Libbie Custer

General Custer's widow wrote this about the verge of her husband and his men's end at Little Bighorn: "My husband rode to the top of a promontory and turned around, stood up in his stirrups and waved his hat. Then, they all started forward again and, in a few seconds, they had disappeared, horses, flags, men. And we never saw them again."

Mail sent after him by courier was shortly returned unopened. For he had gone beyond reach of letters. “My thoughts, my dreams, my prayers, are all for you. God bless and keep my darling. Ever your own Libbie,” her last one ended.

To our modern eyes, it sometimes seems as if no woman born in the last century was actually pretty. But that’s not true of Elizabeth Bacon, the daughter of a Monroe, Michigan judge. The pictures show it. She had, we are told, the most wonderful smile, her eyes almost squeezing shut as a happy look came over her face.

Among her hometown pursuers was a blacksmith-farmer’s son never called George, always Armstrong or Autie. But they could never be more than friends, she told her diary. He twitted her by playing up to others and at social get-togethers refused to look at or speak to her. He strenuously flirted with another. “A low-minded girl,” she told her diary. “He, like others, takes all she gives which I sometimes think is everything.” Then, the war on and he fresh to it after a last-place finish in the rankings of his West Point class of 1861—she had been valedictorian of her female seminary—he obtained her father’s permission to write. She had changed. “My more than friend,” began her first letter to him; and soon, she wrote, she prayed “letter please arrive” when the mail was due. By then, he was the Boy General With the Golden Locks to the newspapers, a dashing “Come on, boys” as opposed to “Go in, boys” leader clad in velveteen and with swirling gold loops from wrist to elbow. They were married in February of 1864. Earlier, she had refused him a kiss “4000 times,” she remembered; now she wrote home she was prouder to be his wife than she would to be Mrs. Lincoln or a queen.

They lived a dream existence. Graybeards stood to attention in the presence of the 25-year-old commander of the Union’s largest cavalry brigade, and Philip Sheridan purchased for $20 the table at which Grant had written the surrender terms for Lee to give his subordinate, with instructions that he present it to his Libbie. (It is in the Smithsonian today.)

She was droll, cheery, unreserved, talkative, clever with a sketchbook, a capable writer. They rode, kept many dogs, sang, played charades, went to the theater and cried together at East Lynne. (“Don’t keep it long, Libbie,” he said, handing her a handkerchief to replace her soaked one. “I need it.”) He thought of resigning the Army to make money, then decided to stay in. They were at posts in Texas, New Orleans, Kansas, Kentucky, and, in the end, Dakota Territory, their letters when they were apart filled with My Dearest Boy, My Durl, Bo, Bunkey, Sunbeam, Peerless Little One, Dear Old Sweetness, My Jewel, My Crown—“You are irrevocably my first, my present and my last love” from him and “An idolizing wife could not live without you” from her. Childless, they focused upon each other. Then came a June day of 1876, and he rode to attack with fewer than 300 soldiers a force of Indians ten times and more that number, the band playing as he went away “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and “Carry Owen,” the Seventh Cavalry’s song.

Libbie Custer departed the West pale and with drooping head, feeling, she later wrote, that now God asked her to walk on alone and in the shadow. She had a $30 monthly pension from the government and little else, for he had squandered what money they had, impetuous and reckless and neglectful of caution as he was. Those were the qualities, history has ruled, that made it an easy work for the Indians to slaughter to the last man Yellow Hair and his bluecoats. That was not her view. “She was blind, deaf and dumb as to any shortcomings of her husband,” a chronicler wrote. “To her, Custer was a god, a saint, an immaculate hero, a knight without stain or reproach.”

She went to New York to work three days a week for the Society of Decorative Arts, which promoted home employment for women: needlework and the production of manufacturers’ decorations and designs and handiwork on china, slate, porcelain, and pottery. She answered letters, received office visitors, arranged classes, and worked on arts displays. She made a living, but only just.

She remembered the 12 years of her marriage, the Civil War days, the travels, the Army, the summers with Autie she came to see as one long and perfect day to be hers in blessed memory for time and for eternity. She wrote a book about Autie, the Army, herself. It sold very well. She wrote more books and branched out into articles for newspapers and magazines on public affairs, art, the opera, ballet, people in the news, buffalo hunting, vandalism at Mount Vernon, children, an ice carnival, a Japanese village set up for viewing at Madison Square Garden. She went lecturing on the social and economic status of women, appearing in churches, libraries, schools for girls, and the drawing rooms of wealthy matrons who had their friends in.

She led a life of the most markedly and most strikingly self-contradictory nature. On the one hand, she was quintessentially the professional widow, forcing it to become a very touchy matter for any military writer or officer to criticize Custer for having insanely launched an attack without taking the most elementary precautions or making even an attempt at reconnaissance. To say or write such put one in the position of standing against bereaved Libbie.

On the other hand, she was forceful and strong and making her way unassisted at a time when there were very few assertive women such as she, proud to sit with a group of women writers and artists at an Onteora, New York, summer colony and say, “Why, we are all working women; not a lady among us.” A very shrewd investor, increasingly prosperous, she traveled widely, went to England, Germany, Egypt, Turkey, China, and Japan, and spent winters in Daytona Beach. There was never another man.

Years passed, and decades rolled over the writer-lecturer-investor who was at one and the same time the late brevet major general’s wife ready to help with the pension problems of the widows and children of the men who had fallen with her husband at the Little Bighorn. In 1910, she went back to Monroe to see President Taft dedicate an equestrian statue of her husband. (An earlier one had been erected at West Point, where he was buried, but she declared it a failure, and, in the face of her attitude, it was taken down and dismantled.) In practically every saloon in the country, drinkers saw the famous, and famously fanciful, representation of the Last Stand, and people who had never heard of Generals Miles and Crook knew, or thought they knew, all about Custer.

In 1926, 50 years on, the Battle of the Little Bighorn was commemorated on its site, thousands attending. She listened to a radio description, for never in her life would she visit where her husband and his men had been overwhelmed. A year later, meeting with a magazine writer, her tendril curls worn in the manner of the 1880s, her wedding ring on her finger, she said when asked about the Roaring Twenties bareback dresses of women and what her interviewer termed other extremes of youth: “You know, I keep my sense of the ludicrous.” Hobbling on a cane, white-haired, tiny, unrecognizable as the Libbie of long before save for the bright and sparkling blue eyes, she asked in her old humorous manner, “It’s really rather suspicious of me to be living on Park Avenue, don’t you think?”

She died in 1933, four days short of her 91st birthday. “Heaven would not be Heaven till we are joined together,” Custer wrote her in Civil War times while speaking of the possibility of his death in action. “Autie lies in such a lovely spot,” she had said of his grave at West Point, and there, 57 years after the Little Bighorn, she went to join him, the old lady put with her young hero, a military band playing “Carry Owen” as she went to his side.