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

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

I wish I could describe what delight my husband took in his horse life, what hours of recreation and untiring pleasure he got out of our companionship with Jack Rucker, Phil and Custis Lee. On that day we three and our orderly were alone on the track, and such a merry, noisy, care-forgetting three as we were! the General, with his stop-watch in hand, cheering me, urging the horse wildly, clapping his hands, and hallooing with joy as the animal responded to his expectation. Phil's coming up to their boasts and anticipations was just a little episode in our life that went to prove what a rare faculty he had of getting much out of little, and of how persistently the boy in him cropped out as soon as an opportunity came to throw care aside. It is one of the results of a life of deprivation, that pleasures, when they come, are rarities, and the enjoyment is intensified. In our life they lasted so short a time that we had no chance to learn the meaning of satiety.

One of the hardest trials, in our first winter with the regiment, was that arising from the constantly developing tendency to hard drinking. Some who came to us had held up for a time, but they were not restricted in the volunteer service, as a man who fought well was forgiven much else that came in the rare intervals of peace. In the new state of affairs, as went the first few months of the regiment, so would it go for all time. There was a regiment stationed in New Mexico at that time, the record of which was shameful. We heard of its career by every overland train that came into our post, and from officers who went out on duty. General Sherman said that, with such a set of drunkards, the regiment, officers and all, should be mustered out of the service. Anything, then, rather than let our Seventh follow such a course. But I must not leave the regiment at that point in its history. Eventually it came out all right, ably officered and well soldiered, but it was the terror of the country in 1867. While General Custer steadily fought against drunkenness, he was not remorseless or unjust. I could cite one instance after another, to prove with what patience he strove to reclaim some who were, I fear, hopeless when they joined us. His own greatest battles were not fought in the tented field; his most glorious combats were those waged in daily, hourly fights on a more hotly contested field than was ever known in common warfare. The truest heroism is not that which goes out supported by strong battalions and reserve artillery. It is when a warrior for the right enters into the conflict alone, and dares to exercise his will in defiance of some established custom in which lies a lurking, deadly peril or sin. I have known my husband to almost stand alone in his opinion regarding temperance, in a garrison containing enough people to make a good-sized village. He was thoroughly unostentatious about his convictions, and rarely said much; but he stood to his fixed purpose, purely from horror of the results of drinking. I would not imply that in garrison General Custer was the only man invariably temperate. There were some on pledge; some temperate because they paid such a physical penalty by actual illness that they could not drink; some restrained because their best-loved comrade, weak in his own might, "swore off" on consideration that the stronger one of the two backed him up; some (God bless them!) refused because the woman they loved grieved, and was afraid of even one friendly glass. What I mean is, that the general custom, against which there is little opposition in any life, is, either to indulge in the social glass, or look leniently upon the habit. Without preaching or parading his own strength in having overcome the habit, General Custer stood among the officers and men as firm an advocate of temperance as any evangelist whose life is devoted to the cause.

I scarcely think I would have realized the constantly recurring temptations of my husband's life, had I not been beside him when he fought these oft-repeated battles. The pleasure he had in convivial life, the manner in which men and women urged him to join them in enjoyment of the sparkling wine, was enough to have swept every resolution to the winds. Sometimes the keen blade of sarcasm, though set with jewels of wit and apparent badinage, added a cut that my ears, so quickened to my husband's hard position, heard and grieved over. But he laughed off the carefully concealed thrust. When we were at home in our own room, if I asked him, blazing anew with wrath at such a stab, how he kept his temper, he replied, "Why notice it? Don't I know what I've been through to gain my victory? That fellow, you must remember, has fought and lost, and knows in his soul he'll go to the dogs if he doesn't hold up, and, Libbie, he can't do it, and I am sorry for him." Our brother Tom was less patient, less forbearing, for in one of his times of pledge, when the noble fellow had given his word not to taste a drop for a certain season if a man he loved, and about whom he was anxious, would do the same, he was sneered at by a brother officer, with gibes at his supposed or attempted superiority. Tom leaped across the table in the tent where they sat at dinner, and shook up his assailant in a very emphatic way. I laugh in remembrance of his choler, and am proud of it now. I, as "gentlewoman," descended from a line of decorous gentlemen and ladies, ought to be horrified at one man's seizing another by the collar and pouncing upon him, regardless of the Marquis of Queensbury rules. But I know that circumstances alter cases, and in our life an occasional good shaking was better than the slow justice of a tedious court-martial.

