Just Weeks Before Little Bighorn, Custer Invites Robert Barnwell Roosevelt to Join Him in the "Great West"

Background

What Custer needed in the spring of 1876 was money, and cultivating a New York Roosevelt was as good a way to get it as any. He had already proposed, years before, to Robert Barnwell (Barnhill) Roosevelt, editor of the New York Citizen and Theodore Roosevelt’s paternal uncle, that he write a series of articles about Custer's martial experiences during the winter of 1868. Back then, he had hoped to capitalize on the Battle of Washita River - an unprovoked attack on a peaceful Cheyenne village, which served to establish his reputation as America’s top Indian “fighter” - but Roosevelt declined. Now, eight years later, however, Custer needed more than fame, more than extra income, more, even, than consideration as a public intellectual. He needed cash, fast, to settle a huge and secret debt.  

All his life Custer had been a compulsive gambler, and all his married life, swearing he would stop. But he had recently discovered in New York a new way to wager: the stock exchange. Betting, essentially, by selling short, Custer traded feverishly, on credit, upwards of $300,000. He would prove, though, no luckier playing in a sophisticated financial market than in a card room, a casino, or a racetrack. He owed, as of writing this graceful letter, a dire sum: in today’s money, a quarter million dollars. Adding insult to injury, he was also being sued over a book he had contracted to write but never delivered, and could not even afford a lawyer. 

This invitation, then, to Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, a prominent New York lawyer, politician, diplomat, writer, conservationist, and Democratic party reformer, would seem to signal Custer’s habitual desire to associate, and insinuate himself with, “top-drawer” society: people who could, in his present distress, and future ambitions, only help him. Perhaps it was a gamble, inviting a man he had yet to meet to come “see something of the Great West.” It was certainly in keeping with his typical recklessness and underestimation of the dangers faced in the war zone to which he would soon return. Considering what Custer knew was brewing in the Plains War, in fact, it might well have been a staggeringly reckless proposition. 

I expect to leave the city either Monday evening or Tuesday evening although I may be detained longer. I fear I must go without having had the pleasure of seeing you, if so I will trust that this pleasure will not be long deferred. If you ever make your way west do try and reach me and I will endeavor to make your visit agreeable and interesting to you, and those who may be with you. My address is Fort Lincoln, Dakota. Cannot you tear yourself away from the business as well as pleasure of this delightful city long enough to enable you to see something of the Great West? I am sure the trip would well repay you the effort. 

As genteel an invitation as Custer proffered, what he was really offering was a wager. The risk was not whether a man he had yet to meet face-to-face would be his guest, but that the man, should he do so, might live to tell of it. The “Great West” was then engulfed in the 22nd year of the Plains Indian War, and Custer knew what lie ahead. The month before, in fact, he wrote another prominent New Yorker, Edwin Wallace Stoughton, that he was about to command “a large expedition consisting of cavalry and infantry for the Yellowstone country anticipating active hostilities with the Sioux” and, incredibly, having just stated the danger, then invited Stoughton to join him. It would, Custer said, be “the most interesting trip of your life, don your buckskin suit,” he exhorted the eminent patent lawyer, “and report at Fort Lincoln… You can then either accompany the troops on the march to the Yellowstone or take the steamer and join us there weeks later when the weather will be more delightful and the country more interesting. I think I can promise you an Indian fight. You can participate or become a spectator in either case I will agree to return you not only alive and well but feeling younger and better by at least ten years.” [see SMC 437 Custer to Stoughton, dated March 1, 1876 .] Custer, it would seem, believed his famed luck would protect his every endeavor. He could, then, tempt fate, heedless of consequence – and gamble with nothing less than life itself. And so he did, over and over and over again. His luck, however bad at gaming, in mining, or in stocks, never really ran out - until it did, in just about an hour, some eleven weeks after inviting Roosevelt to join him. Custer, and his entire command, were slaughtered on June 25th, 1876, atop a grassy hilltop at the Little Bighorn River, in an area so big and vast and empty, its three hundred and fifty thousand square miles were designated, simply, the Dakota Territory – or, as Custer liked to call it, “the Great West.”

Physical Description

Autograph Letter Signed ("G.A. Custer"), 3 pages, octavo, on the letterhead of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York City, Sunday [April] 9th [1876]. To Robert Barnhill Roosevelt