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as well as a number of state and foreign buildings, many restaurants, beer gardens, cigar pavilions, and a thirty-six-foot-tall ice water fountain erected by the Grand Division of Sons of Temperance of the State of Pennsylvania, which dispensed free ice water from twenty-seven self-acting spigots. The predominating theme of the exposition was Progress and the leading role of the United States in driving the innovations and achievements of the age. The president of the Centennial Exposition voiced the hope that people would come to the exposition “to study the evidence of our resources, to measure the progress of a hundred years, and to examine to our profit the wonderful products of other lands.”³⁴ A visit to Machinery Hall, bragged one contemporary account, “must convince all that the world contains no fingers more cunning, no minds more inventive, nor tastes more refined, than are found on our shores.³⁵

      In the Government Building, exhibitions were intended to “illustrate the functions and administrative facilities of the Government in times of peace and its resources as a war power.” Accordingly, the War Department awed fairgoers with a dynamic display of some of its most powerful and modern weaponry. All the machinery and skilled operatives needed to demonstrate the manufacture of the Springfield breech-loading rifle were assembled in the Government Building; fascinated fairgoers watched as “handsome weapons of death” were fashioned out of round bars of steel and blocks of black walnut before their eyes. The process of grinding a bayonet on a steam-powered grindstone as well as the manufacture of bullets and cartridges were also on view, as well as an array of cannons, Gatling guns, and mountain howitzers with carriages and ammunition, positioned realistically on pack saddles, just as they would be carried into battle on the backs of mules.³⁶

      Weapons also made up a significant portion of the American Indian artifacts exhibited in the same building, but these were presented in an entirely different way. Stone axes, clubs, spears, bows and arrows, and knives were piled together in museum cases or “huddled under tables.” Without interpretation, these “savage weapons” were displayed as relics, thus supporting the prevalent idea about the backwardness of the men who had made them. As the author of an article describing the weapons concluded: “The Centennial Exhibition was mainly of the means and results of modern industry and art, and the primitive objects were comparatively but strays and occasionals.”³⁷

      The principal organizer of the Indian exhibit, Spencer F. Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, intended the display of Indian objects to educate Americans on the way of life of American Indians as well as to illustrate “the change from a savage state to one of comparative civilization,” but the overall impression created by the jumble of artifacts tended instead to reinforce common stereotypes of Indians as primitives, whose culture and way of life represented the antithesis of progress.³⁸

      Baird had also wanted to include living Indians in the Centennial Exposition. Working with the Indian Office, which shared responsibility for representing Indians at the exposition, plans to bring thirty to forty Indian families to the exhibition were well developed, but ultimately abandoned due to lack of congressional support. The idea was to install members of selected tribes (those already subdued by the government) in a five-acre reservation on the exposition grounds where they could demonstrate their skills at crafts such as weaving blankets, making pottery, and dressing buffalo skins. Unfortunately for Baird, Congress refused to fund the proposal, even when it was pointed out that such an excursion would have the added benefit of providing an object lesson in the power of the United States.³⁹ Instead of living Indians, visitors to the Indian exhibit in the Government Building encountered life-sized effigies, made of papier-mâché modeled on notable Indians who had been photographed on diplomatic visits to Washington. One of the men whose image was rendered in effigy was the Oglala chief Red Cloud, who had led his people’s resistance to incursions into Lakota and Shoshone territories along the Bozeman Trail; by the time of the centennial, Red Cloud had long since accommodated himself to the inevitable and acceded to the government’s insistence that he settle near an agency on the Great Sioux Reservation. Although Red Cloud had been at peace with the United States since 1868, the manikin representing him was dressed to appear warlike, presenting a “repulsive looking image with raised tomahawk and a belt of human scalps.”⁴⁰ Two years after touring the Indian exhibit under Red Cloud’s scowling likeness, Scott would spend several days as an interpreter and guest in Red Cloud’s lodge, where he found him to be “the picture of hospitality.”

      Ethnographic limitations notwithstanding, for the recent West Point graduate the exposition was enjoyable for the spectacle it provided and also for the chance to meet friends. Scott spent some of his time at the exposition in the encampment of West Point cadets. He also enjoyed the hospitality of the Seventh New York Regiment, also camped out within the fairgrounds. “Any soldier who got into one of the company streets of the Seventh Regiment was in for a strenuous time,” Scott recalled years later. “Each tent floor had a small cellar under it, filled with ice, champagne, roast chicken, and other delicacies, and a passer-by would be hauled into those tents, one after another, and, with the cellar door opened wide, he would not be allowed to leave until some duty called his hospitable hosts elsewhere.”

      Scott was still in Philadelphia for the gala events to mark Independence Day 1876. These began with a torchlight parade to Independence Hall on the evening of July 3. At the stroke of midnight, Philadelphia’s new Liberty Bell pealed thirteen times to thunderous applause. An orchestra was on hand to play “The Star Spangled Banner,” with all the bells and steam whistles in the city joining in. The city’s celebrations continued until two in the morning. The Fourth dawned hot. To avoid the worst heat of the day, the planned military parade of ten thousand troops was scheduled for early in the day. Taking part in the parade were two dozen regiments and national guard companies as well as a Centennial Legion composed of detachments from the thirteen original states of the Union. All were under the command of the governor of Pennsylvania; they marched through Philadelphia’s streets and were reviewed by General William Tecumseh Sherman in front of Independence Hall. The parade was followed by the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah as well as odes, orations, and songs composed in honor of the anniversary of American independence. At night the city was illuminated again and a fireworks display over the exposition grounds brought the festivities to a close.⁴¹

      The following day, unsettling news began to spread through the exposition. Far to the west, in Montana Territory, troops of the Seventh Cavalry, led precipitously into battle by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, had been routed by a larger force of Lakotas and Cheyennes. Scott heard the news from a friend he encountered on the street. At first he did not believe it. A newspaper soon convinced him of the truth of his friend’s report. Among the dead were two of Scott’s friends who had graduated the previous year, John Crittenden and James Sturgis.⁴²

      Shocking though the news was, the death of Custer’s entire command also opened up certain opportunities for the recent graduate. Scott hurried back to Princeton to consult his uncle Sam Stockton about how to proceed.⁴³ Stockton, who had been a captain in the Fourth Cavalry, brushed aside Scott’s scruples about “jumping for the shoes of those killed in the Little Big Horn before they were cold.” Stockton counseled him to write immediately to his uncle David Hunter “who knew everybody in the War Department.” Uncle David received Scott’s application for the Seventh Cavalry at breakfast the next day and carried it to the War Department where they were making the transfers to the regiment, and made sure that Scott’s name was added to the list. Scott’s new commission as second lieutenant in the Seventh Cavalry was dated June 26, 1876, the day after the Little Bighorn battle, an event Scott referred to for the rest of his life as “the Custer disaster.”⁴⁴

      It had taken ten days for the alarming news of Custer’s defeat on the Little Bighorn River to travel from Indian Country to the fairgoing crowds in Philadelphia. The few details and rumors transmitted by telegram to newspaper offices in the East from remote places like Salt Lake City and Helena in time for the July 5 papers were supplemented the following day by a fuller account and the first official confirmation of the fight by the commander of the Yellowstone campaign, General Alfred Terry. Terry sent his official report on the events of June 25 from his field camp on the Lone Horn River on June 28 by way of a scout who arrived with the dispatch at Fort Ellis near Bozeman on July 3. From Bozeman

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