The letter was supposed to change history, but it never reached its destination. What it revealed about Major Marcus Reno’s sabotage, George Armstrong Custer’s doomed campaign, and the lies buried after the Battle of the Little Bighorn was too dangerous to survive. The truth about that battle remains hidden in a mail pouch at the bottom of the Powder River to this day. The last letter came from the mouth of the Powder River, describing the army’s march from the Little Missouri.
The writer feared the letter might never arrive, or if it did, that it would be unreadable because of a tragic accident that had befallen the mail detail. That detail consisted of a sergeant from the Sixth Infantry, Hazen’s regiment, and two privates from the same unit. Their task was to carry the campaign mail by small boat from the Powder’s mouth to Fort Buford. As Sergeant Fox stepped into the boat with the mail pouch on his arm, the vessel capsized, throwing everyone into the river.
The sergeant disappeared beneath the surface and was never seen again. The other two men, better swimmers, were rescued by those standing nearby. When the sergeant drowned, the mail pouch went down with him, but it floated between the steamboat and the bank long enough to be recovered with boat hooks. The pouch and its contents were pulled from the water after several minutes underwater.
On shore, many of the letters were soaked and open, and every postage stamp had come loose. Captain Grant Marsh, commander of the steamer Far West and the most respected steamboat captain on the upper Missouri, took charge of the damaged mail. He and his crew spent nearly the entire night drying and resealing the letters, finishing in time to send the mail at four o’clock the next morning. The drowned sergeant had served in the army for twenty-two years.
He had recently returned from Washington, where he had submitted his application for appointment as ordnance sergeant, a position often regarded as the pinnacle of service for a long-serving soldier. He never lived to receive it. Major Reno, who had left with six companies of the Seventh Cavalry toward the Powder River, was operating under written orders. Those orders directed him to scout the Powder to the mouth of the Little Powder, cross to the headwaters of Mizpah Creek, follow it almost to its mouth, then move to Pumpkin Creek and follow that stream down to its junction with the Tongue River.
From there he was to continue down the Tongue to its junction with the Yellowstone, where he would rejoin the main campaign. Most experienced officers doubted that any large Indian force would be found along the Powder. A few, including Reno himself, believed Sitting Bull’s main strength would be encountered there. But the general consensus was that the hostile tribes would most likely be near the headwaters of the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn.
Based on that assumption, General Terry drafted Reno’s orders with great precision. Reno was required to adhere strictly to his instructions and not approach the Rosebud. The fear was that any early movement in that direction would alert the enemy, disrupting the plan to concentrate the entire cavalry force for an attack on the hostile camps at the right time. Custer and many of his fellow officers did not approve of Reno’s march to the Powder.
A primary concern was that the maneuver left the rest of the campaign idle, only two days’ march from the Rosebud valley, where many believed the hostile camps actually lay. The danger was that the Indians, ever watchful, would discover the army’s presence and flee. After ten days Reno returned. To the shock of the entire campaign, from General Terry down to the lowest private, Reno had not only failed to accomplish anything useful, he had so mishandled his mission that he endangered the success of the entire operation.
His conduct was a direct violation of Terry’s clear and explicit orders. Instead of following the route laid out in his instructions, Reno moved to the mouth of the Little Powder, then crossed to the Tongue River. He should have followed the Tongue downstream to its junction with the Yellowstone. Instead, without explanation, he turned toward the Rosebud, the very region he had been explicitly warned to avoid.
He reached the Rosebud about twenty-five miles above its mouth, and there, as Custer had predicted, he found clear signs of a large Indian camp. The abandoned site indicated that 380 lodges had recently stood there. Reno tracked the trail left by the departing village for about twenty miles, but instead of continuing the pursuit, he chose to turn back. Had Reno pushed forward and forced the enemy to fight, his disobedience might have been overlooked.
But by turning back he compounded his error. He returned to the mouth of the Tongue and reported his actions to General Terry, who told him firmly that his conduct constituted a flagrant violation of orders and that its consequences had not yet been determined. A court-martial was widely proposed, and if one was never convened, it was not for lack of cause. The scouts who accompanied Reno stated that the village trail he had abandoned was so fresh and slow-moving that his force could have caught up within a day and a half.
Few officers ever receive such a clear opportunity for decisive action, and few ever squandered one so completely. General Terry responded by taking steps to correct Reno’s error as quickly as possible. Twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry, along with their Indian scouts, arrived at the rendezvous point on the evening of the day the mail was lost. The steamer Far West, with Terry and his staff aboard, had already reached the site.
Gibbon’s force was camped on the left bank of the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of the Rosebud. Terry, Gibbon, and Custer met that day and agreed unanimously. Custer would take his command up the Rosebud valley to the point where Reno had abandoned the trail. From there he would pick up the track and pursue it as far as the endurance of his men and horses allowed.
Custer would travel without wagons or tents, adopting Indian methods to achieve maximum mobility. Gibbon’s command would move toward the mouth of the Bighorn, with Terry following aboard the Far West. With Gibbon’s troops and thirty days of supplies loaded on the steamer, Terry planned to ascend the Bighorn as far as navigation permitted, probably to old Fort C. F.
Smith. There Custer was to rejoin the campaign after his reconnaissance. Custer’s column carried fifteen days of rations on pack mules. He advised his officers to bring extra salt, saying that if they remained on the trail after fifteen days, they would not turn back due to lack of food.
They would live on fresh game, or even on the pack mules if necessary. A reporter from the Herald would accompany Custer’s command and would be present to document events for the newspaper in the event of a battle or retreat. During the march from the Powder to the Tongue, Custer, riding at the head of the column, passed an abandoned Indian winter village. There he found the skull and bones of a white man.
Near them were the remnants of a cavalry uniform, identifiable by the letter C on a coat button and the yellow cord on the service coat. Scattered around were the ashes of a large fire, suggesting the man had been a prisoner of the Indians, possibly tortured in the brutal manner they often used on captives. Who this unfortunate man was, or the exact circumstances of his tragic death, would never be known. This is more than a story of military failure.
It is a reckoning with the ghosts of arrogance and betrayal. That sunken mail pouch carried more than letters. It carried the final warnings that might have saved 268 lives. Reno’s disobedience was not merely a mistake.
It was the spark that lit Custer’s funeral pyre. What haunts the memory is not just Reno’s withdrawal from Sitting Bull’s trail. It is the question that echoes across those plains. Was it sabotage or cowardice?
The scouts swore the village could have been caught within thirty-six hours. The 380 abandoned lodges proved Custer had been right all along. Yet Reno walked away while Custer rode into history. Why did Terry let Reno go to face disgrace another day?
And most chilling of all, did someone want Custer to fail? That is the truth they buried with the bodies. The lost mail pouch contained Reno’s original orders. And when Captain Marsh dried those pages, he found something even Terry could not explain.
But that is a story for another day.
