A reporter covering the Seventh Cavalry’s 1876 campaign died with George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but his death secured both his place in history and a future for his two daughters. > Reporter Mark Kellogg was chasing the story of a lifetime, but he had to die to get it. . On June 21st, just days before the battle in Montana Territory, he wired his publisher a final dispatch: “We leave the Rose Bud tomorrow, and by the time this reaches you, we will have met and fought the Red Devils with what results remain to be seen.
I go with Custer and will be at the death. ” His words carried an eerie sense of prophecy. . The phrase “at the death” likely referred to the finish of a fox hunt, but fate gave it a much darker meaning, and when Custer and his men were wiped out on June 25th, Kellogg was among the dead.
. Kellogg was born in Brighton, Ontario, in 1831, the third of what would eventually be 10 children. His family moved often before settling in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where his father ran the Kellogg House Hotel. Mark became a skilled telegrapher and later worked as a reporter and editor under the pen name “Frontier,” filing stories for the St.
Paul Dispatch while traveling the upper Midwest. He also sold stories to larger eastern newspapers, as many western correspondents did. In 1861, he married Martha J. Robinson, and together they had two daughters, but Martha died in 1867, leaving Kellogg to send his girls to live with Martha’s sister, Lily Robinson.
He struggled financially, even making a failed run for the Minnesota legislature
By 1873, Kellogg was living in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, where he helped Civil War veteran Clement A. Lounsberry establish the Bismarck Tribune, the first newspaper in the territory. Kellogg occasionally filled in as editor but mostly served as an “attache” as Lounsberry put it—enough to cover bills but not enough to raise two daughters and support their aunt. His columns echoed the dominant pro-expansion sentiment of the day.
In 1875, after native warriors killed a homesteader near Fort Abraham Lincoln, Kellogg wrote: “I say, turn the dogs of war loose and drive them off the face of the earth if they do not behave themselves. ”
When word spread in spring 1876 that Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were preparing to campaign against the Lakota and Cheyenne, Lounsberry had intended to go along and report, but his wife fell ill, so Kellogg went in his place. Some accounts suggest another factor: Kellogg had by chance traveled on the same Northern Pacific train as George and Libby Custer earlier that year. Stranded for days in deep snow drifts, Kellogg had rigged a telegraph line to send word to Fort Abraham Lincoln, and Captain Tom Custer soon arrived with a sleigh to rescue his brother and sister-in-law.
That act earned Kellogg the trust of the Custer family. Kellogg needed one big story to secure his reputation and provide for his daughters. Riding on Custer’s fame, he secured a coveted contract with the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jr. ‘s high-paying, flamboyant newspaper that had bankrolled world-famous expeditions, including Henry Stanley’s search for Dr.
David Livingstone in Africa. Custer too needed redemption: he had recently angered President Ulysses S. Grant by testifying about corruption in military trading posts implicating Grant’s brother, and had to lean on Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Terry to get his Seventh Cavalry assignment back. Despite Sherman’s orders banning reporters, Custer allowed Kellogg to join.
Kellogg’s dispatches reflected his gratitude. On June 21st, he wrote admiringly of Custer: “The only event that happened during the expedition was General Custer’s demonstration of proficient rifle shooting, which resulted in him taking down an antelope at 400 yards and almost blasting the heads off of many sage hens. ” The next day, they reached the Little Bighorn, and within days, Kellogg’s pen fell silent forever. Kellogg rode into the campaign mounted on a mule, carrying paper, pencils, sugar, coffee, and bacon in his canvas saddlebags—enough supplies to last two weeks.
A fellow journalist later wrote that Kellogg was full of hope they would catch up to the Indians on the march and witness a major fight. When scouts reported the size of the Indian village, Kellogg struggled to keep pace with Custer’s advance party. Riding his mule, he asked his friend Fred Gerard, Custer’s civilian interpreter for the Arikara Scouts and an occasional news correspondent, for the loan of a pair of spurs. Gerard agreed but cautioned Kellogg to stay back with the main column: neither Kellogg’s mount nor his riding skills, Gerard warned, seemed suited for what might lie ahead.
Kellogg, however, insisted he expected interesting developments and pressed forward with Custer. No one can say with certainty what transpired next. Gerard survived, having left Custer’s immediate command before the final push, but Kellogg did not. Four days after the battle, soldiers discovered the body of a civilian in the tall grass near the Little Bighorn.
According to Colonel John Gibbon, the attire was not appropriate for a soldier. The man was missing an ear and had been partially scalped. Survivors recognized him as Kellogg by a distinctive strap fastened to one boot, and it’s likely his mule panicked at the gunfire, throwing him into harm’s way. His long, Napoleonic-style sideburns may even explain why one ear was cut away.
On July 6th, 1876, the Bismarck Tribune—Kellogg’s actual employer under Lounsberry—was the first newspaper in the world to break the full story of the Custer massacre, complete with a casualty list. The Tribune’s telegraph office sent a 15,000-word dispatch east to Kellogg’s secondary employer, the New York Herald, costing $3,000 in 19th-century money. Thanks to Kellogg’s tragic end, the Herald beat every other paper east of the Mississippi. Its publisher, James Gordon Bennett Jr.
, claimed Kellogg as his own correspondent, and true to his reputation for extravagance, sent $2,000 to support Kellogg’s two daughters and their aunt. In the 1920s, old residents of LaCrosse remembered how Bennett went even further, arranging for Lily Robinson, Kellogg’s sister-in-law, to receive $100 each month for the girls’ care and education and granting each daughter $5,000 upon reaching adulthood. Kellogg may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he accomplished what he set out to do: securing the future of his daughters.
Whatever his fate at the Little Bighorn, to his family, he was nothing short of a hero.
