General George Armstrong Custer
The history books are chock full of famous messages. Indeed, without the correspondences between people in the past, historians would have very little to write about; such sources provide us the information upon which our historical stories are based. Some messages have had great impact because they were so successful. Who can forget President Eisenhower’s beautifully simplistic, effective campaign slogan, “I Like Ike?” However, some messages are important because they failed at accomplishing their purpose. A great example of this is General George Armstrong Custer’s last dispatch before his Seventh Cavalry was wiped out in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The message read:
”Come on. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring packs.”
Though brief, this message conveyed a lot of information. Captain Frederick Benteen, in command of Custer’s left flank, would have instantly recognized the importance of the message: a large number of aggressive enemies had been encountered, and Custer needed Benteen’s men and the ammunition packs that they possessed. Why, then, did the communiqué fail to save Custer? Historians, professional and amateur alike, have argued about this. Some have laid the blame on Benteen, others have said that the Sioux were just to powerful for Benteen to obey the orders. One thing, however, is beyond dispute: Custer’s lack of foresight in regard to messaging.
In short, Custer did not give much thought about messages between units before it was too late. Coordination between the various components of the Army had already begun to break down as long as a week before the battle. At that time, Custer had failed to receive any messages from his forward patrols. Instead of pausing due to the lack of communication, Custer moved forward. Furthermore, on the first day of the battle he had three different commands in the field—his, Benteen’s, and Major Marcus Reno’s. All were spread out along the Little Bighorn in about a four-mile line. Despite this, Custer retained only two messengers to communicate to his subordinates. For whatever else went wrong on that fateful day, the lack of a clearly effective communication system seriously aggravated the circumstances.
In a very direct way, Custer met his end because he did not pay heed to the importance of messaging until the Sioux were already shouting their war cry and crossing the river. At that point, a terse, eight-word message could not be decoded by Benteen in a way that could have helped Custer and his men. Had Custer not approached messaging as an after-thought, things at the Little Bighorn may have worked out very differently for him.
