Myles Keogh - Postbellum Career

Postbellum Career

After the war, he obtained a commission as a captain in the Regular Army as part of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment under George Armstrong Custer and was given command of I Company. He was generally well liked by fellow officers although the isolation of military duty on the western frontier often weighed heavily upon him. When depressed he occasionally drank to excess, though he seems not to have fallen prey to the chronic alcoholism that destroyed the careers of many fellow officers of the frontier Regular Army.

There was more than a tinge of melancholy in Keogh's nature, which seemed somehow at odds with his handsome, dashing persona. While he was not given to self-analysis, Keogh once noted:

"Impudence and presumption carry with them great weight and a certain lack of sensitiveness is necessary to be successful. This lack of sensitiveness I unfortunately do not inherit."

Keogh was also fond of the ladies, though he never married:

"My great weakness is the love I have for the fair sex, and pretty much all my trouble comes from or can be traced to that charming source." "I never propose to form any ties. I might often have married for money but I never gave it a moment's serious thought & never propose to."

He did, however, carry a photograph of Capt. Thomas McDougall's sister, Josephine Buel, with him to Little Bighorn.

Although absent from the Washita battle (1868) and the Yellowstone Expedition (1873), Custer's encounters of substance with hostile Indians, Keogh did have sole responsibility for defending the Smoky Hill route against Indian raids from late 1866 to the summer of 1867. When Sheridan took over from Hancock in 1868, there is evidence that it was to Keogh he turned for first-hand information on conditions on the front line. And while with Sully's expedition later that year, Keogh was fighting Indians almost every day—indeed, it was in one such fight that his new mount, Comanche, received his first wound and, as the story goes, his name. Captain Keogh's frustration with an enemy who did not fight in a conventional manner is evident from a comment he wrote in a personal letter to his family in Ireland:

"I have never before appreciated the difficulty of finding Indians, and have concluded that without knowing exactly where to surprise their camp, or having a guide who can track them at a run, it is a waste of horseflesh and time to endeavor to come up with them."

In the summer of 1874, Keogh was on leave to visit his homeland on a seven-month leave of absence, while Custer was leading a controversial expedition through the Black Hills. During this second visit home he deeded his inherited Clifden estate in Kilkenny to his sister Margaret. He enjoyed his stay in his homeland, feeling the necessity to support his sisters after the death of both parents.

In October, Keogh returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln for his old duty with Custer, and it would be his last days. As a precaution, he purchased a $10,000 life insurance policy and wrote a letter of warning to his close friends in the Throop-Martin family, Auburn, New York, outlining his burial wishes:

"We leave Monday on an Indian expedition & if I ever return I will go on and see you all. I have requested to be packed up and shipped to Auburn in case I am killed, and I desire to be buried there. God bless you all, remember if I should die—you may believe that I loved you and every member of your family—it was a second home to me.”

He gave out copies of his will to comrades, and left behind personal papers with instructions that they be burned if he was killed.

Perhaps the strongest testimony to Keogh's bravery and leadership ability came at Custer's Last Stand – the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. The senior captain among the five companies wiped out with Custer that day, and commanding one of two squadrons within the Custer detachment, Keogh died in a "last stand" of his own, surrounded by the men of Company I. When the sun-blackened and dismembered dead were buried three days later, Keogh's body was found at the center of a group of troopers that included his two sergeants, company trumpeter and guidon bearer. The slain officer was stripped but not mutilated, perhaps because of the "medicine" the Indians saw in the Agnus Dei ("Lamb of God") he wore on a chain about his neck. Keogh's left knee had been shattered by a bullet that corresponded to a wound through the chest and flank of his horse, indicating that horse and rider may have fallen together prior to the last rally.

The badly injured animal was found on the fatal battlefield, and nursed back to health as a regimental mascot, where he remained until his death in 1890; Comanche was one of only two U.S. military horses buried with full military honors. This horse, Comanche, is considered the only military survivor of the battle, though several other badly wounded horses were found and destroyed at the scene. His bloody gauntlet and the guidon of his Company I were recovered by the army three months after Little Bighorn at the Battle of Slim Buttes.

His Papal medals are now in the possession of his family (see Myles Keogh: the Life and Legend of an "Irish Dragoon" in the Seventh Cavalry, p. 157), though the story has been told that they wound up around the neck of Sitting Bull (according to Ray O'Hanlon of the New York Irish Echo).

Keogh's remains were interred in Fort Hill Cemetery (bio and photos) in Auburn, New York on October 26, 1877, an occasion marked by city-wide official mourning and an impressive military procession to the cemetery. Fort Keogh, in southeastern Montana, was named after Keogh. The fort was first commanded by Nelson A. Miles. The 55,000 acre fort is today an agricultural experiment station. Miles City, Montana is located two miles from the old fort.