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

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

This is but one of many instances where superior men, for one reason or another, get into the ranks of our army. If they are fortunate enough to fall into the hands of considerate officers, their lot is endurable; but to be assigned to one who is unjust and overbearing is a miserable existence. One of our finest men was so constantly looking, in his soldiers, for the same qualities that he possessed, and insisted so upon the superiority of his men that the officers were wont to exclaim in good-natured irony, "Oh, yes, we all know that Hamilton's company is made up of dukes and earls in disguise."

There were some clever rogues among the enlisted men, and the officers were as yet scarcely able to cope with the cunning of those who doubtless had intimate acquaintance with courts of justice and prisons in the Eastern States. The recruiting officer in the cities is not compelled, as in other occupations, to ask a character from a former employer. The Government demands able-bodied men, and the recruiting sergeant casts his critical eye over the anatomical outlines, as he would over the good points of a horse destined for the same service. The awful hereafter is, when the officer that receives this physical perfection on the frontier aims to discover whether it contains a soul.

Our guard-house at Fort Riley was outside the garrison a short distance, and held a goodly number of violators of the regulations. For several nights, at one time, strange sounds for such a place issued from the walls. Religion in the noisiest form seemed to have taken up its permanent abode there, and for three hours at a time singing, shouting and loud praying went on. There was every appearance of a revival among those trespassers. The officer of the day, in making his rounds, had no comment to pass upon this remarkable transition from card-playing and wrangling; he was doubtless relieved to hear the voice of the exhorters as he visited the guard, and indulged in the belief that the prisoners were out of mischief. On the contrary, this vehement attack of religion covered up the worst sort of roguery. Night after night they had been digging tunnels under the stone foundation-walls, removing boards and cutting beams in the floor, and to deaden the sound of the pounding and digging some of their number were told off to sing, pray and shout. One morning the guard opened the door of the rooms in which the prisoners had been confined, and they were empty! Even two that wore ball and chains for serious offences had in some manner managed to knock them off, as all had swum the Smoky Hill River, and they were never again heard from.

As with the history of all prisons, so it was of our little one. The greatest rogues were not incarcerated; they were too cunning to be caught. It often happened that some excellent soldiers became innocently involved in a fracas and were marched off to the guard-house, while the archvillain slipped into his place in the ranks and answered to his name at roll-call, apparently the most exemplary of soldiers. Several instances of what I thought to be unjust imprisonment came directly under my notice, and I may have been greatly influenced by Eliza's pleas in their behalf. We made the effort, and succeeded in extricating one man from his imprisonment. Whether he was in reality wronged, or had only worked upon our sympathies, will never be known, but he certainly made an excellent soldier from that time until the end of his enlistment. Eliza, in her own quaint way, is saying to me now: "Do you mind, Miss Libbie, how me and you got J—— his parole? He used to come to our house with the rest of the prisoners, to police the yard and cut the wood, and they used to hang round my door; the guard could hardly get 'em away. Well, I reckon he didn't try very hard, for he didn't like hard-tack no better than they did. One of them would speak up the minute they saw me, and say, 'Eliza, you hain't got no hot biscuit, have you?' Hot biscuits for prisoners! do you hear that, Miss Libbie? The Ginnel would be standin' at the back window, just to catch a chance to laugh at me if I gave the prisoners anythin' to eat. He'd stand at that window, movin' from one foot to the other, craning of his neck, and when I did give any cold scraps, he just bided his time, and when he saw me he would say, 'Well, been issuin' your rations again, Eliza? How many apple-dumplin's and biscuit did they get this time?' Apple-dumplin's, Miss Libbie! He jest said that 'cause he liked 'em better than anythin' else, and s'posed I'd been givin' away some of his. But as soon as he had teased me about it, that was the end; he would go along about his way and pick up his book, when he had done his laugh. But, Miss Libbie, he used to kinder mistrust, if me and you was talkin' one side. He would say, 'What you two conspirin' up now? Tryin' to get some one out of jail, I s'pose.' I remember how we worked for J——. He came to me and told me I must 'try to get Mrs. Custer to work for him; two words from her would do him more good than all the rest,' and he would come along sideways by your window, carrying his ball over his arm with the chain adanglin', and look so pitiful like, so you would see him and beg him off." This affair ended entirely to Eliza's satisfaction. I saw the captain of his company; for though it was against my husband's wish that I should have anything to do with official matters, he did not object to this intervention; he only laughed at my credulity. The captain politely heard my statement of what Eliza had told me were J——'s wrongs, and gave him parole. His sentence was rescinded eventually, as he kept his promises and was a most faithful soldier. The next morning after J—— was returned to duty and began life anew, one of the young officers sauntered into our quarters and, waving his hand with a little flourish, said, "I want to congratulate you on having obtained the pardon of the greatest scamp in the regiment; he wouldn't steal a red-hot stove, but would wait a mighty long time for it to cool." Later in my story is my husband's mention, in his letters, of the very man as bearing so good a record that he sent for him and had him detailed at headquarters, for nothing in the world, he confessed, but because I had once interceded for him.

