On June 25, 1876, as the Seventh Cavalry advanced toward the Little Big Horn River, Sergeant Frank Finkle urged his struggling horse forward, fighting to keep pace with C Company. He was the tallest and one of the heaviest men in the regiment, and his mount was failing beneath him. Sergeant Daniel Knipe rode beside him, close to Captain Tom Custer, when Finkle called out that his horse was giving out. Knipe answered, come on Finkle, if you can, and then dropped back to hurry the ammunition pack train.
It was the last time anyone in C Company would see Finkle alive before the battle that destroyed them all. Over the years that followed the massacre, many men came forward claiming to have survived Custer’s Last Stand. Around seventy elderly men told historians and journalists between 1876 and the 1920s about their daring escapes, spinning tales of hiding beneath blankets, crawling into hollow horse carcasses, or being saved by chiefs’ daughters who had fallen in love with them. Most of these stories were fantasy.
Frank Finkle’s account was different because it was true, and for decades the evidence proving it lay buried in the National Archives, the U. S. Census Bureau, and the Columbia County Auditor’s Office in Dayton, Washington. Pieced together with published accounts, those records confirmed what Finkle had always claimed: he was the sole known white survivor of the five companies that rode into battle with Custer.
Frank Finkle was born in January 1854 in Washington County, Ohio, the third son of Peter and Magdalena Finkle, both German immigrants. The family farm was worth about five hundred dollars in 1860, an average holding for the region, and the census taker recorded their name as Finkle, a slow anglicization of the Germanic Finkle. Frank grew up bilingual, speaking German at home while receiving a full education in English, a combination that would serve him well in the years ahead. When his father died in 1868, Frank was only fourteen.
The farm could not support six sons, so the older boys scattered in search of work. By January 1872, down on his luck in Chicago with few prospects, Frank did what many young men in his position did. He enlisted in the U. S.
Army. For native-born Americans, joining the ranks was often seen as an admission of economic failure, and many recruits enlisted under false names. Finkle was no exception, but he crafted an alias that would elevate his standing. He adopted the name August Finkle, claimed Berlin, Prussia as his birthplace, and listed his previous occupation as clerk.
Prussian soldiers were highly regarded at the time thanks to Prussia’s recent military victories, and Finkle capitalized on that reputation, telling gullible comrades in the Fifth and later the Seventh Cavalry that he had been a Prussian officer. He kept his real birth date, January 23rd, but changed his age from eighteen to twenty-seven. Physically, Finkle was imposing. Standing just over six feet tall with dark hair, gray eyes, and a strong build, he stood out among his peers.
His size, combined with his language skills, helped him rise quickly, and within two years of enlisting he had been promoted to sergeant. By 1876 he was the second sergeant in C Company of the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Captain Tom Custer, the general’s brother. C Company was known for its high morale and fierce loyalty to the Custer brothers. That loyalty even extended to personal style.
When the Army issued large floppy hats that made the soldiers look like pirates, the men of C Company pooled their money to buy more fashionable hats from a retailer in Chicago. The purchase angered the post trader, who had a monopoly on goods sold at the fort and rarely visited the posts he profited from. Prices were inflated on items like whiskey and canned peaches, while supplies meant for Native Americans often disappeared, leaving them with little but surplus Henry repeating rifles. The Sioux had refused to sell the Black Hills in 1875, and many younger warriors had joined Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other leaders in what army officers called the hostiles.
George Custer, who had testified before Congress about corruption in the post trading system, found himself in hot water in Washington and had to work hard to regain a command role in the upcoming campaign against the Sioux. The Seventh Cavalry, including Tom Custer’s C Company and Second Sergeant Frank Finkle, set out from Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory as part of a three-pronged offensive. As the regiment approached the Little Big Horn River, George Custer refused additional firepower, turning down three Gatling guns, a three-inch Rodman cannon, and two companies from the Second Cavalry. C Company was not so confident.
Rumors swirled that Captain Tom Custer was unusually nervous before the battle. Lieutenant Henry Harrington, second in command, was plagued by nightmares of being tied to a tree and tortured by Native Americans. First Sergeant Edwin Bobo was so anxious that he ordered a small . 22 caliber pistol by mail but forgot to bring it.
As the men rode closer to the river, they found a gruesome sight: a white man’s scalp mounted on a stick. The massive Native encampment, larger than any they had ever seen, did nothing to calm their nerves. C Company led the charge down toward the river on June 25th, but Finkle’s horse was struggling to carry his heavy frame. Despite falling behind, Finkle continued with the group as they reached the stream.
Based on archaeological findings, George Custer initially stopped at the river before pulling his men back to take up three defensive positions. C Company was stationed on Calhoun Hill, overlooking the Hunkpapa village, while Major Marcus Reno led an assault on the other side. Reno’s forces were quickly repelled, and Native warriors armed with superior rifles poured out of the camp. The soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, carrying single-shot Springfield carbines, found themselves outgunned.
Finkle later recalled that as C Company took up positions on the hill, the order came to mount. As he was firing, a bullet struck the butt of his carbine, slamming the steel barrel into his forehead. He was knocked unconscious and hit twice more, once in the leg and once in the side. His horse was also injured, its bridle cut by a bullet and its flank grazed.
