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William David Nugent
To start with let me state firmly that the editor of the present book is not my grandson. Blood is blood and I believe that the boy is getting confused about who his real grandmothers were or maybe just overexercising poetic privilege. If you want say that I was like a second mother to him, I’ll accept a degree of that designation. I taught all five of my boys to be polite, to stand up straight, to speak the English language grammatically, and to read good books--when we could find any. There was no circulating library in Grayson County in the 1850s when we raised our family there. I don’t know what all kinds of mischief my laddies got into, because I never wanted to, but I assumed there was plenty of it, because boys will be boys.
“Shoulders back,” I told them, “and stand up straight.” I was tall myself, and my five boys were taller yet, so I emphasized good posture. I still don’t have much use for boys that slouch around with their pants falling half off their butts. I wonder if their parents reared them in a barn. I don’t criticize the boys, they don’t know any better in most cases. It’s the parents that I criticize. I was a teacher too, and my husband was a lawyer or at least had some legal training. We were not ignorant people, so I taught my boys to use good grammar. If you can teach boys to speak correctly and to stand up straight, that’s half the battle, or my name is not Zerilda. That name has fallen out of fashion, but don’t you mock at it. The Missouri guerrilla fighter Jesse James’ mother’s name was Zerilda. Like any Kentucky mother, she taught her boys to fight and not to come home dragging their tails. We preferred dead heroes from our loins to live cowards.
My maiden name was McClure, and as a family we were known as fighters. I had eight brothers, and three of them died in the Civil War with another crippled. Speaking of fighters, let me explain how the subject of Sgt. William Nugent arises here. Among the good books I saw to it that my boys would read were books of history, including war stories of the colonial period and the Indian wars of the westward movement. Boys crave excitement, so I started them off with adventure stories, and for a boy--and I regret having to write this--the great adventure is war. As an American, I do not like to say this but we have produced very few military heroes, and none of the stature a boy could admire like Napoleon and Marlborough, not to mention Julius Caesar and a host of others. George Washington was a man of imposing size who looked good in the saddle of a white horse, but he never showed a glimmer of military genius. Grant and Lee are both very well so far as they go, but Lee gave way to his own vanity when he ordered Pickett’s charge, which decided the Battle of Gettysburg, and Grant simply took advantage of he fact that he had more men and bigger guns than Lee. This allowed him to fight a war of attrition, which only ended when Lee gave up. So much for glory in the U.S.A. I always taught my boys that line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”: The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
William David Nugent was a soldier in Custer’s famous 7th Cavalry, but he brought it no glory. If he is known at all today it is for a battle he did not fight and for the fact that he was not buried in Lincoln County, which is the county where one of my great grans was born. I’m joking now, of course, but it is a joke that has legs--like the Marx Brothers question, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” One of my grans had a good friend named Arthur who relied on his charming smile rather than his brains. He was living in Washington D.C. when his family came to visit him. He showed them the local monuments, including Grant’s tomb, which he claimed was where John Wilkes Booth was buried. “Arthur, you nincompoop,” cried my granddaughter, “Booth was shot down on a farm in Virginia and buried in Baltimore!” Facts are slippery things, and they will slide and elide. Some people have thought that Bill Nugent is buried in Lincoln County. Not so, he’s lies in spitting distance but he’s just across the county line in Payne.
The question that used to interest historians was the identity of “the lone survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.” He never turned up, but nobody thought there’d be more than one. The answer, as already given in the previous story about Custer’s horse Comanche (who was never Custer’s horse), is that there was no lone survivor. Thousands of Indians survived that battle, and it now appears that a good number of the 7th Cavalry did also. Not that there was no massacre, for given the great disparity between the number of Indians and Army soldiers, it could hardly have been anything else. But “massacre” does not mean that nobody survived, it means merely that the odds were very one-sided. Wikipedia says there were 2500 warriors against about 700 soldiers. Those are long enough odds for me.
Much of the “lone survivor” business is a misunderstanding based on semantics and the journalistic desire to sensationalize. The misunderstanding first arises when the part of “Custer’s Last Stand” becomes mistaken for the whole Battle of the Little Bighorn, but the "Last Stand Hill" occupied only the northern end and never included the whole battlefield. It seems fair to say that there were no white survivors of Last Stand Hill, but that is a far cry from saying that there were no survivors of the Little Bighorn. “My word,” cries I, Zerilda the old teacher, “People, pay attention to language!”
