June 1876 – Marcus Kellogg, a journalist traveling with Custer’s 7th Cavalry, files one of his last dispatches before being killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
June 1876 – Marcus Kellogg, a journalist traveling with Custer’s 7th Cavalry, files one of his last dispatches before being killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. A native of Ontario, Canada, Kellogg migrated with his family to New York in 1835 and had met Custer and his wife while traveling together by train that same year and struck up a friendship. When Custer led his soldiers out of Fort Abraham Lincoln and headed west for Montana on 31 May, Kellogg rode with him. During the next few weeks, Kellogg filed three dispatches from the field to the Bismarck Tribune, which in turn passed the stories on to the New York Herald. Kellogg’s first dispatches, dated May 31 and June 12, recorded the progress of the expedition westward. His final report, dated June 21, came from the army’s camp along the Rosebud River in southern Montana, not far from the Little Big Horn River. “We leave the Rosebud tomorrow,” Kellogg wrote, “and by the time this reaches you we will have met and fought...