Captain Grant Marsh

By editor

Hardin, Big Horn County, Montana, June-July 1876

The Far West was a sternwheel steamboat, 190 feet long, drawing less than four feet of water when light. Captain Grant Marsh had been piloting her up and down the upper Missouri since the spring of 1876, carrying mules and hardtack and ammunition for Brigadier General Alfred Terry's Dakota Column. It was not glamorous work. It was the kind of work that kept armies moving while the armies themselves forgot the boats existed.

On June 21, 1876, Terry held his final strategy conference aboard the Far West at the mouth of the Rosebud Creek. Custer was there. Gibbon was there. The plan was simple enough on paper: Custer would take the Seventh Cavalry up the Rosebud while Gibbon's Montana Column marched west along the Yellowstone and then south to block the northern exits from the Little Bighorn valley. The Far West would push up the Bighorn as far as she could go and wait.

Marsh took her 56 miles up the Bighorn River -- a river no steamboat had navigated before -- and moored her near the confluence of the Little Bighorn. He was still there on June 29 when a courier arrived from General Terry with orders to prepare the boat to receive the wounded.

There were 52 of them. The men of Reno's and Benteen's commands who had held the hilltop for two days while Custer's five companies were destroyed four miles away. They came down to the river on improvised litters, carried by troopers from Gibbon's column. Marsh had the deckhands cut prairie grass and layer it under canvas to cushion the planking. He loaded them as gently as the river and the circumstances allowed. Two would die on the journey. The rest survived.

On July 5, 1876, at eleven o'clock at night, Marsh cast off from the Bighorn and turned the Far West downstream. He ran her day and night, crashing through willows on the bends, bouncing off mud banks, using the deck winches to spar over sandbars. He averaged thirteen miles per hour. In fifty-four hours he covered 710 miles and tied up at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, at eleven o'clock on the morning of July 7.

The news went out by telegraph that same day. America was celebrating its centennial. The story of the Seventh Cavalry stayed on the front pages for weeks.

Marsh was asked afterward about the run. He said the river was low and the night was dark and there were snags he did not see until the bow was already past them. He did not say anything about the men lying on the grass-padded deck behind him, or about what it meant to carry them that far that fast. He was a river pilot. He said what river pilots say about rivers.

Joseph Mills Hanson, who wrote the biography of Marsh in 1909, recorded the captain's own account of the run: "I knew that if we were going to save those men we had to make time, and I made it. The river was low and there were places where I didn't know from one minute to the next whether we'd get through, but we got through." Hanson noted that Marsh had painted the Far West's prow black as a sign of mourning before departing the Bighorn, and that the boat arrived at Fort Lincoln flying her flag at half-mast. The fort's garrison heard the whistle at midnight and came out to meet her in the dark.

The wounded were carried off the boat and into the post hospital. The families of the dead were woken and told. Libbie Custer learned that her husband was gone in the hours before dawn on July 7, 1876. She later wrote that the officer who told her "was weeping like a child." The news that Marsh had carried 710 miles in fifty-four hours went out by telegraph to the rest of the country that morning.

He never lost a steamboat in his life. In a career spanning more than twenty-two vessels on the most dangerous stretch of navigable water in North America, where 295 boats went down between 1831 and 1893, Grant Marsh brought every one of his ships home. That is the kind of fact that does not fit easily into a newspaper story. It is the kind of fact that takes a lifetime to make.

See also

• Captain Grant Marsh at Hardin, Big Horn County (Custer Circle Project 2017 and Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks)
• Captain Ball's Scout at Hardin, Big Horn County
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County