A proper discussion of my son William Nugent would require some biography--or you would think so, but I’ve already told most of what there is to tell. Of his parents I can speak with authority, since I’m one of them. I already have bragged on traditional respect education--but in fact we were farming folk like most Grayson countians. The only wealth we knew of was the gold bullion stored under Fort Knox in neighboring Hardin County. There was coal in Grayson county but in my day corn liquor provided a steadier income. A school teacher like myself and her lawyer husband shared in the general poverty, so it will come as no surprise when I say that my son Bill Nugent is of no historical importance. He happened to be present at an important event, but he never cast a long shadow.
I have said that I introduced my sons to good books, including history, where I could find them. I neglected to add that my husband Hamilton Nugent, trained as a lawyer, preferred German theology, writers with jurist backgrounds like Christian Barth, George Bauer, and Johann Blumhardt (just to name three forgotten B’s), but I stuck with history. History at least has real people in it whereas theology does not. In the New Testament, Jesus is a person, but theology asphyxiates him. It gives him his revenge, however, for in the Book of Revelations --much loved by theologians--Jesus returns as Pantocrator and Lord of Hosts and kills all his enemies.
Historical attention, when it turns to my boy William, has only one focus, and that’s the survivor business. Here’s the foreground. The historian Earl Alonzo Brininstool said he had collected at least 70 "lone survivor" stories. Michael Nunnally, an amateur Custer historian, wrote a booklet describing 30 such accounts. W. A. Graham claimed that Libby Custer received dozens of letters from men, in shocking detail, about their sole survivor experience. At least 125 alleged "single survivor" tales have been confirmed in the historical record as of July 2012. You want more? See the footnote in the forthcoming print edition of this story.
Almost as soon as men came forward implying or directly pronouncing their unique role in the battle, there were others who were equally opposed to any such claims. Theodore Goldin, a battle participant who later became a controversial historian on the event, wrote (in regards to Charles Hayward's claim to have been with Custer and taken prisoner). There are several Ph.D. dissertations to be excavated here as the bull manure Piles Higher and Deeper and the angels gather to be mounted on the head of a pin. That last, as you recognize, is a metaphor for wasting time, but I’m not wasting anybody’s time, I’m writing about the fate of my own son. I know his life as well as I know my own, since his life is my own. I gave it to him. If you think that I’m wasting your time, Reader, then fare thee well. I have story to tell and I’m going to tell it come hell or the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho devils. The battle, which resulted in the defeat of U.S. forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.
The standard historians cited above have next-to-nothing to say about my boy William David Nugent, so it is up to his family, people like myself, to tell his story, and in this regard we have a goldmine--not the fabled gold of the South Dakota’s Black Hills but the more durable gold of a reliable history written by a cousin.
The first copy I had of this document was so ragged and wrinkled that I believed it constituted a treasure, all the more so because it bore no indication of date of publication of the name of the newspaper. I have just today received a perfect copy of the article from my brilliant cousin Ruth Coker of Arlington, Texas, and find to my Amazement that it is dated 9 Oct. 1986. It is a full-page scan of a newspaper story written by Bill’s cousin Mark Nevils for The Grayson County News-Gazette. The old clipping I had seemed to come from the ruins of time, ruins that arrive even within the lifetime of a single person, I thought. Today’s new scan from Ruth Coker, however, is fresh as a daisy. Here it is:
A Grayson Countian was with Custer at battle of Little Big Horn
Page A13, Column 1
William David Nugent of Sadler was one of 23 Kentuckians who fought as cavalrymen in America’s bloodiest military defeat…Custer and his gung- ho 7th Cavalry in the still debated battle of the Little Big Horn in then wild, unsettled Southern Montana.
Nugent is still warmly remembered by his cousin, Paul McClure, the knowledgeable Millerstown historian. "On his last visit about 1930-31,” McClure said, “I was going to high school in Upton and had the honor of driving him to his family in Millerstown, but I remembered him from at least two previous visits. He was my boyhood hero. I’d sit and listen to his tales by the hour. I've heard him sing the 7th Cavalry's marching song, 'Gary Owen' (a rollicking old Irish two-step tune)."
