JUNE 2019 WILD WEST 23PIONEERS & SETTLERSgions of the South that came under Klan control
after dark. Lieutenant Porter served in Chester,
S.C.; Rutherfordton and Lincolnton, N.C.; and
then the Kentucky towns of Shelbyville, Lebanon
and Louisville. In wartime Union officers had come
to admire such Confederate cavaliers as Jeb Stuart,
but Porter—hailing from Maine, where neither slav-
ery nor secession had a following—was not one
of them. One fellow West Pointer wrote of Porter’s
“energy and discretion, [which] formed a combi-
nation sufficiently rare and valuable to give him
a name among his fellows.”
Reconstruction duties kept the 7th Cavalry and
other units busy. By 1872 federal grand juries had
indicted more than 3,000 Klansmen, releasing those
who tattled on the “Invisible Empire,” while send-
ing 600 of the more violent Klansmen to the fed-
eral penitentiary in Albany, N.Y. Backed by Grant’s
Justice officials, the soldiers effectively suppressed
the Klan. For his part Porter earned promotion
to first lieutenant and was assigned to Company I,
serving as company commander during the ab-
sences of Captain Myles Keogh. In 1873 the regi-
ment moved its headquarters to Fort Abraham
Lincoln, Dakota Territory, and that year Porter, an
engineer, was assigned to the Northern Boundary
Survey based in Minnesota.
By June 1876 Porter and his wife had moved 14
times. Eliza had given birth to their second child
that March, and James, seeking a more settled exis-
tence, had requested general staff duty. Instead, the
29-year-old lieutenant got a trip to the Little Bighorn
in eastern Montana Territory. As the troop readied
for departure, Keogh, who’d befriended the family,
gave Eliza a satchel of letters to be burned in the
event of his death. As that “gallant Irishman” was
fond of the ladies and had twice been engaged, one
can appreciate the priority of his request.
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Porter charged
down on the Little Bighorn behind Captain Keogh,
then into conjecture occasioned by his disappear-
ance. According to early 20th-century historian
Charles Kuhlman, a ranking expert on the battle,
Porter’s section of Company I struck the attack-
ing Indians on the flank and briefly slowed their
advance. Other experts claimed Keogh left to join
Custer, leaving Porter to command Company I for
the rest of the battle. But Keogh, an upper-class
Irishman and veteran of combat on both sides of
the Atlantic, knew that no officer ever leaves his
company in a fight. Though suffering an agoniz-
ing gunshot wound that shattered one knee and
wounded his horse Comanche (who would survive
the battle), Keogh clenched his teeth and fought
like an angry grizzly, surrounded by his fiercely
loyal enlisted men. The captain was probably theOn June 25,
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man extolled by Indian participants as “the bravest
of the brave.” Out of respect for his courage—and
perhaps for the “medicine” in the Catholic religious
medal around his neck—they spared him the grue-
some ritual mutilation visited on other soldiers’
corpses. Porter may not have been as fortunate.
“I found Porter’s coat with two bullets through
it,” Colonel Richard E. Thompson told Custer
researcher Walter Mason Camp in 1911. A Civil
War veteran and fellow West Pointer from Maine,
Thompson was a second lieutenant with the 6th
Infantry in 1876 and explored the Indian village
two days after Custer’s Last Stand. He saw the three
burial tepees with a total of 21 dead Indians—not
the 60 to 75 dead Indians confabulated in later
years. John F. McBlain described finding buckskin
jackets belonging to fellow Lieutenants Porter and
James Sturgis, “bloodstained and with numerous
bullet holes in each.” Five other witnesses saw the
jackets, but no one found Porter’s corpse. In the
wake of the battle a scraggly old man named D.H.
Ridgeley came forward, claiming to have been a
captive of Sitting Bull and witnessed soldiers being
dragged into the Sioux village and tortured to death.
His published tale soon evaporated when Ridge-
ley’s former employer described the “eyewitness”
as a chronic liar who was actually on the payroll
cutting hay in Minnesota when the regiment met
with catastrophe.
Weeks after the battle family and friends held
a memorial service for James Porter, sans body,
at the Congregational Church in Strong, Maine,
and in 1910 battlefield superintendent Oscar Wright
put up a stone marker for the lieutenant on the Little
Bighorn. Widow Eliza, whom Congress had granted
an especially generous pension in 1882, followed
James in death in 1915. She’d lived long enough to
see the Grand Army of the Republic post in Weld,
Maine, and a U.S. Coast Artillery battery at Fort
Hunt, Virginia, named in her husband’s honor.Top: Lieutenant Porter
once owned this 1860
cavalry saber and
this Smith & Wesson
No. 3 revolver. Above:
Captain Myles Keogh
commanded Company I,
Porter’s 7th Cavalry unit.