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

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

While we ran hither and thither, startled at the shouts of the officers and men as they called to one another, dreading some new terror, our hearts sinking with uncontrollable fright at the wild havoc the storm was making, the two dogs that the General valued, Turk, the bull-dog, and Rover, his favorite fox-hound, broke their chains and flew at each other's throat. Their warfare had been long and bloody, and they meant that night to end the contest. The ferocity of the bull-dog was not greater than that of the old hound. The soldiers sprang at them again and again to separate them. The fangs of each showed partly buried in the other's throat, but finally, one powerful man choked the bull-dog into relaxing his hold. The remnants of the gashed and bleeding contestants were again tied at a secure distance, and the soldiers renewed their work to prevent the tents from falling. I remember that in one gale, especially furious, seventeen clung to the guy-rope in front and saved the canvas from downfall.

But, after all, something worse awaited us than all this fury of the elements and the dread of worse to come to ourselves; for the reality of the worst that can come to anyone was then before us without a warning. There rang out on the air, piercing our ears even in the uproar of the tempest, sounds that no one, once hearing, ever forgets. They were the despairing cries of drowning men. In an instant our danger was forgotten; but the officers and men were scattered along the stream beyond our call, and Eliza was now completely unnerved. We ran up and down the bank, wringing our hands, she calling to me, "Oh, Miss Libbie! what shall we do? What shall we do?" We tried to scream to those dark forms hurrying by us, that help might come farther down. Alas! the current grew more furious as the branch poured into the main stream, and we could distinguish, by the oft-repeated glare of the lightning, the men waving their arms imploringly as they were swept down with tree-trunks, masses of earth, and heaps of rubbish that the current was drifting by. We were helpless to attempt their rescue. There can be few moments in existence that hold such agonizing suffering as those where one is appealed to for life, and is powerless to give succor. I thought of the ropes about our tent, and ran to unwind one; but they were lashed to the poles, stiff with moisture, and tied with sailors' intricate knots. In a frenzy, I tugged at the fastenings, bruising my hands and tearing the nails. The guy-ropes were equally unavailable, for no knife we had could cut such a cable.

Eliza, beside herself with grief to think she could not help the dying soldiers with whom she had been such a favorite, came running to me where I was insanely struggling with the cordage, and cried, "Miss Libbie, there's a chance for us with one man. He's caught in the branches of a tree; but I've seen his face, and he's alive. He's most all of him under water, and the current is a-switchin' him about so he can't hold out long. Miss Libbie, there's my clothes-line we could take, but I can't do it, I can't do it! Miss Libbie, you wouldn't have me to do it, would you? For where will we get another?" The grand humanity that illumined the woman's face, full of the nobility of desire to save life, was so interwoven with frugality and her inveterate habit of protecting our things, that I hardly know how the controversy in her own mind would have ended if I had not flown to the kitchen tent to get the clothes-line. The current swayed the drowning man so violently he was afraid to loosen his hold of the branches to reach the rope as we threw it to him over and over again, and it seemed momentarily that he must be torn from our sight. The hue of death was on his face—that terrible blue look—while the features were pinched with suffering, and the eyes starting from their sockets. He was naked to the waist, and the chill of the water, and of those hours that come before dawn, had almost benumbed the fingers that clutched the branches. Eliza, like me, has forgotten nothing that happened during that horrible night, and I give part of her story, the details of which it is so difficult for me to recall with calmness:

"Miss Libbie, don't you mind when we took the clothes-line an' went near to him as we could get, he didn't seem to understan' what we was up to? We made a loop and showed it to him, when a big flash of lightnin' came and made a glare, and tried to call to him to put it over his head. The noise of the water, and the crashin' of the logs that was comin' down, beside the thunder, drownded out our voices. Well, we worked half an hour over that man. He thought you and me, Miss Libbie, couldn't pull him in—that we wasn't strong enough. He seemed kind o' dazed-like; and the only way I made him know what the loop was for, I put it on over my body and made signs. Even then, he was so swept under that part of the bank, and it was so dark, I didn't think we could get him. I could hear him bubblin', bellowin', drownin' and gaggin'. Well, we pulled him in at last, though I got up to my waist in water. He was cold and blue, his teeth chatterin'; he just shuck and shuck, and his eyes was perfectly wild. We had to help him, for he could hardly walk to the cook tent. I poured hot coffee down him; and, Miss Libbie, you tore aroun' in the dark and found your way to the next tent for whisky, and the lady that never was known to keep any before, had some then. And I wrapped the drownded man in the blouse the Ginnel give me. It was cold, and I was wet and I needed it, Miss Libbie; but didn't that man, as soon as ever his teeth stopped a-chatterin', jest get up and walk off with it? And, Miss Libbie, the Ginnel wrote to you after that, from some expedition, that he had seen the soldier Eliza gave her clothes-line to save, and he sent his thanks and asked how I was, and said I had saved his life. I just sent back word, in the next letter you wrote the Ginnel, to ask if that man said anything about my blouse he wore off that night. You gave one of the Ginnel's blue shirts to a half-naked, drownded man. We saved two more and wrapped 'em in blankets, and you rubbed 'em with red pepper, and kept the fire red-hot, and talked to them, tryin' to get the shiver and the scare out of 'em. I tell you, Miss Libbie, we made a fight for their lives, if ever any one did. The clothes-line did it all. One was washed near to our tent, and I grabbed his hand. We went roun' with our lanterns, and it was so dark we 'spected every moment to step into a watery grave, for the water was so near us, and the flashes of lightnin' would show that it was a-comin' on and on. Turk and Rover would fight just by looking at each other, and in all that mess they fell on each other, an' I was sure they was goin' to kill each other, and, oh, my! the Ginnel would have taken on so about it! But the soldiers dragged them apart."

