Tenting on the Plains; or, General Custer in Kansas and Texas

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

We paid little heed at first to the boat on which we embarked. It was a captured blockade-runner, built up with two stories of cabins and staterooms for passengers. In its original condition, the crew and passengers, as well as the freight, were down in the hull. The steamer was crowded. Our staterooms were tiny, and though they were on the upper deck, the odor of bilge water and the untidiness of the boat made us uncomfortable from the first. The day was sunny and clear as we departed, and we had hardly left the harbor before we struck a norther. Such a hurricane as it was at sea! We had thought ourselves versed in all the wind could do on land; but a norther in that maelstrom of a Gulf, makes a land storm mild in comparison. The Gulf of Mexico is almost always a tempest in a tea-pot. The waves seem to lash themselves from shore to shore, and after speeding with tornado fleetness toward the borders of Mexico, back they rush to the Florida peninsula. No one can be out in one of these tempests, without wondering why that thin jet of land which composes Florida has not long ago been swept out of existence. How many of our troops have suffered from the fury of that ungovernable Gulf, in the transit from New Orleans to Matamoras or Galveston! And officers have spoken, over and over again, of the sufferings of the cavalry horses, condemned to the hold of a Government transport. Ships have gone down there with soldiers and officers who have encountered, over and over again, the perils of battle. Transports have only been saved from being engulfed in those rapacious waves by unloading the ship of hundreds of horses; and to cavalrymen the throwing overboard of noble animals that have been untiring in years of campaigning, and by their fleetness and pluck have saved the lives of their masters, is like human sacrifice. Officers and soldiers alike bewail the loss, and for years after speak of it with sorrow.

Though the wind seems to blow in a circle much of the time on the Gulf, we found it dead against us as we proceeded. The captain was a resolute man, and would not turn back, though the ship was ill prepared to encounter such a gale. We labored slowly though the constantly increasing tempest, and the last glimpse of daylight lighted a sea that was lashed to white foam about us. At home, when the sun sets the wind abates; but one must look for an entire change of programme where the norther reigns. There was no use in remaining up, so I sought to forget my terror in sleep, and crept onto one of the little shelves allotted to us. The creaking and groaning of the ship's timbers filled me with alarm, and I could not help calling up to my husband to ask if it did not seem to him that all the new portion of the steamer would be swept off into the sea. Though I was comforted by assurances of its impossibility, I wished with all my heart we were down in the hold. Sleep, my almost never-failing friend, came to calm me, and I dreamed of the strange days of the blockade-runner, when doubtless other women's hearts were pounding against their ribs with more alarming terrors than those that agitated me. For we well knew what risks Confederate women took to join their husbands, in the stormy days on sea as well as on land.

In the night I was awakened suddenly by a fearful crash, the quick veering of the boat, and her violent rolling from side to side. At the same instant, the overturning of the water-pitcher deluged me in my narrow berth. My husband, hearing my cry of terror, descended from his berth and was beside me in a moment. No one comprehended what had happened. The crashing of timber, and the creaking, grinding sounds rose above the storm. The machinery was stopped, and we plunged back and forth in the trough of the sea, each time seeming to go down deeper and deeper, until there appeared to be no doubt that the ship would be eventually engulfed. There seemed to be no question, as the breaking of massive beams went on, that we were going to pieces. The ship made a brave fight with the elements, and seemed to writhe and struggle like something human.

In the midst of this, the shouts of the sailors, the trumpet of the captain giving orders, went on, and was followed by the creaking of chains, the strain of the cordage, and the mad thrashing to and fro of the canvas, which we supposed had been torn from the spars. Instant disorder took possession of the cabin. Everything movable was in motion. The trunks, which the crowded condition of the hold had compelled us to put in the upper end of the cabin, slid down the carpet, banging from side to side. The furniture broke from its fastenings, and slipped to and fro; the smashing of lamps in our cabin was followed by the crash of crockery in the adjoining dining-room; while above all these sounds rose the cries and wails of the women. Some, kneeling in their night-clothes, prayed loudly, while others sank in heaps on the floor, moaning and weeping in their helpless condition. The calls of frantic women, asking for some one to go and find if we were going down, were unanswered by the terrified men. Meanwhile my husband, having implored me to remain in one spot, and not attempt to follow him, hastily threw on his clothes and left me, begging that I would remember, while he was absent, that the captain's wife and child were with us, and if a man ever was nerved to do his best, that brave husband and father would do so to-night.