The General would not smile, but there was a noticeable twisting of his mustache, and he took himself out of the way to conceal his feelings, when I pointed my discerning finger at him and said, "You're laughing, your own self, and you think Tom was right, even if you don't say a word, and look so dreadfully commandery-officery at both of us!" The General did not keep himself aloof, and sometimes, in convivial scenes, when he joined in the increasing hilarity, was so infused with the growing artificial joviality, and grew jollier and jollier, that he was accused himself of being the wildest drinker of them all. But some one was sure to speak up and say, as the morning approached, "I have sat beside Custer the night through, and if he's intoxicated it's over water, for he has not tasted a drop of wine—more loss to him, I say."

Only a short time before the final battle, he dined in New York, at a house where General McDowell was also a guest. When no one else could hear, he told me, with a warning not to talk of it, that he had some one to keep him company, and described the bowl of ice that stood in the midst of the untouched semicircle of glasses before General McDowell, and how the ice seemed just as satisfactory as any of the rare beverages. We listened once to John B. Gough, and the General's enthusiasm over his earnestness and his eloquence was enhanced by the well-known fact of his failures, and the plucky manner in which he started anew. Everybody cries over Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle, even if they have never encountered drunkenness, and my husband wept like a child because of his intense sympathy for the weakness of the poor tempted soul, harrowed as he was by a Xantippe.

If women in civil life were taken among men, as army women are, in all sorts of festivities, they would get a better idea of what strength of purpose it requires to carry out a principle. At some army posts the women go to the sutler's store with their husbands, for billiards or amusements. There is a separate room for the soldiers, so we see nothing of those poor fellows who never can stay sober. The sutler's is not only the store, but it is the club-house for the garrison, and I have known posts where the officers were so guarded about their drinking, that women could go among them and join in any amusement without being liable to the distress that the sight of an intoxicated man invariably gives to a sensitive woman. If I saw drunken soldiers reeling off after pay-day, it was the greatest possible relief to me to know, that out of hundreds only a few were married, as but a certain number of the laundresses were allowed to a company. So no woman's heart was going to be wrung by unsteady steps approaching her door, and the sight of the vacant eyes of a weak husband. It took away half the sting and shock, to know that a soldier's spree was not one that recoiled on an innocent woman.

As I look back upon our life, I do not believe there ever was any path so difficult as those men on the frontier trod. Their failures, their fights, their vacillations, all were before us, and it was an anxious life to be watching who won and who lost in those moral warfares. You could not separate yourself from the interests of one another. It was a network of friendships that became more and more interwoven by common hardships, deprivations, dangers, by isolation and the daily sharing of joys and troubles. I am thankful for the certainty that there is some one who scores all our fights and all our victories; for on His records will be written the story of the thorny path over which an officer walked if he reached the goal.

Women shielded in homes, supported by example, unconscious of any temptation save the mildest, will realize with me what it was to watch the quivering mouth of a man who voluntarily admitted that until he was fifty he knew he was in hourly peril of being a drunkard. The tears blind me as I go back in retrospection and think over the men that warred against themselves.

In one respect, there never was such a life as ours; it was eminently one of partings. How natural, then, that the last act before separation be one of hospitable generosity! How little we had to offer! It was often almost an impossibility to get up a good dinner. Then we had so many coming to us from a distance, that our welcome could not be followed up by any entertainment worthy of the name. Besides, there were promotions to celebrate, an occasional son and heir to toast, birthdays occurring so often, and nothing in the world that answered for an expression of hospitality and good feeling but an old straw demijohn behind the door. It was surprising what pertinacious lives the demijohns of the garrison had. The driver of the wagon containing the few appointments of an officer's outfit, was just as careful of the familiar friend as one could wish servants to be with the lares and penates of an æsthetic household. If he was rewarded with a drink from the sacred demijohn, after having safely preserved it over muddy roads, where the mules jerked the prairie-schooner out of ruts, and where, except for a protecting hand, the contents would have saturated the wagon, he was thankful. But such was his reverence for what he considered the most valuable possession of the whole wagon, virtue alone would have been sufficient reward. When in the regimental movings the crockery (the very heaviest that is made) was smashed, the furniture broken, carpets, curtains, clothes and bedding mildewed and torn, the old demijohn neither broke, spilled nor suffered any injury by exposure to the elements. It was, in the opinion of our lovers of good whiskey, a "survival of the fittest."