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

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

Monroe was then thought to have more pretty girls than any place of its size in the country. In my first experience of the misery of being paragraphed, it was announced that General Custer had taken to himself a wife, in a town where ninety-nine marriageable girls were left. The fame of the town had gone abroad, though, and the ninety-nine were not without opportunities. Widowers came from afar, with avant couriers in the shape of letters describing their wealth, their scholarly attainments, and their position in the community. The "boys" grown to men halted in their race for wealth long enough to rush home and propose. Often we were all under inspection, and though demure and seemingly unconscious, I remember the after-tea walks when a knot of girls went off to "lovers' lane" to exchange experiences about some stranger from afar, who had been brought around by a solicitous match-maker to view the landscape o'er, and I am afraid we had some sly little congratulations when he, having shown signs of the conquering hero, was finally sent on his way, to seek in other towns, filled with girls, "fresh woods and pastures new." I cannot account for the beauty of the women of Monroe; the mothers were the softest, serenest, smoothest-faced women, even when white-haired. It is true it was a very quiet life, going to bed with the chickens, and up early enough to see the dew on the lawns. There was very little care, to plant furrows in the cheeks and those tell-tale radiating lines about the eyes. Nearly everybody was above want, and few had enough of this world's goods to incite envy in the hearts of the neighbors, which does its share in a younger face. I sometimes think the vicinity of Lake Erie, and the moist air that blew over the marsh, kept the complexions fresh. I used to feel actually sorry for my husband, when we approached Monroe after coming from the campaigns. He often said: "Shall we not stop in Detroit a day or two, Libbie, till you get the tired look out of your face? I dread going among the Monroe women and seeing them cast reproachful looks at me, when your sunburned face is introduced among their fair complexions. When you are tired in addition, they seem to think I am a wretch unhung, and say, 'Why, General! what have you done with Libbie's transparent skin?' I am afraid it is hopelessly dark and irredeemably thickened!" In vain I argued that it wouldn't be too thick to let them all see the happy light shine through, and if his affection survived my altered looks, I felt able to endure the wailing over what they thought I had lost. After all, it was very dear and kind of them to care, and my husband appreciated their solicitude, even when he was supposed to be in disgrace for having subjected me to such disfigurement. Still, these mothers were neither going to run the risk of the peach-bloom and cream of their precious girls all running riot into one broad sunburn up to the roots of the hair, and this was another reason, in addition to the paramount one that "the girls might marry into the army." The vagrant life, the inability to keep household gods, giving up the privileges of the church and missionary societies, the loss of the simple village gayety, the anxiety and suspense of a soldier's wife, might well make the mothers opposed to the life, but this latter reason did not enter into all their minds. Some thought of the loaves and fishes. One said, in trying to persuade me that it was better to break my engagement with the General, "Why, girl, you can't be a poor man's wife, and, besides, he might lose a leg!" I thought, even then, gay and seemingly thoughtless as I was, that a short life with poverty and a wooden leg was better than the career suggested to me. I hope the dear old lady is not blushing as she reads this, and I remind her how she took me up into a high mountain and pointed out a house that might be mine, with so many dozen spoons, "solid," so many sheets and pillow-slips, closets filled with jars of preserved fruit, all of which I could not hope to have in the life in which I chose to cast my lot, where peaches ripened on no garden-wall and bank-accounts were unknown.

GENERAL CUSTER WITH HIS HORSE VIC, STAG HOUNDS AND DEER HOUNDS.

