, he shares this

marker in Stone, Maine, with his parents.

colonel’s controversial attack on Black

Kettle’s Cheyenne village on the Washi-

ta River in Indian Territory (present-day

Oklahoma). The lieutenant duly reported

for frontier duty in Kansas.

Porter’s first action wasn’t against the

Indians on the Great Plains, however, but

against the Ku Klux Klan in the occupied

South. In the wake of their failed rebellion,

unreconstructed Confederates began abus-

ing blacks, especially former Union sol-

diers, in a wholesale effort to prevent them

from exercising their newfound rights and

voting in any of the 11 states that had com-

prised the Confederacy. Beatings and mur-

ders of blacks and their white defenders

became frequent. But as such crimes re-

mained under state jurisdiction, the offend-

ers usually got off.

President Ulysses S. Grant, who had de-

tested slavery and also coveted the black

vote, promulgated the Enforcement Acts,

the raison d’être of the newly created

Justice Department. Designed to protect

blacks’ rights to vote, hold office and serve

on juries, the acts allowed the federal gov-

ernment to intervene on their behalf. Not

incidentally, Grant also sent elements of

the 7th Cavalry from the Plains to the re-