Born November 5, 1852, a son of Hamilton and Mary Cryer McClure whose parents settled in this area in 1790, young Nugent learned early to dislike Indians. Savages had killed his grand uncle Johann Schemerhorn, but over ooked his grandma Janeten and infant Cornelius in the Schenectady, N.Y. massacre in 1690. In 1794, Indians had ambushed William McClure's grandfather Jediah Ashcraft, a Revolutionary War veteran, as he was crossing Clifty Hollow (in East Grayson County) to visit his 1,200-acre farm awarded by Gen. George Rogers Clark for military services. Later, his grandmother (Paul's great-grandmother) Mary Cryer, a young bride living on the latter farm, shot an Indian to save her life.
Paul McClure recalls Nugent was too young to fight in the Civil War though three of seven uncles of the McClure family in the Union Army were killed and a fourth crippled (the last was an ancestor of David Elmo McClure Jr. who wrote Two Centuries in Elizabethtown and Hardin County). The war over, the War Department reduced its armed forces but was determined to settle its long strife with the Indians and to build up its cavalry forces. The pay for a cavalryman was $13 month. Young Nugent, now 19, enlisted August 5, 1872 in Elizabethtown and was assigned to Company “A” of the elite 7th Cavalry, then policing the Ku Klux Klan and moonshiners. Its commander was Lt. Col George A. Custer, the youngest brevet general to emerge from the Civil War. . . . Among the names his troopers called him were Iron Butt and Ringlets. The Indians called him Long Hair.
. . . . They soon left on a Yellowstone expedition to protect surveyors for the new Northern pacific railroad. (Interestingly, Nugent recorded on the back of a photo of himself in uniform with saber given to Mr. and Mrs.Charles H. Anderson of Litchfield—the former a cousin—his battles from August 1873 through the Little Big Horn, June 16, 1876. . . .
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Nugent was with Custer in 1874 when they explored the Black Hills and confirmed the discovery of gold. Incoming miners and settlers developed into a horde. Sitting Bull and his Sioux began killing white men and raiding wagon trains and settlements. Press and the public demanded immediate action against “the miserable, dirty, lousy-blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaky, murdering skunks” (per the Topeka Weekly Reader. . . . A Showdown became inevitable.
General Cook attacked the Indians on the Rosebud River. Army columns commanded by General Terry and Colonel Gibbon, in a pincer movement, marched into the Sioux country of Southeastern Montana planning to meet June 26, 1876, at the Little Bighorn River. Nugent was one of 600 troopers of Custer’s 7th Cavalry detached from Terry’s force for reconnaissance.
Each armed with a Springfield carbine, a 6-shot Colt revolver, and a hunting knife, they marched 83 miles in 24 hours, arriving about noon June 25 at a site on the Little Big Horn River opposite the Indian village with 3,000-3,500 warriors led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Gall. Here Custer unwisely divided his force into three groups. Maj. Marcus Reno with three companies to cross the river and attack from the south; Capt. Frederick Benteen with three companies to attack on Reno’s left; and he, with five companies, to proceed downstream to attack; one company remained behind to guard the pack train.
Major Reno led companies “A” (with Nugent), “G” and “M” in a sharp trot across the river to attack from the south , but was surprised by hundred’s of Gall’s mounted warriors, stopped, repulsed attack for 15 minutes and then gave orders to retire. (He was later criticized for not attacking.) The withdrawal became a route as weary cavalrymen harassed by close-riding savages, plunged off a 100-foot embankment into the river and a race began to regain the steep banks on the opposite bluff. It was everyman for himself!
Some dismounted to hide in the brush. After losing about half of his 129 men Reno established a defense position of the bluff and was later joined by some of the stragglers from the brush and by Capt Benteen and his three companies. PersistentIndian attacks were repulsed. After 22
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hours of siege water became scarce; thirsty trooper drained fluids from cans of canned fruit. The 52 wounded were suffering severely.
But what happened to Custer?
Nugent and a small group volunteered that night to obtain water by penetrating the Indian lines to the river a quarter-mile away. [The story of the bloody canteen cork.]
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General Terry and Colonel Gibbon arrived the next day to relieve the beleaguered Reno-Benteen force.
All were asking “What happened to Custer?”
Friendly Indian scouts discovered next morning what happened to Custer on a site four miles North on the Little Bighhorn where what appeared to be white boulders were the stripped and naked bodies of all that remained of Custer and his 213 troopers including eight Kentuckians and their dead horses. . . .