When we were ready to set out for the West, in October, 1866, our caravan summed up something like this list: My husband's three horses—Jack Rucker, the thoroughbred mare he had bought in Texas, a blooded colt from Virginia named Phil Sheridan—and my own horse, a fast pacer named Custis Lee, the delight of my eyes and the envy of the General's staff while we were in Virginia and Texas; several hounds given to the General by the planters with whom he had hunted deer in Texas; a superb greyhound, his head carried so loftily as he walked his lordly way among the other dogs, that I thought he would have asked to carry his family-tree on his brass collar, could he have spoken for his rights. Last of all, some one had given us the ugliest white bull-dog I ever saw. But in time we came to think that the twist in his lumpy tail, the curve in his bow legs, the ambitious nose, which drew the upper lip above the heaviest of protruding jaws, were simply beauties, for the dog was so affectionate and loyal, that everything which at first seemed a draw-back leaned finally to virtue's side. He was well named "Turk," and a "set to" or so with Byron, the domineering greyhound established his rights, so that it only needed a deep growl and an uprising of the bristles on his back, to recall to the overbearing aristocrat some wholesome lessons given him when the acquaintance began. Turk was devoted to the colt Phil, and the intimacy of the two was comical; Phil repaid Turk's little playful nips at the legs by lifting him in his teeth as high as the feed-box, by the loose skin of his back. But nothing could get a whimper out of him, for he was the pluckiest of brutes. He curled himself up in Phil's stall when he slept, and in traveling was his close companion in the box car. If we took the dog to drive with us, he had to be in the buggy, as our time otherwise would have been constantly engaged in dragging him off from any dog that strutted around him and needed a lesson in humility. When Turk was returned to Phil, after any separation, they greeted each other in a most human way. Turk leaped around the colt, and in turn was rubbed and nosed about with speaking little snorts of welcome. When we came home to this ugly duckling, he usually made a spring and landed in my lap, as if he were the tiniest, silkiest little Skye in dogdom. He half closed his eyes, with that beatific expression peculiar to affectionate dogs, and did his little smile at my husband and me by raising what there was of his upper lip and showing his front teeth. All this with an ignoring of the other dogs and an air of exclusion, as if we three—his master, mistress, and himself—composed all there was of earth worth knowing.

We had two servants, one being Eliza, our faithful colored woman, who had been with us in Virginia and Texas, and had come home with me to care for my father in his last illness. We had also a worthless colored boy, who had been trained as a jockey in Texas and had returned with the horses. What intellect he had was employed in devising schemes to escape work. Eliza used her utmost persuasive eloquence on him without effect, and failed equally with a set of invectives that had been known heretofore to break the most stubborn case of lethargy. My tender-hearted mother Custer screened him, for he had soon discovered her amazing credulity, and had made out a story of abuses to which he had been subjected that moved her to confide his wrongs to me. Two years before, I too would have dropped a tear over his history; but a life among horses had enlightened me somewhat. Every one knows that a negro will do almost anything to become a jockey. Their bitterest moment is when they find that growing bone and muscle is making avoirdupois and going to cut them off from all that makes life worth living. To reduce their weight, so they can ride at races, they are steamed, and parboiled if necessary. This process our lazy servant described to our mother as having been enforced on him as a torture and punishment, and such a good story did he make out, that he did nothing but lie in the sun and twang an old banjo all summer long, all owing to mother's pity. We had to take him with us, to save her from waiting on him and making reparation for what she supposed had been a life of abuse before he came to us.

Last of all to describe in our party was Diana, the pretty belle of Monroe. The excitement of anticipation gave added brightness to her eyes, and the head, sunning over with a hundred curls, danced and coquetted as she talked of our future among the "brass buttons and epaulets."

My going out from home was not so hard as it had been, for the dear father had gone home, saying in his last words, "Daughter, continue to do as you have done; follow Armstrong everywhere." It had indeed been a temptation to me to use all my influence to induce my husband to resign and accept the places held out to him. I do not recollect that ambition or a far look into his progress in the future entered my mind. I can only remember thinking with envy of men surrounding us in civil life, who came home to their wives, after every day's business. Even now, I look upon a laborer returning to his home at night with his tin dinner-pail as a creature to be envied, and my imagination follows the husband into his humble house. The wife to whom he returns may have lost much that ambition and success bring, but she has secured for herself a lifetime of happy twilights, when all she cares for is safe under her affectionate eyes.

Our father and mother Custer lived near us, and Sister Margaret and the younger brother, "Bos," were then at home and in school. The parting with his mother, the only sad hour to my blithe husband, tore his heart as it always did, and he argued in vain with her, that, as he had come home after five years of incessant battles, she might look for his safe return again. Each time seemed to be the last to her, for she was so delicate she hardly expected to live to see him again.

The summer had been one of such pleasure to her. Her beloved boy, dashing in and out in his restless manner, was never too absorbed with whatever took up his active mind, to be anything but gentle and thoughtful for her. She found our Eliza a mine of information, and just as willing as mother herself to talk all day about the one topic in common—the General and his war experiences.