Graham Berry collection
During a visit to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in 2004, Peter Russell, right, and two other English enthusiasts of the Plains Indian Wars, Graham Berry and Alan Wellbelove, were allowed to go inside “hallowed ground” and stand next to the tombstone of Lt. Col. George A. Custer.
Peter Russell calls his website “The Voice of British Custeriana.”
In a sense, it also serves as the posthumous voice of the many British soldiers who served under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in the 7th U.S. Cavalry during the fateful month of June 1876.
Russell’s site, Men With Custer UK, which celebrated its first anniversary on May 31, is a storehouse of carefully researched biographical material on those British soldiers, in addition to some soldiers from the European continent and the Republic of Ireland.
It is also a “one-man affair,” Russell said, since he serves as researcher, author, editor, proofreader and webmaster. He puts an individual stamp on almost everything on the site — the stamp of a man driven to unearth the smallest of facts, and to make sure that facts win out over mistakes and myths.
“I am a genealogist-cum-historian and put factual accuracy at the very top of my agenda,” Russell wrote in an interview conducted via email.
Russell is 75, a semi-retired financial adviser who lives in Bexleyheath, Kent, a southeast suburb of London. His interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn was fired by a chance encounter in 1995.
A fellow airline passenger told him he’d seen the name “Custer” carved on the wall of a house in Kirkwall, in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. From the description of the house, strangely enough, Russell knew the house was the one his father had been born in 86 years earlier.
The story about his family’s possible connection with Custer is long, involved and inconclusive, but well worth reading, which you can do by going to the “Author, Editor & Webmaster” page of his website.
It was with the hope of doing more research on that subject that Russell made his first visit to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in June 1998. He did not find what he was looking for in the battlefield museum, but as Russell put it, “I was hooked.”
Peter Russell
This inscription — “JA. CUSITER J – 1864” — on the wall of a house in Kirkwall, in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, sparked Peter Russell’s intense interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
A little more than a year later, in November 1999, he was the founding secretary and treasurer of the Custer Association of Great Britain, as well as a co-editor of “The Crow’s Nest,” the association’s biannual journal.
Russell has retained his membership in the association, but he went off on his own to found Men With Custer UK because he thought there was a need for specific information about the British troopers, as opposed to being merely a group of Brits interested in the battle itself.
He said his aim was to have a website on which everything published would have a British (or at least European) connection, be factually correct, “whenever possible bring something new to the party,” and be informal, interesting and user-friendly. He also wanted to avoid being too partisan and parochial, and he wanted the website to be updated regularly.
He has been doing an admirable job of it, in the view of Lee and Michele Noyes, editors of the Battlefield Dispatch, published quarterly by the Custer Battlefield Historical and Museum Association.
They said, also via email, that while others have occasionally written articles or sketches of 7th Cavalry soldiers from Great Britain, Russell “is the first to make a comprehensive, systematic attempt.”
“Peter’s quality website reflects his intense dedication to Custer, Little Big Horn and related topics,” they wrote. “The content is excellent, which should be no surprise to those who know him and his demanding, exemplary research standards.”
Asked if they had any favorites among the 60-plus soldiers profiled on Men With Custer UK, the Noyeses said they would probably pick Sgt. Major William Sharrow — the subject of a paper presented when the Custer Battlefield association met last year, to be published this month — and 1st Lt. Charles Rudio, who conspired to assassinate the French Emperor Napoleon III in 1858.
Russell, for his part, said he would probably choose James Pym, whose remarkable life ended when he was gunned down by a cowboy in Miles City in 1893. Pym was awarded a Medal of Honor for his actions on June 26, 1876, when he and other volunteers made their way from Reno Hill to the Little Bighorn River, under heavy fire, to fetch water for their wounded comrades.
He was wearing the Medal of Honor — actually a replacement medal because the first one had defective suspension rings — when he was killed in Miles City.
Russell said in response to another question that one of the tricky aspects of researching the lives of soldiers with the 7th Cavalry was that many of them obscured their names, birth dates and other biographical details to escape from legal and personal entanglements.
That seems to have been the case with Pym, who, at the age of 17, was charged with attempting to “commit an unnatural crime with a mare.” He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and nothing more was heard of him until nine years later, late in 1874, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in Boston, Mass.
He told the recruiting officer he was five years younger than he really was. Although there is no evidence to support the claim, Russell says in his biography of Pym, the fudging of his age would seem to support a story handed down by another branch of the family that Pym was a deserter from the British Army.
Russell’s biography of Pym goes into much greater detail about his post-Little Bighorn military career and his eventual move to Miles City, where he ran a restaurant and lived next door to L.A. Huffman, the famous frontier photographer.
Such stories, layered with the history of early-day Montana, make it obvious that you don’t have to be British, or even particularly a fan of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, to find Russell’s researches so interesting.
Russell has made three trips to the battlefield. The most memorable was in October 2004, when John Doerner, then chief historian at the battlefield, invited Russell and two other Plains Indian Wars enthusiasts from England to join him on “the hallowed ground within the enclosed area on Last Stand Hill that contains the markers where, symbolically at least, George Armstrong Custer and other brave men fell on 25 June 1876.”
They had their photo taken next to Custer’s tombstone.
“It was, indeed, an honour and one suspects a rare privilege to be given such an opportunity,” Russell wrote on his website; “an experience that will stay long in our memories.”
Details: For more information on this year’s battle re-enactments and other events related to the anniversary of the battle, see this story by Stephen Dow.