Eliza kept my sympathies constantly aroused, with her piteous tales of the wrongs of the prisoners. They daily had her ear, and she appointed herself judge, jury and attorney for the defense. On the coldest days, when we could not ride and the wind blew so furiously that we were not able to walk, I saw from our windows how poorly clad they were, for they came daily, under the care of the guard, to cut the wood and fill the water-barrels. The General quietly endured the expressions of sympathy, and sometimes my indignant protests against unjust treatment. He knew the wrathful spirit of the kitchen had obeyed the natural law that heat must rise, and treated our combined rages over the prisoners' wrongs with aggravating calmness. Knowing more about the guard-house occupants than I did, he was fortified by facts that saved him from expending his sympathies in the wrong direction. He only smiled at the plausible stories by which Eliza was first taken in at the kitchen door. They lost nothing by transmission, as she had quite an imagination and decidedly a dramatic delivery; and finally, when I told the tale, trying to perform the monstrously hard feat of telling it as it was told to me, youth, inexperience and an emotional temperament made a narrative so absolutely distressing that the General was likely to come over bodily to our side, had he not recalled the details of the court-martial that had tried the soldier. We were routed, yet not completely, for we fell back upon his clothes, and pleaded that, though he was thought to be wicked, he might be permitted to be warm. But the colored and white troops had to leave the field, "horse, foot and dragoons," when, on investigation, we found that the man for whom we pleaded had gambled away his very shirt.

The unmoved manner in which my husband listened to different accounts of supposed cruelty—dropping his beloved newspaper with the injured air that men assume, while I sat by him, half crying, gesticulating, thoroughly roused in my defense of the injured one—was exasperating, to say the least; and then, at last, to have this bubble of assumed championship burst, and see him launch into such uproarious conduct when he found that the man for whom I pleaded was the archrogue of all—oh, women alone can picture to themselves what the situation must have been to poor me!

After one of these seasons of good-natured scoffing over the frequency with which I was taken in, I mentally resolved that, though the proof I heard of the soldier's depravity was too strong for me to ignore, there was no contesting the fact that the criminal was cold, and if I had failed in freeing him I might at least provide against his freezing. He was at that time buttoning a ragged blouse up to his chin, not only for warmth, but because in his evening game of poker, his comrade had won the undergarment, quite superfluous, he thought, while warmed by the guard-house fire. I proceeded to shut myself in our room, and go through the General's trunk for something warm. The selection that I made was unfortunate. There were some navy shirts of blue flannel that had been procured with considerable trouble from a gunboat in the James River the last year of the war, the like of which, in quality and durability, could not be found in any shop. The material was so good that they neither shrunk nor pulled out of shape. The broad collar had a star embroidered in solid silk in either corner. The General had bought these for their durability, but they proved to be a picturesque addition to his gay dress; and the red necktie adopted by his entire Third Division of Cavalry gave a dash of vivid color, while the yellow hair contrasted with the dark blue of the flannel. The gunboats were overwhelmed with applications to buy, as his Division wished to adopt this feature of his dress also, and military tailors had many orders to reproduce what the General had "lighted upon," as the officers expressed it, by accident. Really, there was no color so good for campaigning, as it was hard to harmonize any gray tint with the different blues of the uniform. Men have a way of saying that we women never seize their things, for barter or other malevolent purposes, without selecting what they especially prize. But the General really had reason to dote upon these shirts.

The rest of the story scarcely needs telling. Many injured husbands, whose wardrobes have been confiscated for eleemosynary purposes, will join in a general wail. The men that wear one overcoat in early spring, and carry another over their arm to their offices, uncertain, if they did not observe this precaution, that the coming winter would not find these garments mysteriously metamorphosed into lace on a gown, or mantel ornaments, may fill in all that my story fails to tell. In the General's case, it was perhaps more than ordinarily exasperating. It was not that a creature who bargains for "gentlemen's cast-offs" had possession of something that a tailor could not readily replace, but we were then too far out on the Plains to buy even ordinary blue flannel.