I have more time to indulge my interest in history these days. Here lately I have been filling in some gaps in my knowledge of the original Gilded Age and the Grant administration. I had never heard of this character before this week, though I probably should have:
Charles Camillo DeRudio, originally Carlo Camillo Di Rudio
Someone should make a movie about him. He was a soldier at 16, survived a shipwreck 6 years later, was sentenced to the guillotine for trying to assassinate Napoleon III of France, escaped from Devil’s Island, served in the US Army, and was one of the survivors of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Remarkably, he lived to be 78 and died of natural causes in 1910.
As a teenager. the Italian born di Rudio fought for the Italian patriots in the Revolution of 1848. In 1855, he was shipwrecked off Spain and ended up settling in London. In 1858, he was one of the four assassins who tried to kill Napoleon III with bombs in the notorious Orsini affair. Two of his colleagues were guillotined. Di Rudio initially received the same sentence but it was commuted to life on Devil’s Island. He escaped and made his way to the United States, where he joined the US Army during the Civil War and anglicized his name to DeRudio. He stayed in the army after the war.
By 1876, he was assigned to the 7th Cavalry under none other than George Armstrong Custer. He had been in command of company E before the Little Bighorn campaign but Custer, who disliked DeRudio, replaced him with one of his favorites, Lt Algernon Smith, just before the regiment departed Fort Lincoln.
Company E, with Smith in command, formed part of Custer’s own battalion and perished to a man in the battle. DeRudio joined Major Marcus Reno’s command for their ill-fated charge against the south end of the giant village. He lost his horse during the subsequent retreat into the trees along the river’s edge, and was unable to follow Reno and the rest of the survivors back across. He and another soldier spent a harrowing 36 hours hiding from the Indians. They were eventually able to rejoin Benteen and Reno. He served until 1898 and spent his remaining years in California.