Italian #60: Giovanni Martino

Giovanni is a really an odd character in History thanks to his two brushes with fame through coincidence. The latter, read on, is what made him a temporary celebrity in the US and it should’ve led to a cameo in Dustin Hoffman’s opus Little Big Man.

He was born possibly in late 1851 to early 1852. Since Giovanni was abandoned at an orphanage, the Catholic Church baptized him, gave him a rather generic name and handed him over to a local wet nurse. When he turned 14, he left the orphanage to join Italian unification leader Garibaldi’s forces as a drummer boy in the campaign against Austria. This would be 1866 and Italy allied with Prussia in what would be the Austro-Prussian War. Even though Italy was an established de facto state by 1861, the Austrians still controlled the Northeastern states containing Venice.

Nothing further of note seemed to happen after the war and in 1873, Martino hopped a ship to America. I’m guessing it was find a new start, a better opportunity, etc. Despite Italy joining the rest of Europe as a nation-state club through its size, its economy was nothing close to the big three: UK, Germany and France.

America didn’t go any better and after a year of no luck landing steady or gainful employment, he joined the US Army. The Army chose to send him to Missouri where he trained to be a cavalry soldier and bugler. Maybe his past experience playing drums led the recruiter to say, hey, you could play a horn then, right? It’s all the same!

Within two years, Giovanni was assigned to the infamous US Seventh Cavalry led by Custer to fight in the Plains Indians Wars in the Dakotas and Montana. On the fateful event known as the Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn), he was luckily dispatched by Custer to get reinforcements and extra ammunition before Custer led Company H into the trap laid out by First Nations’ forces. Giovanni managed to survive because he reached the nearby hill where the Seventh’s remaining soldiers were stationed and he then spent the next 36 hours fighting for his life with his comrades until another US unit came to their rescue. Due to his “exotic” nature and circumstances, newspapers labelled him “the last White man to see Custer alive.”

Several years later, he met and married an Irish immigrant named Julia while stationed at a less conflict-ridden base in New York State. They started a family (first son was named George, after Custer) and Martino continued to be a career Army member until he was forced out upon reaching the mandatory retirement age in 1904. He then went to have multiple careers on the East Coast: owning a candy store, ticket taker for the NYC subway and a nightwatchman. Reporters and historians continued to seek him out on the anniversary of the fateful battle or they were writing a bio regarding Custer. He passed away in 1922 after dying from complications caused by being hit by a truck.

In some ways, Giovanni Martino was a mini-Forrest Gump given his brushes with famous people and events. The difference? His actually happened.

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