page_title: Thomas Bailey Marquis
section_title: Suicide controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Bailey Marquis / Legacy / Suicide controversy
caption_attribution_description: English: Grave markers at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
context_page_description: Thomas Bailey Marquis was an American self-taught historian and ethnographer who wrote about the Plains Indians and other subjects of the American frontier. He had a special interest in the destruction of George Armstrong Custer's battalion at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which became his lifelong obsession. Marquis' body of work is valued by historians for his recording of the life stories of several Plains Indians and his writing on their way of life, particularly those involved in the Custer fight, notably Wooden Leg in A Warrior Who Fought Custer. Marquis carried out this research at a time when few were interested in the Indian version of events, even though no American soldiers survived the Custer fight. Marquis' work is thus both unique and unrepeatable.
  Marquis developed his own theories regarding the history of the Cheyenne. One idea in particular, that many of Custer's men committed suicide when the situation became hopeless, proved to be highly controversial.
context_section_description: The theory that Custer's soldiers committed suicide en masse toward the end of the Battle of the Little Bighorn has been controversial from the moment it was first suggested, and the discussion continues. The notion was so controversial that Marquis could not find a publisher for Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself, his main vehicle for promoting the theory, and the book did not appear in print until 1976, forty years after his death.
  The earliest criticism comes with Ghent's review in the New York Times of the Wooden Leg book after its first publication in 1931. "No student of the battle is likely to accept any of the new revelations."  Ghent is dismissive of the value of Indians as eyewitnesses: "... he tells what he remembers, along with much that he has imagined ..." and insists that the "body of authenticated fact is in no danger of being disturbed by any new material from any source". Weist describes this review as "somewhat supercilious" and goes on to point out that Marquis has many other witnesses confirming the story, and that the only eyewitnesses are Indians. Marquis names a dozen of these in the introduction to the Wooden Leg book, one of whom, Sun Bear, gives a similar account in The Cheyennes of Montana. However, Marquis has many other critics who say he either exaggerated the role played by suicide or is entirely mistaken.
  Ghent's mistrust of Indians as reliable witnesses was commonplace in the period;
  But I did not say anything about that. Other Indians, at other times, had tried to tell of the soldiers killing themselves, but the white people listening always became angry and said the Indians were liars, so I thought it best to keep quiet.
  — Wooden Leg
  According to Hardorff, the theory is discounted by most academics. He suggests that Marquis may have made errors due to the use of sign language, which, he claims, cannot convey the nuances of language. In his book, Wooden Leg unambiguously relates a tale of mass suicide. He discusses possible causes of the suicides at length. It puzzled him because the idea of suicide to avoid capture was unknown to the Indians. Attributing the soldier's suicides to the effects of whisky was a common theory among the Indians, although Wooden Leg believed the prayers of medicine men to have been the cause. Wooden Leg's only taste of whisky up to the time of the battle had been a mouthful – which he immediately spat out – that he took from a captured bottle. In later life, Wooden Leg changed his mind and subscribed to the whisky theory after experiencing the effects of alcohol first-hand.
  Richard Fox and others note that while Wooden Leg's version is corroborated by the oral tradition of other Cheyenne witnesses, notably that of Kate Big Head, a young woman who witnessed the battle, there is no corroboration in the oral tradition of the Sioux. Fox concludes that "quite simply, the contention is nonsense. A few troopers undoubtedly took their own lives, but it is hard to know what factors fostered the idea of wholesale suicide". Fox in his turn has been criticized for selectively using Indian oral tradition when it suits him, but discarding it as nonsense when he finds it disagreeable.
  According to Liberty, the soldiers' fear that Indians would torture prisoners was unfounded. "Plains Indian warriors as a rule took as captives only women and children, killing male opponents outright." However, Liberty goes on to say that the possibility of torture was widely believed by Custer's men. She says that Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself is well researched by Marquis, but is often not consulted merely because of the title.
  Another suggestion is that the Cheyenne warriors, pressed to recount details of the Custer battle, were still reluctant to admit to killing soldiers for fear of punishment. A simple way out of this dilemma was to say when questioned by non-Indians that most of the soldiers died at their own hands. Researchers Fox and Thom Hatch say that Wooden Leg retracted the claim in later life; this would have been in extreme old age, as he had still not recanted at the age of
caption: Grave markers at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
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