Historical Notes: Reno’s Last Stand

For nearly a century, the name of Major Marcus Reno has been tainted with the suspicion that his cowardice was responsible for the massacre of Custer’s Last Stand. Last week Manhattan Bartender Charles Reno, a grandnephew of the ill-fated cavalry officer, asked the Army to return the major to full rank and take his body from an unmarked grave in Washington for burial among his comrades at Custer Battlefield National Cemetery in Montana.

Reno, a West Point graduate, was second in command of the 7th Cavalry’s 600 troopers on June 25, 1876, when Lieut. Colonel George Armstrong Custer ordered the attack at Little Big Horn. For days, scouts had been telling Custer that thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians were encamped in the area, but he had dismissed the reports as exaggerations. “I guess we’ll get through with them in one day,” he said.

In his battle plan, according to a well-documented biography of Reno, Faint the Trumpet Sounds, Custer gave the major three companies to attack the south end of the camp, keeping five companies for himself, which Reno thought Custer would use to support him if he ran into heavy opposition. Reno’s force of 112 officers and men had barely forded the Little Big Horn River when at least 500 Indians hit the front line and left flank. No relief force was in sight, and Reno ordered his men to dismount and fight on foot. Against odds as high as 10 to 1, Reno’s men managed to advance to the first tepees of the camp before the Indians started to cut off their lines of retreat.

Reno ordered his men to remount and charge through the encircling Indians in a desperate fight to escape annihilation. By the time the retreating force managed to recross the river, less than two hours after first fording it, 32 men had been killed, 18 wounded, and 18 were missing. Reno and his survivors hastily dug defensive positions atop a hill on the east bank of the river where they were reinforced by three other cavalry companies, but remained pinned for nearly 20 hours, fighting off as many as 4,000 Indians. Only with the threat of the arrival of fresh troops under General Alfred Howe Terry did the Indians break off the siege.

Hurrah, Boys! Meanwhile, Custer had sighted the eastern edge of the Indian camp and decided to attack. Thinking the warriors were asleep in their tepees, Custer shouted: “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them! We’ll finish them up and then go home.” With 205 men and a newspaper reporter, Custer charged—and the rest is history.

Reno’s life from that day forward was a dismal descent into dishonor.

Though an Army board of inquiry termed his defense of the hill “heroic” and cleared him of any blame in the massacre, he was repeatedly—and falsely—accused of having saved his own neck by failing to go to Custer’s aid. The next year he was court-martialed for making a pass at a fellow officer’s wife, and in 1880 he was dishonorably discharged on complaints—hardly startling in the Wild West—such as fighting, drunkenness, peeping in a window at the girl he loved, and unabashedly hiccuping at a dinner party. Though he had served with such distinction in the Civil War that he was given the rank of brevet brigadier general at the age of 30, Reno was never able to clear his name and return to the Army. He died in 1889, poor and friendless.

The Army Board for Correction of Military Records last week heard an intriguing explanation why Reno was hounded by malicious gossip and ousted on such flimsy charges. The reason, argued Reno Partisan Gene L. Fattig of the American Legion, was that “Mrs. Custer, who didn’t happen to die until 1933, was obsessed with this matter. As a result of her persistent efforts to blame someone other than Custer, the blame fell on a man named Marcus Reno.”