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

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

In the midst of this indecision, when the General was obliged to be in New York and Washington on business, my father was taken ill. The one whom I so sorely needed in all those ten years that followed, when I was often alone in the midst of the dangers and anxieties and vicissitudes attending our life, stepped into heaven as quietly and peacefully as if going into another room. His last words were to urge me to do my duty as a soldier's wife. He again begged me to ignore self, and remember that my husband had chosen the profession of a soldier; in that life he had made a name, and there, where he was so eminently fitted to succeed, he should remain.

My father's counsel and his dying words had great weight with me, and enabled me to fight against the selfishness that was such a temptation. Very few women, even the most ambitious for their husbands' future, but would have confessed, at the close of the war, that glory came with too great sacrifices, and they would rather gather the husbands, lovers and brothers into the shelter of the humblest of homes, than endure the suspense and loneliness of war times. I am sure that my father was right, for over and over again, in after years, my husband met his brother officers who had resigned, only to have poured into his ear regrets that they had left the service. I have known him to come to me often, saying he could not be too thankful that he had not gone into civil life. He believed that a business man or a politician should have discipline in youth for the life and varied experience with all kinds of people, to make a successful career. Officers, from the very nature of their life, are prescribed in their associates. They are isolated so much at extreme posts that they know little or nothing of the life of citizens. After resigning, they found themselves robbed of the companionship so dear to military people, unable, from want of early training, to cope successfully with business men, and lacking, from inexperience, the untiring, plodding spirit that is requisite to the success of a civilian. An officer rarely gives a note—his promise is his bond. It is seldom violated. It would be impossible for me, even in my twelve years' experience, to enumerate the times I have known, when long-standing debts, for which there was not a scrap of written proof, were paid without solicitation on the part of the friend who was the creditor. One of our New York hotels furnishes proof of how an officer's word is considered. A few years since, Congress failed to make the usual yearly appropriation for the pay of the army. A hotel that had been for many years the resort of military people, immediately sent far and wide to notify the army that no bills would be presented until the next Congress had passed the appropriation. To satisfy myself, I have inquired if they lost by this, and been assured that they did not.

Men reared to consider their word equal to the most binding legal contract ever made, would naturally find it difficult to realize, when entering civil life, that something else is considered necessary. The wary take advantage of the credulity of a military man, and usually the first experience is financial loss to an officer who has confidingly allowed a debt to be contracted without all the restrictive legal arrangements with which citizens have found it necessary to surround money transactions. And so the world goes. The capital with which an officer enters into business is lost by too much confidence in his brother man, and when he becomes richer by experience, he is so poor in pocket he cannot venture into competition with the trained and skilled business men among whom he had entered so sanguinely.

Politics also have often proved disastrous to army officers. Allured by promises, they have accepted office, and been allowed a brief success; but who can be more completely done for than an office-holder whose party goes out of power? The born politician, one who has grown wary in the great game, provides for the season of temporary retirement which the superseding of his party necessitates. His antagonist calls it "feathering his nest," but a free-handed and sanguine military man has done no "feathering," and it is simply pitiful to see to what obscurity and absolute poverty they are brought. The men whose chestnuts the ingenuous, unsuspecting man has pulled out of the fire, now pass him by unnoticed. Such an existence to a proud man makes him wish he had died on the field of battle, before any act of his had brought chagrin.

All these things I have heard my husband say, when we have encountered some heartbroken man; and he worked for nothing harder than that they might be reinstated in the service, or lifted out of their perplexities by occupation of some sort. There was an officer, a classmate at West Point, who, he felt with all his heart, did right in resigning. If he had lived he would have written his tribute, and I venture to take up his pen to say, in my inadequate way, what he would have said so well, moved by the eloquence of deep feeling.

