Distinctly Montana Magazine

46 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 6 This may have been a lie of omission to protect the General's widow. Most have the General's thigh gashed in the Lakota manner. Some reports, including a letter Godfrey later wrote to a friend, had Custer's body found with an arrow lodged in the corpse's penis; some fifty years later, a pair of Cheyenne women claimed that they made their own mark on the body by inserting awls into the General's ears, so that he might hear better in the next life when he is warned not to attack their tribe. The Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen puts it succinctly: "He had left this world diminished, and he would enter the next diminished." It fell to men tired from fighting and sick with nausea and grief to bury the dead. They had eight shovels between them; the task was insurmountable. Knives and cups had to make up for the lack. "For most," wrote historian Paul Hedren, "the so-called burials amounted to little more than respectful gestures." In some cases, it was deemed enough to simply straighten the body out. Some were left exactly where they lay. Most, after two days in the heat, were unrecognizable regardless of the degree of mutilation. Adding to the difficulty was the cu- rious fact that the names had been cut out of most of the men's socks as if in a deliberate attempt to obscure their identities. Where identification was possible, a matter of searching for rel- ics that hadn't been scavenged by the enemy force, the "graves" were marked with a small piece of wood, most likely salvaged from abandoned lodge poles, with the soldier's name written on a piece of paper, inserted into a bullet, and then driven into the wood. Mistakes were no doubt made. Above all, Private William H. White would write that "the state of putridity consequent upon the two or more days of exposure during the long and hot daylight hours rendered any handling almost impractical." Comanche stood near the battlefield for two days, unmoving, nearly dead. He and the other wounded horses waited, listen- ing, eyes wide and mad with fear, for whatever would be visited upon them next. The horse had seen battle before, and been wounded. He had been struck with an arrow during a skirmish with the tribe that would become his namesake some eight years before Custer's de- feat. It had been his first battle carrying Captain Keogh, indeed his first battle at all. After being wounded, the horse's pained bel- low sounded something like a Comanche war cry, but the horse kept his rider throughout the fight, earning distinction for his bravery and inspiring his name. He had gone on to serve Keogh well in battles against the Ku Klux Klan and whiskey runners in Kentucky, where he was again wounded, this time by a bullet. But poor Comanche had never seen anything like the maelstrom he witnessed on the day his owner died. Myles Keogh loved and favored his horse. Perhaps that explains why, as the Native warriors closed in around him, he didn't kill his C OMANCHE WAS CAREFULLY MUTILATED AND REASSEMBLED IN THE VERISIMILITUDE OF HIS WARTIME GLORY. Gustav Korn and Comanche

• Cover