Meanwhile my letters, on which I wrote every day, even if there was no opportunity to send them, made mention of our frights and uncertainties. Each mail carried out letters from the women to the expedition, narrating their fears. We had not the slightest idea that there was a remedy. I looked upon the summer as the price I was to pay for the privilege of being so far on the frontier, so much nearer the expedition than the families of officers who had gone East. With all my tremors and misgivings, I had no idea of retreating to safe surroundings, as I should then lose my hope of eventually going out to the regiment. It took a long time for our letters to reach the expedition, and a correspondingly long time for replies; but the descriptions of the night of mutiny brought the officers together in council, and the best disciplinarian of our regiment was immediately despatched to our relief. I knew but little of General Gibbs at that time; my husband had served with him during the war, and valued his soldierly ability and sincere friendship. He had been terribly wounded in the Indian wars before the Civil War, and was really unfit for hard service, but too soldierly to be willing to remain at the rear. In a week after his arrival at our post, there was a marked difference in the state of affairs. Out of the seemingly hopeless material, General Gibbs made soldiers who were used as guards over Government property through the worst of the Indian country, and whose courage was put to the test by frequent attacks, where they had to defend themselves as well as the supplies. The opinion of soldier and citizen alike underwent a change, regarding negroes as soldiers, on certain duty to which they were fitted. A ranchman, after praising their fighting, before the season was ended said, "And plague on my cats if they don't like it."
We soon found that we had reached a country where the weather could show more remarkable and sudden phases in a given time than any portion of the United States. The cultivation of the ground, planting of trees, and such causes, have materially modified some of the extraordinary exhibitions that we witnessed when Kansas was supposed to be the great American desert. With all the surprises that the elements furnished, there was one that we would gladly have been spared. One quiet day I heard a great rumbling in the direction of the plateau where we had ridden so much, as if many prairie-schooners, heavily laden, were being spirited away by the stampede of mules. Next, our house began to rock, the bell to ring, and the pictures to vibrate on the wall. The mystery was solved when we ran to the gallery, and found the garrison rushing out of barracks and quarters; Women and children ran to the parade-ground, all hatless, some half-dressed. Everybody stared at every one else, turned pale, and gasped with fright. It was an earthquake, sufficiently serious to shake our stone quarters and overturn the lighter articles, while farther down the gully the great stove at the sutler's store was tumbled over and the side of the building broken in by the shock. There was a deep fissure in the side of the bank, and the waters of the Big Blue were so agitated that the bed of the river twelve feet deep was plainly visible.
The usual session of the "Did-you-evers" took place, and resolutions were drawn up—not committed to paper, however—giving the opinion of women on Kansas as a place of residence. We had gone through prairie-fire, pestilence, mutiny, a river freshet, and finally, an earthquake: enough exciting events to have been scattered through a lifetime were crowded into a few weeks. Yet in these conclaves, when we sought sympathy and courage from one another, there was never a suggestion of returning to a well-regulated climate.
CHAPTER XVI.
SACRIFICES AND SELF-DENIAL OF PIONEER DUTY—CAPTAIN ROBBINS AND COLONEL COOK ATTACKED, AND FIGHT FOR THREE HOURS.
It is a source of regret, as these pages grow daily under my hand, that I have not the power to place before the country the sacrifices and noble courage endured by the officers and soldiers of our army in their pioneer work. I can only portray, in the simplest manner, what I saw them endure unmurmuringly, as I was permitted to follow in the marches and campaigns of our regiment. I find that it is impossible to make the life clear to citizens, even when they ask me to describe personally something of frontier days, unless they may have been over the Plains in their journeys to and from the Pacific coast. Even then, they look from the windows of the Pullman car on to the desert, white with alkali, over which the heat rises in waves, and upon earth that struggles to give even life to the hardy cactus or sage-brush. Then I find their attention is called to our army, and I sometimes hear a sympathetic tone in their voices as they say, "Ah! Mrs. Custer, when I rode over that God-forgotten land, I began to see what none of us at the East ever realize—the terrible life that our army leads on the Plains." And only lately, while I was in the West, a citizen described to me seeing a company of cavalry, that had made a terrific march, come in to the railroad at some point in Arizona. He told me of their blistered faces, their bloodshot, inflamed eyes—the result of the constant cloud of alkali dust through which they marched—the exhaustion in every limb, so noticeable in men of splendid vigor, with their broad chests, deep throats, and muscular build, because it told what a fearful strain it must have been to have reduced such stalwart athletes to weakness. What effect it would have to introduce a body of such indomitable men in the midst of an Eastern city, tired, travel-stained, but invincible!
After all, if we who try to be their champions should succeed in making this transfer by some act of necromancy, the men would be silent about their sufferings. Among the few officers who have written of Plains life, there is scarcely a mention of hardships endured. As I read over my husband's magazine articles for the first time in many years, I find scarcely a reference to the scorching sun, the stinging cold, the bleak winds. His narrative reads like the story of men who marched always in sunshine, coming across clear streams of running water and shady woods in which to encamp. I have been there; through and through the breezy, buoyant tale I see the background—a treeless, arid plain, brackish, muddy water, sandy, sterile soil. The faces of our gallant men come up to me in retrospection, blistered and swollen, the eyes streaming with moisture from the inflaming dust, the parched lips cracked with fever of unquenched thirst, the hands, even, puffed and fiery with the sun-rays, day after day.
It seems heartless to smile in the midst of this vision, recalled to me of what I myself have seen, but I hear some civilian say, as they have often asked me equally inconsistent questions, "Well, why didn't they wear gloves?" Where all the possessions of a man are carried on the saddle, and the food and forage on pack-mules, it would be impossible to take along gloves to last from early spring till the stinging cold of late autumn. Thirst is an unconquerable foe. It is one of those enemies that may be vanquished on one field and come up, supported by legions of fresh desires, the very next day. I know nothing but the ever-present selfishness of our natures that requires such persistent fighting. Just fancy, for a moment, the joy of reaching a river or a stream on the Plains! How easy the march seemed beside its banks! At any moment one could descend, fill the canteen, and rejoin the column. It is true the quality of the water was not of the best, but there comes a time, out there, when quantity triumphs. It seems so good to have enough of anything, for the stinted supplies of all sorts make life seem always meagre in a country with no natural resources. But woe be to the man who puts his faith in a Western stream! They used to take themselves suddenly out of sight, down somewhere into the bowels of the earth, and leave the bed dry as dust, winding its tortuous way for miles, aggravating us by the constant reminder of where water ought to be, but where it unfortunately was not. This sudden disappearance of water is supposed to be due to the depression of the rocky beds of the streams. A deep sand absorbs the moisture from the surface, and draws down into its depths all the stream. When the bed again rises nearer the surface, the stream comes to sight once more. Whoever, after the water disappeared, found that he must drink or die, was obliged to stop and dig away at the dry bed of the river until he found moisture. It was a desperate man that attempted it; one whose throat had become voiceless, whose mouth and lips ached with the swelling veins of overheated blood; for, if one delayed behind the column for ever so short a time, he was reminded of his insecurity by a flash from a pile of stones or a bunch of sage-bush on the summit of a low divide. The wily foe that lurks in the rear of a marching column has no equal in vigilance.