Part III: Mount Vernon’s William Bergin was witness to Little Bighorn battlefield

Author’s Note: I am indebted to the research assembled by John Chidester for the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County, where he did a presentation about this case about five years ago, and to the reference department staff who shared it with me. Next week, we will examine the events that so twisted William S. Bergin, Jr., that he could turn into the kind of monster who would shoot a man in broad daylight on the streets of Mount Vernon, a crime which would lead to his infamy as the only man ever hung for murder in Knox County history.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a five-part series on a murder committed by Will Bergin and his ensuing botched hanging. Part I (the shooting). Part II (Bergin’s disastrous Civil War years). Part III (eyewitness to the aftermath of Custer’s Last Stand. Part IV Bergin’s shooting of McBride defied explanation. Part V the botched hanging.

MOUNT VERNON — On June 5, 1876, the spiritual leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota tribe had a dream. When he awoke, he told his people that in his vision, he had seen “soldiers falling into our camp like grasshoppers from the sky.”

Thus spoke Sitting Bull, putting the Lakota and their associated American Indian tribes, the Northern Cheyenne and the Arapaho, on alert.

And the soldiers were coming. President Ulysses S. Grant had decided that the natives in the northern Great Plains region were becoming difficult, refusing to stay on their assigned reservations because they preferred to continue the lifestyle their ancestors had pursued for the last 10,000 years or so.

The president decided to send a large force under the joint command of Brigadier Generals George Crook and Alfred Terry to force the Indians to return to their reservations.

Among these forces were 12 companies of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, infamous for his unpredictability and known among the natives as “Woman Killer,” for his total warfare approach to attacking Indian men, women, and children, without either mercy or distinction.

Among the people in Custer’s camp in late-June was a certain one-armed quartermaster clerk from Fort Fetterman named William S. Bergin, according to the biography of Bergin that appeared in the Mount Vernon Democratic Banner on Dec. 7, 1877.

Bergin was based at the fort in Wyoming, but serving as a message courier had brought him north into Montana, to deliver a communique to Lt. Col. Custer. After years of restless bumming around the country, working odd jobs and leaving unpaid hotel bills behind him, Billy Bergin had re-enlisted in the U.S. Army, perhaps hoping that it would enforce a stability on his life that he seemed unable to find himself.

Instead, it was to bring more chaos.

At some point during this campaign, either Gen. Crook or Custer himself gave William Bergin a message to take to Fort Fetterman, 200 miles south. Bergin departed immediately.

Since we don’t know exactly when he left, we don’t know if he went the full distance before turning back, for as we shall see, something big was about to happen, and Custer would be at the center of it.

Custer, often called “General,” because of the battlefield title he had held for a time during the Civil War, was a showboat and a loose cannon, someone who was intensely disliked by many of his fellow commanders. He had graduated last in his class from West Point, and gained much of his reputation from self-promotion instead of actual achievement.

Custer brought an unusual hypocrisy to corralling Indians on the Plains, for in one of his magazine articles in 1874, he had written: “If I were an Indian, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains, rather than submit to the confined limitations of a reservation.”

In 1876, President Grant was very leery of allowing Custer to be part of Gen. Terry’s command, because of Custer’s public criticism of the president and other top commanders, but Terry thought he could control the flamboyant Custer.

He was wrong.

On June 25, 1876, Custer decided to make a move forward, ahead of the column. According to The Guinness Book of Military Blunders, by Geoffrey Regan, another commander, Col. Gibbons, remarked, “Now, Custer, don’t be greedy. Wait for us!”

“No, I won’t,” Custer replied, leaving it unclear which part of Col. Gibbons’ comment he was responding to.

He was also advised to take some automatic Gatling guns with him as he left, but Custer dismissed the suggestion. He advanced the 12 companies under his command north along the Little Bighorn River.

The following day, Custer moved even further forward, confident that he was still close enough to the main army because he could still see the smoke of their campfires, about 10 miles behind.

But 10 miles is a vast distance during a battle in the late 1800s. Custer, however, didn’t stop his advance.

The combined Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho forces spotted them coming, and only left a small portion of their warriors visible.

