October 5: A Survivor of Custer’s Last Stand

Sergeant George Geiger, a survivor of the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana, in which General George A. Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was annihilated by a combined force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho native warriors, was awarded the Medal of Honor on this date in 1878. The citation described him as one of four marksmen who exposed themselves to hundreds of Indians in order to protect eleven soldiers who had volunteered to fetch water desperately needed by the troops commanded by Major Marcus Reno. (Custer had split his 700 troops into three companies; the one that was obliterated was commanded by Custer, and a total of 286 soldiers were killed.) Geiger’s military records describe him as Protestant, dark complexioned, gray eyes, 5’ 5”, and literate, but he is widely thought to have been Jewish. Of the 3,473 recipients of the Medal of Honor since it was established during the Civil War, some 27 have been Jews.
“Geiger served in the 47th Ohio Infantry during the Civil War, was captured at the siege of Atlanta, survived many months of privation in the infamous Andersonville Prison . . . and died after a long and painful illness at the National Soldiers’ Home in Dayton, Ohio in 1904, where his religion was clearly recorded as ‘Protestant.’ . . . his name is conspicuous by its absence from the register of U.S. Civil War Jewish-American Veterans, 1861-1865 and the Hall of Heroes at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, Washington, D.C. However . . . [there is] strong ‘circumstantial evidence’ to suggest Geiger was of the Jewish faith, though further research will be required before it can be said with absolute certainty . . .” —The Custer Association of Great Britain