Widows of Custer's Seventh Cavalry

 

On June 25, 1876, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, five companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, under the direct command of George Armstrong Custer were wiped out.  News of Custer’s death reached Fort Abraham Lincoln and his wife Elizabeth “Libbie” Custer, on July 6.

On July 29, 1876, “Libbie” Custer met with the widows and children of the enlisted men who died at the battle of the Little Bighorn.  She thanked them for their friendship and bade them farewell.  She presented each child with a picture of her husband George Armstrong Custer in uniform.

The next morning four widows, Libbie Custer, Maggie Custer Calhoun the widow of Lt. James Calhoun, “The Adonis of the 7^th”, Nettie Brown Smith the widow of Lt. Algernon Smith, and Annie Yates the widow of Captain George Yates traveled by carriage and steamboat to Bismarck in the Dakota Territory.  From Bismarck they went by train on toward their final destinations.

The journey of the widows was widely reported in the press.  An article in The Findlay Jeffersonian reported, “It is a tragic sight.  It is now thought that Mrs. Custer will not long survive her husband.  Her condition is a critical one, and her death may be looked for at any time.  The bullet that pierced the brave Custer was also the death wound for his loving wife.”

Once settled in at her in-law’s home in Monroe Michigan, Libbie transformed the room she occupied into a shrine to her late husband, making the room a replica of their quarters at Fort Abraham Lincoln.  Custer’s uniforms were even placed in the wardrobe next to her own clothes.

The widows, especially Libbie were perplexed and irritated that some newspapers blamed Custer’s recklessness for the disaster at the Little Bighorn.  Much more congenial was a letter of condolence from Major General George B. McClellan under whom Custer once served during the Civil War.

“As a man, I mourn in your noble husband’s death the loss of a warm, unselfish and devoted friend.  As a soldier and citizen, I lament the death of one of the most brilliant ornaments of the service and the nation, a most able and gallant soldier, a pure and noble gentleman….It is some consolation to me, I cannot doubt it is to you, that he died as he had lived, a gallant gentleman, a true hero, fighting unflinchingly to the last desperate odds.” 

Libbie Custer found 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.  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.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer’s Last Stand Re-examined