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Libbie Custer
Custer’s widow was left with
large debts that her husband incurred speculating in the stock market. Mrs. Elizabeth (“Libbie”) Custer eventually
became financially comfortable based on her success as an author. Her three books, Boots and Saddles(1885), Following the Guidon (1890), and Tenting on the Plains(1893) recount her life with Custer on the frontier.
Boots and Saddles covers the period leading up to the battle of
the Little Bighorn, and paints a picture of domestic bliss, “An ineffaceable
picture remains with me even now of those lovely camps, as we dreamily watched
them by the fading light of the afternoon.” (E. Custer, 31). Elizabeth Custer paints a human portrait of
Custer as, “boyish”, as the soldier’s friend, and as a man devoted to his
mother. Elizabeth Custer was widowed at
the age of thirty-four and spent the next fifty- seven years, until her death
in 1933, glorifying and defending her husband’s reputation. Only after her death
did historians begin seriously re-examining the Custer legend.
While Mrs. Custer does not
directly address the events on the Little Bighorn in any of her books, she does
mention the issue of the Indians being better armed, “We heard constantly at
the Fort of the disaffection of the young Indians of the reservation, and of
their joining the hostiles. We knew, for
we had seen for ourselves, how admirably they were equipped. We even saw on a steamer touching at our
landing its freight of Springfield rifles piled upon the decks en route for the
Indians up the river. There was
unquestionable proof they came into the trading posts far above us and bought
them, while our own brave 7th Cavalry troopers were sent out with
only the short range carbines that grew foul after the second firing.”(E.
Custer, 220) Clearly, she believed that
this was one of the reasons for the disaster.
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