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First
Lieutenant James Calhoun would have probably been another mostly forgotten
Army officer of the past if it had not have been for the time and place he
died: 25 June 1876 near the Little Bighorn River. Familiarly known as “Jimmi”,
Lt. Calhoun was born in Ohio. Enlisting as a Private in February 1865 with
the 22nd New York Infantry he was soon promoted to Sergeant in
Co. D. In 1867, he was promoted to Second Lt. and served in the 32nd
and 21st Infantries. Jimmi Calhoun
met Maggie Custer, the general’s younger sister, at Fort Hays, Kansas in
the summer of 1870.
By August
the couple was pressing General Custer to request
Jimmi be transferred to the 7th Cavalry where he would
be under Custer’s command. Jimmi got the
transfer, and a promotion. First Lt. Calhoun and Maggie Custer were
married in March 1872. Custer liked Calhoun enough personally and
professionally to make him his adjutant which is the officer that handles
correspondence and records. The 7th
Calvary relocated to Fort Lincoln just south of
Bismark,
North Dakota. Jimmi’s unit took part in
several Expeditions which protected railroad surveyors and pushed further
into Indian territory to make way for Caucasian
dominated settlements. The 7th Cavalry served under General
David Stanley when it participated in Yellowstone Expedition (1873). A
personal feud developed between General Stanley and General Custer. The
feud came to a head when Stanley confronted Custer about the use of a
government horse by a civilian correspondent. Custer was placed under
arrest (later the charges were dismissed) and for two days rode at the
rear of the column. The civilian was Jimmi’s
brother Fred Calhoun.
Jimmi
was particularly suited to the task of adjutant. His writings were good
enough to be formed into a book published in 1979 (Provo, Utah) edited by
Lawrence Frost entitled With Custer in
’74. During the Black Hills Expedition (1874)
Jimmi writes in his diary of July 2nd:
“The air is serene and the sun is shining in all its glory. The birds are
singing sweetly, warbling their sweet notes as they soar aloft. Nature
seems to smile on our movement. Everything seems to encourage us onward.”
Custer had surrounded himself with a “royal family” which included his own
family members and Jimmi.
Jimmi was the “blonde Adonis” of Custer’s staff. He was also the
object of many jokes and pranks pulled on everyone in the family cluster.
In Cavalier In
Buckskin Robert Utley states “Calhoun, dour and humorless, was
a favorite target.” The General himself mused, “ ‘How
they do tease and devil Mr. Calhoun.’ “
Custer’s
wife Libbie and her sister Maggie Calhoun
often rode at the head of the cavalry column with their husbands while
other wives traveled on an accompanying steamboat when the unit moved
en masse. This is how they
traveled the first day out of
Fort Lincoln to start the new expedition west in May 1876. The first
nights camp was on the Heart River about 13 miles west from
Bismark. The wives returned to Fort Lincoln
the next morning. These expeditions were always dangerous and
Jimmi wrote of how Indian alarms denied sleep
to all. Violent death was always a hazard that happened regularly, but not
to the extent that became “Custer’s Last Stand”. The Last Stand has been
researched and argued about by professional and amateur historians on a
scale that reminds one of the JFK assassination.
In Archaeology, History, and Custer’s
Last
Battle Richard Fox calls the “Calhoun
Episode” the most critical stage of the Custer battle.
Jimmi commanded L Company. They were
apparently the first attacked and had been left to form a rear skirmish
line on one hill which defended Custer as he rode about one mile further
to die on his own hill. Today in the Little Bighorn National Park they are
named Custer Hill and Calhoun Hill. Eyewitness reports from the Native
Americans conferred that the attackers encountered the most resistance and
suffered the most casualties at Calhoun Hill. About 31 men were killed on
Calhoun Hill. Hasty burial parties were formed to dig graves for the
officers-enlisted men lay where they fell. Recovery of the bodies weren’t
attempted until a year later in July 1877. Jimmi
was re-interred at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. One of the original burial
party members was William Taylor who composed a book,
With Custer On The
Little Bighorn. In a section titled “Relics of the Battle” with
no other explanation he states: “Mrs. James Calhoun had the good fortune
to obtain possession of her husband’s watch through the efforts of her
brother-in-law Lt. Calhoun, who purchased it from some Indians in the
Dept. of the Platte.” Apparently Fred joined the Army between the time of
the Stanley incident and the death of his brother.
Jimmi
and Maggie had no children that I could find recorded anywhere. We had the
good fortune for Glen Ethier and 8 other
volunteers to index all four volumes of Orval
Calhoun’s Our Calhoun Family
a few years ago (this index is available directly through the Clan
Colquhoun Society of NA, Glen himself, or access it through the Odom
Genealogical Library in Moultrie). I ran Jimmi
and Fred’s name, and the name Custer through the search engine but found
nothing there. General Custer’s widow, Libby, made a career out of
remembering and having other people take note of her husband. In
Boots And
Saddles, one of the books Libby Custer wrote about her husband,
Jane Stewart notes in her Introduction that there is a
“noticeable omission” by Mrs. Custer to identify almost any of the other
officers of the 7th Cavalry. Jimmi
Calhoun is “…casually referred to as ‘Margaret’s husband.’ “
First Lt. James Calhoun on the left. |
