Are you thinking it’s Little Bighorn time?
Posted By admin on May 27, 2010
Maj. Marcus Reno headstone at the Little Bighorn battlefield.
I especially get the urge to get back to the battlefield this time of year. My daughter and I drove right by 10 days ago — in a nice electric storm on the plains, not the snowy white palette pictured to the right. We couldn’t stop.
Here’s a tidbit that I found and am including in Sunday’s History Almanac (page 3 of the Territory section in the Missoulian). This way I can expound a little more…
May 31, 1967
An off-hand mention in a New York bar last fall leads today an honorable discharge of Maj. Marcus Reno, 87 years after his death.
A retired Army colonel with a long-standing interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876 and with Maj. Reno’s ignominious court martial and discharge from the Army four years later struck up a conversation with the bartender, 52-year-old Charles Reno, Maj. Reno’s great grand nephew.
The younger Reno teamed with the American Legion to rectify the major’s record. In a one-paragraph statement, the Army says it’s changing all of its records to show Reno was honorably discharged in the rank of major on April 1, 1880.
“I think it’s just unbelievable,” says Leora Skates of Billings, Charles Reno’s sister. “Speaking for the whole family, I just don’t think we ever believed it could happen.”
Another sister, Laverna Bachmann, also lives in Billings, where a church ceremony will precede Maj. Reno’s internment at the Custer National Cemetery at the battlefield site in September. Reno, who has lain in a pauper’s grave in Washington D.C. since his death in 1889, will receive an 11-gun salute and be buried with honors – the only participant of the battle to receive such honors at the cemetery named for his former commander.
That’s what will be in the newspaper Sunday. Here’s some more, taken from the Billings Gazette in 1967. (The Gazette added its local angle to a UPI account.)
“After his dismissal in 1880, Reno spent his time in New York and Washington, seeking in vain to be reinstated by the Army. He died in Washington in 1889 and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery. His grave is identified only by a number and a reference in a burial book.
“His remains will be moved from a pauper’s grave at Washington, D.C. to the Custer Battlefield National Monument Cemetery, a piece of ground he once was accused of failing to defend.
“The Army acted after Reno’s famiy and other pro-Reno forces, including Chester K. Shore, then adjutant of the American Legion Department of Montana, reopened the case last fall. The Reno partisans, who also include Billings Mayor Willard Fraser, want Reno’s body brought to the Custer Cemetery for military burial in a marked grave.”
I’ve got some stuff about the September re-interment ceremony in 1867 that I’ll try to post.
Great post! While Reno didn’t exactly cover himself with glory then or after, he didn’t deserve to be scapegoated either. Looking forward to the story about the reinterment.