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

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

Then the dogs and horses, and the stir and life produced by the introduction of ourselves and our belongings into her quiet existence, made her recall the old farm life when her brood of children were all around her. Brother Tom had spent the summer skipping from flower to flower, tasting the sweets of all the rosebud garden of girls in our pretty town. I had already taken to myself a good deal of the mothering of this wild boy, and began to worry, as is the custom of mothers, over the advances of a venturesome woman who was no longer young and playing for high stakes. It was no small matter to me, as I knew Tom would live with us always if he could manage to do so, and my prospective sister-in-law would be my nearest companion. Lad as he was, he escaped, and preserved his heart in an unbroken condition during the summer. Much to our regret, he was appointed to a lieutenancy in a regiment stationed South, after he was mustered out of the volunteer service; but the General succeeded in effecting his transfer to the Seventh Cavalry, and after a short service in the South he joined us at Fort Riley that year.

One of our Detroit friends invited us to go with a party of pretty women, in a special car, to St. Louis; so we had a gay send-off for our new home. I don't remember to have had an anxiety as to the future; I was wholly given over to the joy of realizing that the war was over, and, girl-like, now the one great danger was passed, I felt as if all that sort of life was forever ended. At any rate, the magnetic influence of my husband's joyous temperament, which would not look on the dark side, had such power over those around him that I was impelled to look upon our future as he did. In St. Louis we had a round of gayety. The great Fair was then at its best, for every one was making haste to dispel the gloom that our terrible war had cast over the land. There was not a corner of the Fair-ground to which my husband did not penetrate. He took me into all sorts of places to which our pretty galaxy of belles, with their new conquests of St. Louis beaux, had no interest in going—the stalls of the thoroughbred horses—when a chat with the jockeys was included; the cattle, costing per head what, we whispered to each other, would set us up in a handsome income for life and buy a Blue-grass farm with blooded horses, etc., which was my husband's ideal home. And yet I do not remember that money ever dwelt very long in our minds, we learned to have such a royal time on so little.

There was something that always came before the Kentucky farm with its thoroughbreds. If ever he said, "If I get rich, I'll tell you what I'll do," I knew as well before he spoke just what was to follow—in all the twelve years he never altered the first plan—"I'll buy a home for father and mother." They owned their home in Monroe then, but it was not good enough to please him; nothing was good enough for his mother, but the dear woman, with her simple tastes, would have felt far from contented in the sort of home in which her son longed to place her. All she asked was to gather her boys around her so that she could see them every day.

As we wandered round the Fair-grounds, side-shows with their monstrosities came into the General's programme, and the prize pigs were never neglected. If we bent over the pens to see the huge things rolling in lazy contentment, my husband went back to his farm days, and explained what taught him to like swine, in which, I admit, I could not be especially interested. His father had given each son a pig, with the promise exacted in return that they should be daily washed and combed. When the General described the pink and white collection of pets that his father distributed among his sons, swine were no longer swine to me; they were "curled darlings," as he pictured them. And now I recall, that long after he showed such true appreciation of his friend's stock on one of the Blue-grass farms in Kentucky where we visited, two pigs of royal birth, whose ancestors dated back many generations, were given to us, and we sent them home to our farmer brother to keep until we should possess a place of our own, which was one of the mild indulgences of our imagination, and which we hoped would be the diversion of our old age. I think it rather strange that my husband looked so fearlessly into the future. I hardly know how one so active could so calmly contemplate the days when his steps would be slow. We never passed on the street an old man with gray curls lying over his coat-collar, but the General slackened his steps to say in a whisper, "There, Libbie, that's me, forty years from now." And if there happened to be John Anderson's obese old wife by him, toddling painfully along, red and out of breath, he teasingly added, "And that's what you would like to be." It was a never-ending source of argument that I would be much more successful in the way of looks if I were not so slender; and as my husband, even when a lad, liked women who were slenderly formed, he loved to torment me, by pointing out to what awful proportions a woman weighing what was to me a requisite number of pounds sometimes arrived in old age.

A tournament was given in the great amphitheatre of the Fair building in St. Louis, which was simply delightful to us. The horsemanship so pleased my husband that he longed to bound down into the arena, take a horse, and tilt with their long lances at the rings. Some of the Confederate officers rode for the prizes, and their knights' costume and good horses were objects of momentary envy, as they recalled the riding academy exercises at West Point. Finally, the pretty ceremony of crowning the Queen of Love and Beauty by the successful knight ended a real gala day to us. At night a ball at the hotel gave us an opportunity to be introduced to the beautiful woman, who sat on a temporary throne in the dancing-hall, and we thought her well worth tilting lances for, and that nothing could encourage good horsemanship like giving as a prize the temporary possession of a pretty girl.

