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Two Paths into the Valley of the Little Big Horn

Two Paths into the Valley of the Little Big Horn: The Stories of Lieutenant Donald McIntosh and Private Walter O. Taylor
By Skeeter Wesinger
May 25, 2025

In June of 1876, the U.S. 7th Cavalry rode out from Fort Abraham Lincoln on a campaign that would end in blood, confusion, and legend. Among those troopers were Lieutenant Donald McIntosh, an officer with deep roots in both American and Native heritage, and Private Walter O. Taylor, a young blacksmith from Rhode Island. Both served in Company G—one as its commander, the other as a soldier in the ranks. Their fates diverged sharply on the banks of the Little Big Horn River.

Lieutenant Donald McIntosh
Born in Montreal in 1838, McIntosh was the son of a Hudson’s Bay Company trader and Charlotte Robinson, a direct descendant of Red Jacket, a famed Seneca chief of the Six Nations. His father was killed by Native warriors when Donald was just 14, a loss that shaped much of his early life as he moved between fur posts and western settlements before settling in Oregon.

During the Civil War, McIntosh served as chief clerk to Brigadier General Daniel Rucker—more ledger than saber—but by 1867, he was commissioned in the 7th Cavalry. Promoted to first lieutenant in 1870, he was tapped by Custer to command Company G during the 1876 campaign.

At Little Big Horn, Company G was one of three companies under Major Marcus Reno ordered to cross the river and assault the southern edge of a vast Indian village. McIntosh’s men dismounted and formed a skirmish line, holding it for perhaps fifteen minutes before being driven back into a stand of timber near the river. When Reno’s Arikara scout Bloody Knife was killed, splattering blood across Reno’s face, the major lost control. He ordered an immediate retreat up a nearby coulee toward the high bluffs.

McIntosh was among the last to leave the timber. He never made it out. Knocked from his horse in the chaos, he was killed and later found horribly mutilated. He was initially buried where he fell, later moved to Fort Leavenworth, and eventually reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery in 1909. His widow, Mary, who received a pension of $30 a month until her death in 1910, was buried beside him. A ring bearing their initials and wedding date—a wedding band lost at the scene—was unearthed in 1995 near McIntosh’s memorial marker and now rests in a private museum in Garryowen, Montana.

Private Walter O. Taylor
In contrast, Walter Taylor was just 21 years old—a blacksmith by trade, not birthright—when he joined McIntosh’s Company G. He rode into the Little Big Horn not as a commander, but as one of the many enlisted men whose names often slip through the cracks of history. Taylor was there on the valley floor when Reno’s advance stalled and then crumbled. He took part in the brief, bitter fight along the skirmish line, and the frantic pullback to the timber. And when Reno ordered the retreat, Taylor was among those who made it out.

He survived the chaos of the withdrawal, survived Reno Hill, and lived to see the relief column under General Terry arrive. He witnessed what remained of Custer’s five companies—gone. Nearly 270 of his fellow soldiers would not return, including his own company commander.

Taylor went home to Rhode Island after the war. He married Emma King and together they raised eight children. In his later years, he moved to Rockland, Massachusetts, to live with family. He died in 1931 at the age of 75 and is buried in a family plot in East Bridgewater.

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The Fall of Saigon

Fifty Years Gone: Saigon and the End of America’s Long War
By Skeeter Wesinger
May 4, 2025

This week marks fifty years since the fall of Saigon—though in truth, the city did not fall. It was abandoned. On April 30, 1975, a North Vietnamese tank breached the iron gates of the Presidential Palace, and the war America had fought, debated, televised, and tried to forget came to a shattering close. It was a scene not of triumph, nor of reconciliation, but of exhaustion—ours, theirs, everyone’s.

For those of us who remember it, the day belongs on a short list of American cataclysms. It is spoken of in the same breath as the day Kennedy was shot, and the morning the Challenger fell from the sky—moments when the national spirit broke mid-sentence, and even those far from the epicenter felt the tremor in their bones.

We watched Saigon not fall but flee, beneath the thudding blades of overloaded helicopters evacuating the last Americans and desperate allies from rooftops. On the ground, South Vietnamese citizens begged for an escape that would never come. Inside our borders, we watched it unfold on television—grim, chaotic, and final. No one cheered. There was no ticker tape. No “Mission Accomplished.” No applause from the Senate floor. There was only silence and a gnawing sense that something had gone irreparably wrong.

And then there was the deck of the USS Hancock, where desperate choices were made. To make room for a South Vietnamese pilot flying a tiny Cessna Bird Dog—his wife and children crammed aboard—American crews pushed helicopters overboard into the sea. It was an act of mercy and madness that defined the war’s end in miniature: sacrifice, chaos, and a brief moment of grace.

The war had ended, but in a way that left every side wounded. The Vietnamese people were forced into the arms of a harsh new regime, or onto the decks of overcrowded boats. Here at home, American soldiers—many barely old enough to vote—returned not as conquering heroes, but as a generation to be pitied, or worse, ignored. Even those who had never served, who had only sat cross-legged on shag carpet while Cronkite or Chancellor intoned solemn truths from behind a desk, were shaped by it. For them, the war was not a memory but a nightly ritual of body counts, jungle footage, and questions that no one in Washington could answer.

In the years that followed, we turned inward. Distrust in government deepened. The myth of American infallibility lay smoldering alongside the burned files on the embassy floor. We began to ask harder questions—about power, about intervention, about what patriotism demanded. And many, too many, stopped asking at all.

It would be decades before any measure of healing began. But even today, the scar remains visible to those who know where to look.

Anniversaries like this are not just for commemoration. They are for reckoning. We remember April 30, 1975, not because it ended a war, but because it forced a nation to look in the mirror—and see not the arsenal of democracy, but a republic uncertain of its own shadow.

Fifty years have passed. The names have faded from headlines. But to those of us who lived through it—who watched that tank roll through the palace gate, who still hear the hum of rotor blades in our memory—it is as vivid now as it was then.

History does not forgive forgetfulness. It requires us to remember—and to reflect—not with romanticism but with clarity. We owe that to the dead, to the displaced, and most of all, to the living, who still carry the war with them fifty years later. In case you missed it.

 

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