Marcus Reno
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Marcus Albert Reno (November 15, 1834–March 30, 1889) was a career military officer in the American Civil War and in the Black Hills War against the Lakota (Sioux) and Northern Cheyenne. He is most noted for his role in the Battle of Little Big Horn.
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[edit] Early life and career
Reno was born November 15, 1834, in Carrollton, Illinois, the fourth child of James and Charlotte Reno. According to one biographer, he was a descendant of Phillippe Francois Renault, who in 1777 accompanied Lafayette and had been awarded a land grant by the U. S. worth about $400 million by Reno's time. At the age of 15, he sent a letter to the Secretary of War inquiring about the qualifications necessary to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He attended West Point from 1851 until 1857, graduating 20th in a class of 38. He was brevetted second lieutenant, 1st Dragoons, on July 1, 1857, and assigned to duty in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon.
He was in the Union Army in the Civil War, serving as a captain at Antietam in the U.S. 1st Cavalry Regiment and during the Gettysburg Campaign. Reno was wounded at Kelly's Ford in Virginia on March 17, 1863, and was given the brevet rank of major for gallant and meritorious conduct. That same year, he married Mary Hannah Ross of Harrisburg, who would bear him one son, Robert Ross Reno. They owned a farm near New Cumberland, Pennsylvania in Cumberland County. When she died in 1874, Reno was in the field in Montana and rode all night to Fort Benton to request leave to attend her funeral. The request was denied.
Reno was present at the 1864 battles of Cold Harbor, Trevilian Station and Cedar Creek. After serving in a variety of staff positions, he was brevetted lieutenant colonel in October. In December, Reno became brevet colonel of the 12th Pennsylvania Cavalry, later commanding a brigade against John Mosby's guerrillas. On March 13, 1865, he was brevetted brigadier general for “meritorious services during the war.”
[edit] The Battle of Little Bighorn
Reno was a major U.S figure in the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876 serving under George Armstrong Custer. It was Custer's choice to split the army into three parts, Reno attacking from the south while Custer crossed the river further north. However the plan failed as Reno was pushed back by an overwhelming Native American force. Reno's battalion retreated, crossing the river at a buffalo ford where most casualties occurred, to a bluff overlooking the river. Joined by the third battalion led by Capt Benteen and later by the pack train and its escort, the survivors spent the rest of the day and the next surrounded by hostile forces. They watched the village pack up and leave late in the afternoon of the 26th, and on the 27th, the survivors moved closer to the river, where Terry and Gibbon found them.
Reno was heavily criticized for his actions, during his lifetime and after (and continues to be); some even declared him to have been drunk at a crucial time in the battle. The only legal action ever taken however, the 1879 Reno Court of Inquiry, found him not culpable of any wrong-doing during the battle.
[edit] Postbellum career
After the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Reno was assigned the command of Fort Abercrombe. There, he ran afoul of the wife of another officer of the 7th Cavalry, Lt. James Bell and the Rev. Richard Wainwright, who may have been Mrs. Bell's lover. What really happened is unknown, but Reno certainly displayed public drunkenness on several occasions and denied Rev. Wainwright permission to preach at the Fort; on the other hand, Capt. Bell had been on detached service during the Battle of the Little Big Horn and his company had been wiped out in a debacle which many people were blaming on Reno. Complaints of public indecency were filed with the commander of the Seventh, Col Samuel D. Sturgis, who forwarded the complaints, but dismissed any particular fault of Reno's (most of the incidents had occurred at parties or on holidays when other officers had been drinking). Reno was ordered to surrender command and report to a board of inquiry at St Paul. The Army board recommended dismissal, but President Hayes commuted this to suspension from rank and pay for 2 years.
Responding to charges of cowardice and drunkenness at the Little Bighorn, Reno later demanded and was granted a Court of Inquiry. The court convened in Chicago in January of 1879, and called as witnesses most of the surviving officers who had been in the fight. While the court did not sustain any of the charges against Reno, neither did it did find his conduct praiseworthy.
After his second courtmartial and discharge, Reno moved to Washington D.C., where he tried to find work, finally being hired by the Bureau of Pensions as an examiner. He met a government clerk named Isabella Ray, which he married in January 1884, but she left him after a few months. When his son got married in Nashville to a whisky heiress, Reno said he was too busy to attend the wedding, but in reality, he could not afford the train fare. He offered to write his memoirs, but the New York Weekly Press rejected his offer and when he submitted the portion of his diary concerning the Battle of the LBH, it was returned unpublished. (It later was published posthumously.)
Reno died in Washington on March 29, 1889, following an operation for cancer of the tongue.
In 1967, a US military review board reversed Reno's court martial decision after reviewing original documents and testimony officially changing his general discharge status to "honorable". Originally buried in an unmarked grave in Washington's Oak Hill Cemetery, his remains were re-interred later that year in Custer National Cemetery, within the Little Bighorn Battlefield.
[edit] Trivia
- Reno's best friend in his West Point class was the painter James Whistler. In one exam, Whistler said silicon was a gas. Years later, Whistler said to Reno that if silicon had been a gas, he would have stayed in the Army, and probably have been made a general. Reno responded, that then no one would have heard of Whistler's Mother. People who knew him said it was the only joke they ever heard Reno make.