While in St. Louis we heard Mr. Lawrence Barrett for the first time. He was of nearly the same age as my husband, and after three years' soldiering in our war, as a captain in the Twenty-eighth Massachusetts Infantry, had returned to his profession, full of ambition and the sort of "go" that called out instant recognition from the General.

Mr. Barrett, in recalling lately the first time he met General Custer, spoke of the embarrassing predicament in which he was placed by the impetuous determination of one whom from that hour he cherished as his warmest friend. He was playing "Rosedale," and my husband was charmed with his rendering of the hero's part. He recalled for years the delicate manner with which the lover allows his wounded hand to be bound, and the subtle cunning with which he keeps the fair minister of his hurts winding and unwinding the bandages. Then Mr. Barrett sang a song in the play, which the General hummed for years afterward. I remember his going pell-mell into the subject whenever we met, even when Mr. Barrett was justifiably glowing with pride over his success in the legitimate drama, and interrupting him to ask why he no longer played "Rosedale." The invariable answer that the play required extreme youth in the hero, had no sort of power to stop the continued demand for his favorite melodrama. After we had seen the play—it was then acted for the first time—the General begged me to wait in the lobby until he had sought out Mr. Barrett to thank him, and on our return from the theatre we lay in wait, knowing that he stopped at our hotel. As he was going quietly to his room—reserved even then, boy that he was, with not a trace of the impetuous, ardent lover he had so lately represented before the foot-lights—off raced the General up the stairs, two steps at a time, to capture him. He demurred, saying his rough traveling suit of gray was hardly presentable in a drawing-room, but the General persisted, saying, "The old lady told me I must seize you, and go you must, for I don't propose to return without fulfilling her orders." Mr. Barrett submitted, and was presented to our party, who had accompanied us on the special car to St. Louis. The gray clothes were forgotten in a moment, in the reception we gave him; but music came out from the dining-room, and all rose to go, as Mr. Barrett supposed, to our rooms. The General took a lady on his arm, I, at my husband's suggestion, put my hand on Mr. Barrett's arm, and before he had realized it, he was being marched into the brilliantly lighted ballroom, and bowing from force of capture before the dais on which sat the Queen of Love and Beauty.

All this delighted the General. Unconventional himself, he nothing heeded the chagrin of Mr. Barrett over his inappropriate garb, and chuckled like a schoolboy over his successful raid. I think Mr. Barrett was not released until he pleaded the necessity for time to work. He was then reading and studying far into the night, to make up for the lapse in his profession that his army life had caused. He was not so absorbed in his literary pursuits, however, that he did not take in the charm of those beautiful St. Louis girls, and we three, in many a jolly evening since, have gone back to the beauty of the bewitching belles, as they floated by us in that ballroom or paused to capture the new Richmonds on their already crowded field. Mr. Barrett even remembers that the Queen of Love and Beauty vouchsafed him the eighth of a dance—for her royal highness dispensed favors by piecemeal to the waiting throng about her throne.

Our roving life brought us in contact with actors frequently. If the General found that Mr. Barrett was to play in any accessible city, he hurried me into my traveling-gown, flung his own dress-coat and my best bonnet in a crumpled mass into a little trunk, and off we started in pursuit. It is hard to speak fittingly of the meeting of those two men. They joyed in each other as women do, and I tried not to look when they met or parted, while they gazed with tears into each other's eyes, and held hands like exuberant girls. Each kept track of the other's movements, through the papers, and rejoiced at every success, while Mr. Barrett, with the voice my husband thought perfect in intonation and expression, always called to him the moment they met, "Well, old fellow, hard at work making history, are you?"

A few evenings since I chanced to see Mr. Barrett's dresser, the Irish "Garry," who had charge of his costumes in those days when the General used to haunt the dressing-room in the last winter we were together in New York. As Cassius he entered the room in armor, and found his "old man Custer" waiting for him. Garry tells me that my husband leaped toward the mailed and helmeted soldier, and gave him some rousing bangs on the corseleted chest, for they sparred like boys. Mr. Barrett, parrying the thrust, said, "Custer, old man, you ought to have one of these suits of armor for your work." "Ye gods, no!" said the General, in mimic alarm; "with that glistening breast-plate as a target, every arrow would be directed at me. I'd rather go naked than in that!"