Wild West – June 2019

JUNE 2019 WILD WEST 53

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Did the grieving Samuel Sturgis offer reliable criticism

of the commander who died with his men on the Little Bighorn?

By John Koster

THE

COLONEL

WHO BLAMED

CUSTER

C

olonel Samuel Sturgis was a hard-luck soldier—

though his hardest luck fell on his regiment during

the ill-fated June 1876 battle on Montana Terri-

tory’s Little Bighorn River while he was on detached duty at

a recruiting depot 1,000 miles away in St. Louis. Seventh U.S.

Cavalry Second Lieutenant James Garland “Jack” Sturgis of

Company E, the colonel’s firstborn son, was one of three regi-

mental officers whose bodies were never identified after Custer’s

Last Stand that June 25. A pair of bloodied underdrawers found

in the Indian village after the battle were tentatively identified as

having belonged to the lieutenant. One of four severed heads

found in the village suggested to some officers that 22-year-old

Sturgis may have been captured, tortured and mutilated. Most

accounts from Indian participants deny they took any prisoners

into the village—though after a battle in which upward of 10

Indian women and children were killed in a surprise attack,

ritual mutilation was positively rampant.

Lieutenant Sturgis’ death came little more than a year after

that of his 4-year-old brother, Thomas Glenn Sturgis, who died

of natural causes at Jefferson Barracks, Mo. Thus their father

was doubly devastated.

In his anguish Sturgis touched off what came to be a leading

alternative version of the Last Stand—that Lt. Col. George Arm-

strong Custer and the “Custer Clan” of loyal officers were to

blame for the catastrophe, elsewhere widely attributed to the

purported cowardice of Major Marcus Reno and the deliberate