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They fought desperately before being overwhelmed one by one. Only the dead Capt. Myles Keogh's sorrel horse “Comanche" survived, with saddle turned beneath its belly, resting on its haunches, its body pocked with arrows and bullets. (Comanche recovered, lived for many years, died in a stall, was stuffed and is displayed at the University of Kansas.)
All the bodies were horribly butchered except those of Capt. Keogh and Custer, who had lost a finger joint and his his ears punctured by squaws using an awl. Custer . . . had been shot in the left temple and left breast but apparently had escaped being mutilated by the Indians to assure all recognized him as Long Hair.
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. . . Nugent was one of the three-man squad headed by Sgt. John Ryan, according to Paul McClure, who buried Custer. (His body was later reclaimed and buried in West Point.)
Confirming what Paul McClure said, Nugent disclosed that the Army’s Springfield carbine sometimes failed to perform when its ejection mechanism failed or a cartridge jammed and so was inferior to the Indian’s high powered repeating rifles obtained from fur-traders and gun runners. Military experts estimated that half of the savages in the battle . . . used bows and arrows, that about half the others used old guns, and that the others really possessed modern repeating rifles.
. . . Military action was prompt. On Nov. 25, the Army destroyed the Cheyenne village of Dull Knife near Big Horn mountain; the 7th Cavalry ended the Sioux nation’s 50-year domination [on] Dec. 29, 1890 by killing or wounding about 300 Sioux warriors under Big Foot at Wounded Knee. The government had settled its Indian problem once and for all.
Private, later Sergeant, Nugent was discharged from the Army May 1,1877 at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, re-enlisted the ext day and was finally discharged at that base because of physical disability May 1, 1878. He married Mollie V. Keller who died and later Mary J. Wells, by whom he had three daughters—Myrtle, Mable, and Gladys. He frequently visited Grayson County before dying Nov. 15, 1934 near Coffeyville, Kansas. He was buried in Ripley, Oklahoma.
That is the end of Mark Nevils’ newspaper account. I have transcribed most of the article, because it is clear that Nevils is writing as a Grayson countian for a Grayson County newspaper, and his insights from Paul McClure are invaluable. Thus, of all the short biographical accounts, Nevils’ lengthy account comes from a source closest to William David Nugent. The author and his subject were cousins, each knew the other’s family, and they were only one generation apart.
Even so I must append one additional account of Nugent’s role in the battle because it comes from an authoritative source. Most of the best sources don’t mention Nugent, but Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star does devote a couple of paragraphs to the foray to obtain water on the part of Reno’s men.
It is hard to believe any water carrier could survive such a trip. The Indians knew Reno's men were desperate and eventually must take a chance. This being the case, one would expect a platoon of red sharpshooters to hide on the west bank and knock off the water boys like ducks, yet there seem to have been just two casualties : James Tanner of M Company killed, Madden seriously hurt.
Pvt. William Nugent tried it that night. As soon as he got to the river he dropped his canteens and fell face down for a gulp. Almost at once he felt a terrific blow on the forehead and when he touched the spot his hand came away slick with blood. A bullet had hit one of the canteen corks which flew up and caught him between the eyes the only wound he suffered during six years of Indian warfare. (320-21)
Evan Connell’s work has been highly praised, but of course it is but one of a great number that could be cited here. My intent, however, is not to be exhaustive, but to convey the real flavor of the event. Thus I am content to let one solid source stand for a thousand wobbly ones.
Mark Nevils’ exhaustive account of Nugent as seen from the vantage point of Grayson County ends with a leap that covers a great geographical distance, and with that leap we approach the end of my story, where I must confess I have become too absorbed in the writings of Nevils and Paul McClure to pay close attention to the trail I am trying to follow, which is that of my son. He died November 15, 1934 near Coffeyville, Kansas, and he was buried in Ripley, Oklahoma.” I can name only two stages of this journey away from Grayson County. In 1890 an Oklahoma Territorial census puts him in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the seat of Payne County. And a Bureau of Land Management record shows that in 1895 he homesteaded southeast of Stillwater near Ripley (section 26 of Township 18N, Range 3E), a few miles above the Lincoln County line. He is buried in Parotte Cemetery, located south of Ripley, Oklahoma.