Custer disastrously assumed that what he saw was the entire native force. He divided his 700 troops into three tiny battalions. He pushed forward himself with just over 200 troops.

One of the other battalions, under Major Reno, engaged the Indians on the far side of the river, but were immediately routed. The third battalion held back, waiting to see what the developing situation was going to be. Custer pushed on.

Seeing Major Reno under heavy attack, Custer rushed toward the river from the east side. A native force attacked from across the river, stopping Custer’s advance.

As soon as Custer began to pull back, onto what later became known as Last Stand Hill, a huge contingent under the command of Lakota chief Crazy Horse attacked from behind Custer, from the east, where they had been waiting out of sight. Custer’s battalion was overwhelmed quickly by a force estimated to have been 5 to 10 times larger than his.

The battle lasted less than an hour. Not one of Custer’s soldiers survived the battle. All the U.S. soldiers had been scalped except Custer.

Whether that was a mark of respect or an insult was unclear.

It is also unclear how far Billy Bergin made it south before the battle. He may have already delivered his dispatch and been returning. The remaining parts of Custer’s command remained pinned down in defensive skirmishes for two days. So, Gen. Terry’s army wasn’t even aware that there had been a battle until they advanced two days later, causing the Indians to pull back.

Word quickly spread across the frontier, and the Banner bio states that Bergin had returned to the Little Bighorn battlefield so quickly that he was one of the first white people who walked the field, trying to identify and bury the decomposing bodies.

Is it true? It appears to be so, for his comments appeared in the Chicago Tribune, not exactly a minor publication, and no contradiction of them ever ran.

Therefore, the scene becomes even more monstrous, if that’s possible, from Bergin’s point of view.

His already destabilized condition after the Civil War could have only been made worse by walking across the slaughter of the Little Bighorn battlefield, seeing hundreds of mangled corpses of soldiers, many of whom he may have known personally.

The strongest proof that he was there comes from the fact that he was immediately hired by the Chicago Tribune to serve as courier for the battlefield reports written by their reporter, who was also part of that first group of eyewitnesses, as he had been traveling with the army.

When he got to Chicago, a reporter interviewed him further at the Palmer Hotel.

Bergin said that his trek across the field of carnage ended on the central hill, where he looked at the body of Lt. Col. Custer.

Bergin’s description is specific: “I saw the body myself, and helped handle it. The story is that his heart was cut out; that’s a lie. He was shot through the head, right through here — the middle of the head. He was also shot through the heart. But the bullet must have glanced in a sort of a zig-zag direction; he had no other wounds.”

Bergin’s description of Custer’s wounds and his lack of scalping is accurate to other documented sources. He debunks the cut-out heart rumor, which is accurate, though it is not true that Custer’s body suffered no mutilation. At least one battlefield report speaks of an arrow being shoved into Custer’s groin, but considering that he was being interviewed for a public newspaper, it would be no surprise that Bergin would omit this gruesome detail.

The reporter took delight in describing Bergin’s appearance:

“The Knight of the Plains was easily distinguished from the ordinary folk by his peculiar dress. He wore corduroy pants, which were tucked into a pair of rather heavy boots. His coat, or rather blouse, was made of buckskin, fringed with material of the same, after regular frontiersman style.”

He describes Bergin as “bronzed from exposure,” with a pleasant face and a light sandy mustache.

When the reporter probed for information about the nature of the dispatches he carried, Bergin declined to speak, saying he was not at liberty to divulge anything.

Bergin then drew the conversation to a close, not wanting to be interviewed further.

In addition to the traumas of the battlefield, upon arrival in Chicago, he had nearly been taken in by a confidence trickster with forged military papers. It isn’t clear whether he had been discharged by the Army, or simply quit.

Whatever the case, he did not return out west, nor did he stay in Chicago any longer. He quickly left for Mount Vernon, shaken and unsteady. Not yet 30, he had already lived a life of enormous trauma, without the slightest way to deal with any of it except alcohol.

William Bergin may have thought that Mount Vernon would be a safe space to retreat to, until he could gather himself and begin the next chapter of his life.

He didn’t know how short the next — and final — chapter would be.