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In the following story I have deliberately fused two historical characters, both of whom fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and both of them survivors, a fact which at this time in history can be stated with certainty. Since they are both people in their own right, the circumstances of their dates and places of birth differ, but as soldiers who rode with Custer and survived a battle whose casualties made history for the numbers of losses incurred by the U.S. Army they were extremely similar. Their post-battle histories are also alike but that circumstance does not enter the tale I am about to tell is about the fortunes of two soldiers very much the same, however much the two of them may differ in personal details. That I have used Henry Holden’s name instead of the other man’s is a fluke of the writer’s history and has no bearing on what follows. I trust that I have done no violence to the twin avatars of my hero Henry Holden.
. . . . .
When I first thought to write about Henry Holden, he seemed of interest because of his complete obscurity, yet the facts of his case turned out to be completely different. So much research has been done on the men who rode with Custer that a great deal is now known about Pvt. Holden. Even so, given his general obscurity, it has seemed worthwhile to me to write an essay for the general reader who might share the near universal curiosity to know about the men who rode with Custer and to that end I venture the following.
Henry Holden was born in England in 1837, and in spite of the of the simplicity of that datum none of the very thorough research about him has been able to add a jot or a tittle to it. In this respect he may remind us of Ishmael in Melville’s Moby-Dick who to this day remains in the splendid isolation of Job’s messenger whose last words to his master are “I alone have escaped to tell thee.” Ishmael ends his account of the whaling voyage with these words: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapses, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousands years ago.” Or, as an earlier poet put the matter, “The rest is silence.”
A similar quiet seemed to surround the name Henry Holden until I consulted the archives at Ancestry, and then God’s own plentitude of glut and glory was revealed. Holden’s parents exist in larger plentitude than the soldier himself. His father Benjamin Holden was born
Queequeg’s Tattoo
in 1764 in Mecklenburg, North Carolina, and died in 1848 in Independence County, Arkansas. His mother Elizabeth Scott was born in Rutherford, North Carolina in 1766 and in 1816 died in the same county as her husband. The husband and wife had eleven children born between 1790 and 1905 with Henry coming as a final surprise child seventeen years after the birth of his eldest sister. It is pleasant to think that this oddity of his birth may have marked him as the child of promise in the way that myth reports for many another hero.
Holden joined the U. S. Army in the Year of Our Lord 1968 when its personnel had fallen from a record one million in the Civil War to about 40,000 in the period of the Indian Wars which followed. Though the folk history of Henry states that he never married the cold facts of recent research show that he married Frances Ann Little, but the union produced no children.
Holden 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 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 Mrs. Vassar, “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 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 story of Custer’s horse Comanche, displayed in the huge Natural History glass case for many years. The joke 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 old history teacher, “People, pay attention to language!”
Henry’s mother writes, “A proper discussion of my son 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 mountain people. The only wealth we knew of was the gold bullion stored under Fort Knox in neighboring Hardin County. There was coal in our 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 Henry 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 Henry 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 Henry, 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.
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 Holden, 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 good 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 my cousin and collaborator 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
Holden 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.
Henry 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. . . .
Henry Holden gravestone
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 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?
Henry and a small group volunteered that night to obtain water by penetrating the Indian lines to the river a quarter-mile away. General Terry and Colonel Gibbon arrived the next day to relieve the beleaguered Reno-Bentsen 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 Big Horn 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. . . . 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 where he was mislabeled as Custer’s horse.
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. Henry 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, Henry 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 Henry Holden was discharged from the Army May 1,1877 at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota
I recently received an email note from a correspondent in England who shed a glorious Damascus light on my path:
I live on the South coast of the UK. I look into local history. I came across a gent named Henry Holden. He was born in Brighton and as a young man emigrated to the US to fight against slavery. He fought throughout the Civil War. He later joined the cavalry. He ended up under Custer’s command. He survived one one of the battles which were part of the Little Big Horn battles. Many years later he was injured by a horse and he returned to Brighton UK. He got married at set up home, which is now a chip shop, it!s about a 100 yards from my home. Eventually he died and was buried in a local graveyard. Sometime later his wife found that he had never collected his pension or his Medal of Valor. She was then in receipt of his pension, which was massive compared to todays pension. His grave received a gravestone from the US which had the Medal of Honor engraved on it. It is rumoured that when the Wild West Show toured England he took his children to see it and he met Sitting Bull. They shook hands and agreed the battle achieved nothing.
Here’s to the achievement of nothing by a force that was never numbered, since in America we have never acquired the habit of counting the corpses of men with black hair. Didn’t count them in Vietnam or Korea and all the way back to the arrival of the first English ships on the coast of New England. Holden's grave received a stone from the United States government which had the Medal of Honor engraved on it. It is rumored that when the Wild West Show toured England he took his children to see it and he met Sitting Bull. They shook hands and agreed the battle achieved nothing.
Civil War gravestone noting the medal of honor
There were, however, achievements of a different caliber on the part of the woman Holden married, Frances Ann Little, 1849-1938, who like her husband was born in England about 1849 but unlike him died there in Brighton in 1948. A family photo survives of Mary Ann with her family:
Let us end this brief survey of Henry's family by calling to the reader's attention the larger-than-life figure of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. The latter's fabulous wealth came from his connection to boot-legging, and it may be well to consider for a moment the difference between the two American types. The former, admired and loved, is the very basis of our folklore from Rip Van Winkle in the Catskills down to the present day at NASCAR, where bootleggers continue dominate stock car racing.
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