Weir Point

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

Captain Thomas Weir was the kind of officer who believed that a good soldier follows orders, except when following orders is clearly wrong, in which case a good soldier uses his judgment. This is a fine philosophy in theory. In practice, on the afternoon of June 25, 1876, it got him to the top of a hill where he could watch, from a distance of three miles, what appeared to be the final destruction of George Armstrong Custer and five companies of the 7th Cavalry.

The marker at Weir Point reads: "In an attempt to locate Custer, Company D under Captain Thomas Weir advances to this hilltop position without orders late on June 25. Weir may have witnessed the conclusion of the battle three miles ahead. He is later joined by Captain Benteen and others. The Lakota and Cheyenne, returning from destroying all of Custer's immediate command, force these troops to abandon this position in favor of their hilltop defense one mile south."

Weir was thirty-seven years old in 1876. He had grown up in Ohio, studied at the University of Michigan, and gone to war in 1861 with the 3rd Michigan Cavalry, where he first served under a young general named George Armstrong Custer. He had been captured by the Confederates and spent seven months as a prisoner before being exchanged. After the war he had tried running a grocery store in Alabama, found civilian life unsatisfying, and accepted a commission in the regular army. He was assigned to the 7th Cavalry, where Custer was again his commanding officer, and the two men became close friends.

By June 1876, Weir had served under Custer for nearly a decade. He knew the man's habits, his strengths, his recklessness. He had followed him into the Black Hills in 1874 and up the Yellowstone in 1873. He had been with him at the Washita in 1868, when Custer had attacked Black Kettle's village on the Washita River and then ridden away without searching for a detachment that had been cut off and killed. That episode had not improved Weir's opinion of his commander's judgment, but it had not diminished his loyalty to the man.

On the morning of June 25, Custer divided the regiment into four battalions and sent them in different directions. Weir's Company D was assigned to Captain Frederick Benteen's battalion, which was sent on a scouting mission to the south and southwest. Benteen found nothing and was returning to the main column when a messenger caught up with him carrying a note from Custer: "Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs."

Benteen came on, but not quickly enough to matter. By the time he reached Major Marcus Reno's battered command on the hilltop that would bear Reno's name, the sound of firing from the north had died away. No one knew what that meant. Reno, who had just survived a disastrous charge into the south end of the village and a running retreat across the river, was in no condition to find out. He ordered his men to dig in and hold their position.

Weir disagreed with this decision. He had heard the firing. He believed Custer needed help. He told Reno he wanted to advance north to find the other battalion. Reno refused. The two men argued. Then Weir, without waiting for permission, mounted his horse and rode north with his orderly, leaving his company to follow as it could.

Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly, Weir's second in command, watched his captain ride away and made a practical decision. He formed Company D and followed Weir north, which prompted Benteen to follow with his three companies, which prompted the rest of the command to follow Benteen. The advance that Reno had refused to authorize happened anyway, one company at a time, each one following the one ahead of it.

Weir reached this hilltop, now called Weir Point, ahead of everyone else. He was about one and a half miles north of Reno Hill and about three miles south of the ridge where Custer's command had made its last stand. From here, he could see clouds of dust rising from the northern ridges. He could see movement, but at three miles the details were unclear.

Private William Morris of Company M, who arrived at Weir Point shortly after Weir, recalled what happened next. Sergeant Flanagan said to Weir: "Here, Captain, you had better take a look through the glasses; I think those are Indians." Weir looked through the field glasses and changed his mind about riding forward. What he had taken for guidons flying over distant soldiers were, in fact, warriors. The battle, if there had been one, was over.

Standing Bear, a Minneconjou Lakota warrior, described the moment from the other side: "We saw soldiers coming on a hill toward the south and east. Everybody began yelling: 'Hurry!' We started for the soldiers. They ran back toward where they had come from. One got killed, and many of us got off and couped him."

The warriors who had just finished killing Custer's five companies were now free to deal with the men on Weir Point. They came in large numbers, and they came fast. Weir and the companies that had followed him were forced back to Reno Hill, fighting as they went. One man was killed in the retreat. The survivors dug rifle pits on the hilltop and prepared for a siege that would last two days.

Weir survived the battle. He was not wounded. He rode out with the rest of the regiment when General Terry's column arrived on June 27 and the warriors broke camp and moved south. He was formally posted to recruiting duty in New York City in the months that followed.

He never recovered from what he had seen.

Weir wrote letters to Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the general's widow, hinting at matters regarding her husband's death that he was not able to say plainly. He refused to go outside. He began to drink. In his last days he was said to be so nervous that he could not swallow. He died in his rooms in New York City on December 9, 1876, less than six months after the battle, at the age of thirty-eight. The army surgeon listed the cause of death as congestion of the brain. His classmates from the University of Michigan, who published a memorial volume forty years later, were more candid: they said he had never recovered from the shock of the Little Bighorn.

He was buried at Fort Columbus on Governors Island, and later reinterred at Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn. The hill in Montana that bears his name is a modest pull-off on the paved road that ends at the Reno-Benteen battlefield. There is a marker with an illustration showing what the artist believed Weir saw from this height: clouds of dust rising from the bluffs to the north, where the soldiers were.

Whether Weir actually saw Custer's men in their final moments, or whether he arrived too late and saw only the aftermath, is a question that cannot be answered. The dust was thick. The distance was three miles. The field glasses of 1876 were not precision instruments. What is known is that Weir rode north without orders because he believed his friend needed help, and that when he got to the top of this hill and looked through his sergeant's field glasses, he saw something that he could not bring himself to describe in plain language for the rest of his short life.

See also

• Weir Point at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Little Bighorn Battlefield, National Park Service, erected c. 2000)
• Weir Point Fight at Crow Agency, Big Horn County -- the farthest point reached before the forced retreat