In the chaos, as warriors charged uphill, Finkle’s wounded horse bolted, carrying him through the attacking forces, down Calhoun Hill, past the Hunkpapa camp, and out onto the plains. Rain in the Face, a respected Hunkpapa warrior, later told W. Kent Thomas in 1894 that one long sword escaped, his pony running off with him past the lodges at the foot of Calhoun Hill. Finkle was not the only one to break through the Native lines.
Lieutenant Harrington’s body was never recovered. Corporal John Foley also made it out but was chased by three young warriors armed with bows. When Foley ran out of ammunition, he panicked and shot himself with his Colt . 45.
Some historians believe as many as eight men from C Company may have initially escaped, only to be hunted down and killed far from the battlefield. Crow Indian Scouts later found six skeletons with Seventh Cavalry gear, but no official investigation was ever conducted. Trooper Nathan Short managed to ride twenty miles to the Rosebud River before he and his horse collapsed and died. Back on Calhoun Hill, Sergeant Jeremiah Finley, an Irish-born Civil War veteran and friend of Finkle’s, was unhorsed and killed.
First Sergeant Bobo, whose horse was also killed, walked toward Custer Hill, where he died during the final stand. Tom Custer, along with his brothers George and Boston, nephew Autie Reed, and brother-in-law Lieutenant James Calhoun, perished as well. Finkle kept riding, barely conscious and severely injured. Over the next day and night he crossed the three branches of Tullock’s Creek.
He later reported that the southern branches were polluted with alkali but the northernmost had fresh water, a detail later confirmed by Dr. Charles Kouman, a topographer who studied the region days after the battle. Finkle reached the confluence of the Rosebud and Yellowstone Rivers, where he was forced to put his dying horse down with a single shot. In August 1876, Lieutenant Edward Godfrey found the horse’s remains and realized there had been a survivor, but he did not report that the horse was a C Company sorrel until 1921, and the story did not appear in print until the 1950s.
Back at the battlefield, Sergeant Knipe discovered Finley’s mutilated body with twelve arrows in it. He recognized the dead around him but never found Finkle’s horse. While Knipe claimed to have seen Finkle’s body, he never explained how he could identify a corpse that had been lying in the heat for two days. Sergeant Charles Windolph, Finkle’s best friend, returned to the battlefield after the fighting to search for his body but was unable to find it.
Wandering through the wilderness, Finkle eventually encountered a white man chopping wood outside a shack. Startled by the sight of a soldier, the man raised his gun and ordered Finkle away, but Finkle collapsed, and the man relented, helping him inside. Two men, one named Bill, cared for him, probing his leg wound with a pine splinter before cauterizing it with hot pitch. Finkle passed out from the pain, but when he woke, the bleeding had stopped.
For weeks he helped Bill care for a dying man with tuberculosis until he passed away. After burying him, Finkle and Bill parted ways. Finkle eventually made his way back to civilization, where he discovered his entire company had been wiped out at Little Big Horn. His name appeared near the bottom of the casualty list in the Bismarck Tribune.
Officially dead, Finkle may have decided he had enough of the army and chose to remain hidden for about a year. He drifted through St. Louis, working in the dairy business, before moving to California and then settling in Dayton, Washington, where he began buying land, building successful farms, and selling them for profit. In 1886, Finkle married Delia Rainwater, the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Dayton.
He signed the marriage certificate as Finkle but the license as Finkle. On their wedding night, Delia asked about the old gunshot wound on his left side. He told her he had been shot during a fight with Native Americans but did not say where. The bullet in his side eventually worked its way to the surface, and Finkle had a surgeon remove it.
In April 1920, during a casual game of horseshoes, another farmer remarked that Custer had been ambushed by Native Americans. Finkle responded, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. When the neighbor asked how he knew so much, Finkle replied, I was there. Word spread, and he was invited to speak at the Dayton Kiwanis Club.
His account appeared in the local newspaper on April 8th, 1920. Congressman John W. Summers was a guest and promised to seek government recognition of Finkle’s story. Finkle’s account was not the romanticized version of Custer’s Last Stand that had become popular.
It was a gritty, realistic portrayal of a rout, where C Company was broken up and scattered across the battlefield. His description aligned closely with modern archaeological evidence and the testimony of other survivors and Native warriors. Yet he made one additional false claim that complicated his story. While he had initially admitted his name was on the casualty list as August Finkle, he later distanced himself from the alias, claiming a house fire had destroyed his military papers.
After World War I, when anti-German sentiment ran high, his second wife, Hermy, further muddled the record by claiming he had enlisted under the name Frank Hall, a man who had deserted the Seventh Cavalry in 1875. Frank Finkle died in August 1930 at the age of seventy-six, having lived a long and prosperous life as a respected citizen of Dayton. Hermy pursued a pension on his behalf, attempting to prove his status as a Custer survivor, but she mistakenly denied that Finkle and Finkle were the same person and made conflicting claims about his identity. Her efforts continued until her own death in 1951.
Sergeant Charles Windolph, Finkle’s old friend, did not learn of his survival until long after Finkle had died. When he did, he expressed regret that they had not reconnected, calling Finkle a gallant soldier. Although Hermy’s attempts to secure a pension were unsuccessful, Frank Finkle remains one of the few verified survivors of Custer’s Last Stand.