The final link in this train of transmission comes when Nugent’s grave near Ripley was visited by a group of Custer enthusiasts probably in the 1970s that included among their number Joe Sam Vassar of Lincoln County, Oklahoma. Joe Sam later emailed the editor of the present story a couple of brief notices, including the news that Nugent was buried on the borderline between Lincoln and Payne Counties.
On the Custer subject there is a survivor buried in Lincoln County North of Agra. He was with Reno. On the anniversary of the battle a friend and I put a flag on his grave. Only done it twice. The man’s name was Nugent. From time to time I get the news letter from the group that studies the battle. They are of the number of angels that a dance on the head of a pin variety. --JSV
The cemetery is between Ripley [Payne County] and Agra [Lincoln County]. It contains the Trooper’s grave, a confederate veteran and the grave of the first County Judge in Payne County. Nugent was with Reno who has been damned and defended to a faretheewell. I read a book on the battle and a grass fire had revealed a great deal and they could even tell what rifle had fired what casings. --JSV
In mentioning the casings Joe Sam touches on an issue that was vital to the outcome of the Battle, the difference in fire power on the two sides. The difference between the Henry lever-action rifle used by the Indians and the Springfield breech-loading single-shot used by the Army was decisive. The latter was an amazing weapon for its range (600 yards!) and accuracy, but had to be reloaded after each shot. The old Henry had a range of only 200 yards, but it was a repeating rifle and would fire sixteen (!) shells before it needed to be reloaded.
That seems to me to be a huge factor in the battle. The Indians had greater fire power! The Henry rifle could fire 6-8 times while the Springfield got off one shot. And the notion of a range of 600 yards was meaningless in the kind of battle Custer was fighting. 200 yards was plenty of range. For the Indians with their great numerical advantage, this was a turkey shoot.
I speak now with some confidence, because I know something about rifles. One of the first things my husband did when we got married was to buy me a .22 single-shot to keep the squirrels from eating all our pecans. I had shot guns since I was a girl, and I got good with that thing. When I drew a bead on old bushy tail, he had eaten his last nut. I admit that that may seem like a far cry from Indian fighting, but blood is blood, and it will tell. I sure as tarnation did not raise any cowards. Even so, now in retrospect across the many passed years, myself, I’m just thankful that my boy Bill emerged from that the Little Bighorn fracas with no wound more serious than from that canteen cork!
Gravestone of William D. Nugent
Sources
Connell, Evan. Son of the Morning Star. New York: North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
Nevils, Mark. “A Grayson Countian was with Custer at Battle of Little BigHorn." Grayson County News-Gazette. October 09, 1986, p. A13.
Appendix I: “Nugent had many relatives in county” by Mark Nevils
Sgt. William D. Nugent, of Sadler, who fought for Custer in the memorable battle of Little Big Horn, had many relatives in Grayson County. Geneaogical research by Mrs. Laura H. Anderson, of Leitchfield, whose husband Charles H. Anderson was one of his cousins, discloses the following relationships in the region.
William and Hannah Merrit Nugent came into Grayson-Breckinridge counties in the early 1800s. They had 12 children, three of whom remained in the area, the others moving to Shelbyville, Indiana. Two of the brothers married daughters of William McClure and Mary Cryer. (William McClure’s father, David McClure, an early Grayson County settler is the ancestor of the McClures in this area. George Nugent who married Susan McClure, eventually moved to Indiana.)
Sgt. Nugent, son of Hamilton, had two brothers, Charles and Harrison, who married Eliza P. Nugent, his cousin, daughter of William. His descendants include Asa, Norbitt and Dorsey Nugent. William Nugent married Nancy Taylor and they had nine children, leaving descendants including Elmer and Johnnie Nugent, Joseph and Rhoda Nugent Bell’s children, and the children of Joseph and Anne Nugent Anderson including Charles H. Anderson.
Paul McClure of Millerstown, a researcher of the McClure and Nugent families, is a descendant of Gideon McClure, who was brother of Zerilda McClure Nugent, Paul’s father, John McClure, was a first cousin of Sgt. Nugent.
Appendix II: On Paul McClure
Paul McClure, a cousin of William Nugent, is referred to four times in the foregoing essay. I actually know little about him, but the following two images are worth many words--one of himself, one of the title page from his book of local history. The latter shows that my family is no stranger to the historiographical impulse.
Paul McClure
Millerstown by Paul McClure
