Custer and Fred Grant

On this date in 1876, Brigadier-General Alfred Terry and his reinforcements discovered the bodies of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 of his 7th Cavalry Regiment soldiers, killed two days earlier in Dakota Territory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 

Ulysses and Julia Grant's eldest child, Fred, was an officer in the 7th Cavalry but was on leave, his wife Ida having given birth to their first child on June 6. (That child, a daughter named Julia after her grandmother, would grow up to live in Russia as a princess, before fleeing the revolution there and returning to the United States.)

Custer had graduated from West Point in 1861, last in his class, and proceeded to have an extraordinarily brilliant, courageous and successful Civil War career, being promoted to major general of volunteers (succeeding Frank Herron as the youngest one). Custer's postwar Indian campaigns, on the other hand, were marred by brutality and incompetence. His political sympathies regarding Reconstruction lay more with Andrew Johnson than Ulysses Grant, and his testimony regarding War Department corruption in 1876, just before the Dakota campaign, was damaging to the administration.

Fred Grant (who also had a checkered career at West Point) was too young to serve in the Civil War. He had (temporarily) left the Army before 1885, and was then in severe financial and personal embarrassment due to the collapse of the Grant & Ward investment firm the year before. Yet he was adopting the position of family leadership as his dying father struggled to complete his memoirs. One of the things Fred struggles with, in The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant, is the psychological legacy of his relationship with Custer.