Appendices of Custer’s letters from campaigns of 18. Custer’s prejudices and behavior from 150 years later, but after the General’s death she was left impoverished and had to make a career as a writer and public speaker – which means she had to appeal to her audience. I’ve read other books on life in the frontier Army in the 1800s ( Forty Miles A Day On Beans And Hay) this is the only one that depicts it from a woman’s point of view.
Custer getting the news of the Little Bighorn/Greasy Grass battle. Custer narrates this without any censure for anybody involved. Her husband shot himself when it was revealed. “Old Nash” left instructions to be buried immediately after death, but the ladies of the camp decided that would be unfitting, prepared the body – and discovered “Old Nash” was a man. The first two husbands deserted her, but the third – a much younger cavalry trooper – stayed. However, the fact the she was female and that garrison soldiers and Dakota settlers were pretty desperate allowed her to work through three husbands, two locals and a soldier. Old Nash was not very attractive – even for a garrison laundress, who didn’t exactly have a reputation as centerfold material. One section intrigued me – it was about one of the garrison “laundresses”, “Old Nash”. The book is a chronological series of anecdotes, interesting enough if you can get by the 19th century language and attitudes. She has more favorable words for the Crow and Arikara scouts that work for the cavalry – but even here most of her comments emphasize their quaint and “uncivilized” behavior.
She’s patronizing toward her two black servants – she quotes them in dialect. Custer’s has the social attitudes of most of her contemporaries. She recounts the incident with less emotion than she devotes to being plagued by mosquitoes). Custer was tougher than she makes out (just as an example, on one of her rides with the General they run across a settler who the Lakota had captured, staked out, disemboweled, and finished off by building a fire in his abdominal cavity. Based on other works I’ve read, General Custer was rather less noble than portrayed here, and Mrs.
Custer says the General was annoyed when he found her in the kitchen, which was the province of the servants. Her husband not only acquiesced to this behavior, he required it Mrs. Custer takes the stereotypical role of a Victorian lady – frail dependent on her husband and servants and frightened by wildlife, natives, and Great Plains weather. Custer’s eyes, “the General” (a brevet rank his permanent rank in the Regular Army was Lieutenant Colonel) was the embodiment of military and husbandly virtue, and Mrs. Hagiography for George Armstrong Custer, by his wife Elizabeth, covering their time at Fort Lincoln, North Dakota (then Dakota Territory).
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