I’m a buff of Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn, but here’s something I didn’t know about that event until recently: Two of the members of the 7th Cavalry who died on that hot June day in 1876 were from Putnam County.

Both were lowly privates. Both fell on Custer Hill, and their remains were never identified, which was not unusual. Most of the 200-plus soldiers who were killed were so badly mutilated by the Indians that it was next to impossible to tell who they were.
Care was taken to recover the bodies of the officers, but the enlisted men who served out west in the post-Civil War era were often anonymous types. Many of the soldiers in Col. George Armstrong Custer’s famous regiment were raw recruits, vagabonds, immigrants and chronic deserters who re-enlisted under fake names.

They were considered expendable and so the recovery of their remains was at best perfunctory.

One of the Putnam men was 26-year-old William Lossee, a private who was from Brewster, or Brewster Station as it was known in those days. His enlistment papers indicate that his civilian occupation was “showman,” but doesn’t elaborate further. He was in the army only nine months at the time of his death.

The other unfortunate was Pvt. George Howell, of Cold Spring, who first enlisted in 1868 at West Point at the age of 21. For three years, he served in an engineering batallion. He was discharged in Feburary, 1871 then re-upped in December of 1872 and was assigned to Company C of the Seventh, whose commading officer was Capt. Tom Custer, the brother of George. Tom Custer was also killed in the Indian battle.

One other stray fact about Lossee and Howell. Both were under five feet six inches in height.

As far as I know, no one at the Little Big Horn came from Westchester County, but several were from New York state.

In any event, the bones of Lossee and Howell and those of the other cavalrymen were collected and buried on Cister Hill in Montana. Their names are on the monument there.