Seven men were drowned near our tent, and their agonizing cries, when they were too far out in the current for us to throw our line, are sounds that will never be stilled. The men were from the Colonel's escort on the temporary island above us. The cavalrymen attempted, as the waters rose about them, to swim their horses to the other shore; but all were lost who plunged in, for the violence of the current made swimming an impossibility. A few negro soldiers belonging to the infantry were compelled to remain where they were, though the water stood three feet in some of the tents. When the violence of the storm had abated a little, one of the officers swam the narrowest part of the stream, and, taking a wagon-bed, made a ferry, so that with the help of soldiers that he had left behind holding one end of the rope he had taken over, the remaining soldiers were rescued and brought down to our little strip of land. Alas! this narrowed and narrowed, until we all appeared to be doomed. The officers felt their helplessness when they realized that four women looked to them for protection. They thought over every imaginable plan. It was impossible to cross the inundated part of the plain, though their horses were saddled, with the thought that each one might swim with us through the shallowest of the water. They rode into this stretch of impassable prairie, but the water was too swift, even then, to render it anything but perilous. They decided that if the water continued to rise with the same rapidity we would be washed away, as we could not swim, nor had we strength to cling to anything. This determined them to resort to a plan that, happily, we knew nothing of until the danger was passed. We were to be strapped to the Gatling guns as an anchorage. These are, perhaps, the lightest of all artillery, but might have been heavy enough to resist the action of what current rose over our island. There would have been one chance in ten thousand of rescue under such circumstances, but I doubt if being pinioned there, watching the waves closing around us, would have been as merciful as permitting us to float off into a quicker death.

While the officers and men with us were working with all their might to save lives and property, the little post was beleaguered. The flood came so unexpectedly that the first known of it was the breaking in of the doors of the quarters. The poorly built, leaky, insecure adobe houses had been heretofore a protection, but the freshet filled them almost instantly with water. The quarters of the laundresses were especially endangered, being on even lower ground than the officers' houses. The women were hurried out in their night-dresses, clasping their crying children, while they ran to places pointed out by the officers, to await orders. Even then, one of our Seventh Cavalry officers, who happened to be temporarily at the garrison, clambered up to the roof of an adobe house to discover whether the women of his regiment were in peril. The same plan for rescue was adopted at the post that had been partly successful above. A ferry was improvised out of a wagon-bed, and into this were collected the women and children. The post was thus emptied in time to prevent loss of life. First the women, then the sick from the hospital, and finally the drunken men; for the hospital liquor was broken into, and it takes but a short time to make a soldier helplessly drunk. The Government property had to be temporarily abandoned, and a great deal was destroyed or swept away by the water. It was well that the camp women were inured to hardship, for the condition in which the cold, wet, frightened creatures landed, without any protection from the storm, on the opposite bank, was pitiful. One laundress had no screams of terror or groans of suffering over physical fright; her wails were loud and continuous because her savings had been left in the quarters, and facing death in that frail box, as she was pulled through the turbid flood, was nothing to the pecuniary loss. It was all the men could do to keep her from springing into the wagon-bed to return and search for her money.

On still another branch of Big Creek there was another body of men wrestling with wind and wave. Several companies, marching to New Mexico, had encamped for the night, and the freshet came as suddenly upon them as upon all of us. The colonel in command had to seize his wife, and wade up to his arms in carrying her to a safe place. Even then, they were warned that the safety was but temporary. The ambulance was harnessed up, and they drove through water that almost swept them away, before they reached higher ground. There was a strange coincidence about the death, eventually, of this officer's wife. A year afterward they were encamped on a Texas stream, with similar high banks, betokening freshets, and the waters rose suddenly, compelling them to take flight in the ambulance again; but this time the wagon was overturned by the current, and the poor woman was drowned.