It seemed an eternity to wait. I was obliged to cling to the door to be kept from being dashed across the cabin. While I wept and shivered, and endured double agony, knowing into what peril my husband had by that time struggled, I felt warm, soft arms about me, and our faithful Eliza was crooning over me, begging me to be comforted, that she was there holding me. Awakened at the end of the cabin, where she slept on a sofa, she thought of nothing but making her way through the demolished furniture, to take me in her protecting arms. Every one who knows the negro character is aware what their terrors are at sea. How, then, can I recall the noble forgetfulness of self of that faithful soul, without tears of gratitude as fresh as those that flowed on her tender breast when she held me? There was not a vestige of the heroic about me. I simply cowered in a corner, and let Eliza shelter me. Besides, I felt that I had a kind of right to yield to selfish fright, for it was my husband, of all the men on shipboard, who had climbed laboriously to the deck to do what he could for our safety, and calm the agitated women below.

Some of the noble Southern women proved how deep was their natural goodness of heart; for the very ones who had coldly looked me over and shrunk from a hated Yankee when we met the day before, crept slowly up to calm my terrors about my husband, and instruct Eliza what to do for me. At last—and oh, how interminable the time had seemed!—the General opened the cabin door, and struggled along to the weeping women. They all plied him with questions, and he was able to calm them, so the wailing and praying subsided somewhat. When he climbed up the companionway, the waves were dashing over the entire deck, and he was compelled to creep on his hands and knees, clinging to ropes and spars as best he could, till he reached the pilot-house. Only his superb strength kept him from being swept overboard. Every inch of his progress was a deadly peril. He found the calm captain willing to explain, and paid the tribute that one brave man gives another in moments of peril. The norther had broken in the wheel-house, and disabled the machinery, so that, but for the sails, which we who were below had heard raised, we must have drifted and tossed to shipwreck. If he could make any progress, we were comparatively safe, but with such a hurricane all was uncertain. This part of the captain's statement the General suppressed. We women were told, after the fashion of men who desire to comfort and calm our sex, only a portion of the truth.

The motion of the boat, as it rolled from side to side, made every one succumb except Eliza and me. The General, completely subdued and intensely wretched physically, crept into his berth, and though he was so miserable, I remember, toward morning, a faint thrust of ridicule at our adjoining neighbors, the Greenes, who were suffering also the tortures of seasickness. A sarcastic query as to the stability of their stomachs called forth a retort that he had better look to his own. Eliza held me untiringly, and though the terror of uncertainty had subsided somewhat, I could not get on without an assurance of our safety from that upper berth. My husband, in his helplessness, and abandoned as he was to physical misery, could scarcely turn to speak more than a word or two at a time, and even then Eliza would tell him, "Ginnel, you jest 'tend to your own self, and I'll 'tend to Miss Libbie."

It is difficult to explain what a shock it is to find one who never succumbs, entirely subjugated by suffering; all support seems to be removed. In all our vicissitudes, I had never before seen the General go under for an instant. He replied that he was intensely sorry for me; but such deadly nausea made him indifferent to life, and for his part he cared not whether he went up or down.

So the long night wore on. I thought no dawn ever seemed so grateful. The waves were mountains high, and we still plunged into what appeared to be solid banks of green, glittering crystal, only to drop down into seemingly hopeless gulfs. But daylight diminishes all terrors, and there was hope with the coming of light. A few crept out, and some even took courage for breakfast. The feeble notes disappeared from my husband's voice, and he began to cheer me up. Then he crept to our witty Mrs. Greene (the dear Nettie of our home days), to send more sly thrusts in her stateroom, regarding his opinion of one who yielded to seasickness; so she was badgered into making an appearance. While all were contributing experiences of the awful night, and commenting on their terrors, we were amazed to see the door of a stateroom open, and a German family walk out unconcernedly from what we all night supposed was an unoccupied room. The parents and three children showed wide-eyed and wide-mouthed wonder, when they heard of the night. Through all the din and danger they had peacefully slept, and doubtless would have gone down, had we been shipwrecked, unconscious in their lethargy that death had come to them.

Then the white, exhausted faces of our officers, who had slept in the other cabin, began to appear. Our father Custer came tottering in, and made his son shout out with merriment, even in the midst of all the wretched surroundings, when he laconically said to his boy, that "next time I follow you to Texas, it will be when this pond is bridged over." Two of the officers had a stateroom next the pilot-house, and begged the General to bring me up there. My husband, feeling so deeply the terrible night of terror and entire wakefulness for me, picked me up, and carried me to the upper deck, where I was laid in the berth, and restored to some sort of calm by an opportune glass of champagne. The wine seemed to do my husband as much good as it did me, though he did not taste it; all vestige of his prostration of the preceding night disappeared, and no one escaped his comical recapitulation of how they conducted themselves when we were threatened with such peril. My terrors of the sea were too deep-rooted to be set aside, and even after we had left the hated Gulf, and were safely moving up the Mississippi to New Orleans, I felt no security. Nothing but the actual planting of our feet on terra firma restored my equanimity. Among the petitions of the Litany asking our Heavenly Father to protect us, none since that Gulf storm has ever been emphasized to me as the prayer for preservation from "perils by land and by sea."