My husband believed in what old-fashioned people term a "calling," and he himself had felt a call to be a soldier, when he could scarcely speak plain. It was not the usual early love of boys for adventure. We realize how natural it is for a lad to enjoy tales of hotly contested fields, and to glory over bloodshed. The boy in the Sunday-school, when asked what part of the Bible he best liked, said promptly, "The fightenest part!" and another, when his saintly teacher questioned him as to whom he first wished to see when he reached heaven, vociferated loudly, "Goliath!" But the love of a soldier's life was not the fleeting desire of the child, in my husband; it became the steady purpose of his youth, the happy realization of his early manhood. For this reason he sympathized with all who felt themselves drawn to a certain place in the world. He thoroughly believed in a boy (if it was not a pernicious choice) having his "bent." And so it happened, when it was our good fortune to be stationed with his classmate, Colonel Charles C. Parsons, at Leavenworth, that he gave a ready ear when his old West Point chum poured out his longings for a different sphere in life. He used to come to me after these sessions, when the Colonel went over and over again his reasons for resigning, and wonder how he could wish to do so, but he respected his friend's belief that he had another "calling" too thoroughly to oppose him. He thought the place of captain of a battery of artillery the most independent in the service. He is detached from his regiment, he reports only to the commanding officer of the post, he is left so long at one station that he can make permanent arrangements for comfort, and, except in times of war, the work is garrison and guard duty. Besides this, the pay of a captain of a battery is good, and he is not subject to constant moves, which tax the finances of a cavalry officer so severely. After enumerating these advantages, he ended by saying, "There's nothing to be done, though, for if Parsons thinks he ought to go into an uncertainty, and leave what is a surety for life, why, he ought to follow his convictions."

The next time we saw the Colonel, he was the rector of a small mission church on the outskirts of Memphis. We were with the party of the Grand Duke Alexis when he went by steamer to New Orleans. General Sheridan had asked General Custer to go on a buffalo-hunt with the Duke in the Territory of Wyoming, and he in turn urged the General to remain with him afterward, until he left the country. At Memphis, the city gave a ball, and my husband begged his old comrade to be present. It was the first time since his resignation that the Colonel and his beautiful wife had been in society. Their parish was poor, and they had only a small and uncertain salary. Colonel Parsons was not in the least daunted; he was as hopeful and as enthusiastic as such earnest people alone can be, as certain he was right as if his duty had been revealed to him as divine messages were to the prophets of old. The General was touched by the fearless manner in which he faced poverty and obscurity.

It would be necessary for one to know, by actual observation, what a position of authority, of independence, of assured and sufficient income, he left, to sink his individuality in this life that he consecrated to his Master. When he entered our room, before we went to the ballroom, he held up his gloved hands to us and said: "Custer, I wish you to realize into what extravagance you have plunged me. Why, old fellow, this is my first indulgence in such frivolities since I came down here." Mrs. Parsons was a marvel to us. The General had no words that he thought high enough praise for her sacrifice. Hers was for her husband, and not a complaint did she utter.

Here, again, I should have to take my citizen reader into garrison before I could make clear what it was that she gave up. The vision of that pretty woman, as I remember her at Leavenworth, is fresh in my mind. She danced and rode charmingly, and was gracious and free from the spiteful envy that sometimes comes when a garrison belle is so attractive that the gossips say she absorbs all the devotion. Colonel Parsons, not caring much for dancing, used to stand and watch with pride and complete confidence when the men gathered round his wife at our hops. There were usually more than twice as many men as women, and the card of a good dancer and a favorite was frequently filled before she left her own house for the dancing-room. I find myself still wondering how any pretty woman ever kept her mental poise when queening it at those Western posts. My husband, who never failed to be the first to notice the least sacrifice that a woman made for her husband, looked upon Mrs. Parsons with more and more surprise and admiration, as he contrasted the life in which we found her with her former fascinating existence.

The Colonel, after making his concession and coming to our ball, asked us in turn to be present at his church on the following Sunday, and gave the General a little cheap printed card, which he used to find his way to the suburbs of the city. Colonel Parsons told me, next day, that when he entered the reading-desk and looked down upon the dignified, reverent head of my husband, a remembrance of the last time he had seen him in the chapel at West Point came like a flash of lightning into his mind, and he almost had a convulsion, in endeavoring to suppress the gurgles of laughter that struggled for expression. For an instant he thought, with desperate fright, that he would drop down behind the desk and have it out, and only by the most powerful effort did he rally. It seems that a cadet in their corps had fiery red hair, and during the stupid chapel sermon Cadet Custer had run his fingers into the boy's hair, who was in front of him, pretending to get them into white heat, and then, taking them out, pounded them as on an anvil. It was a simple thing, and a trick dating many years back, but the drollery and quickness of action made it something a man could not recall with calmness.