THIS STAG HOUND WAS BUT one of the many critters that Elizabeth Custer had to put up with. Custer loved animals and they loved him. At one point he even had a pet antelope. He liked big rangy dogs, dogs that could keep up with him as he loped around the plains on a hunt. As a budding general, Custer had quickly adapted himself to living high, a lifestyle he found hard to give up once his rank dropped back to where it had been. He was a captain for a while, and then, in Kansas, a lieutenant colonel.
This is when he began to consider being a mercenary in Mexico. Quite a few bored veterans of the Civil War took this route. The United States had handily whipped Mexico in the war of 1846–48, and afterward gained a huge amount of territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, with the Gadsden Purchase coming a little later.
In Custer’s time the fear was that Mexico was falling under French influence—this was because of the foolish, doomed, sad emperorship of young Maximilian, brother to the Hapsburg Franz Joseph. The real ruler of Mexico was the flintlike Benito Juárez, who tightened the screws on Maximilian whenever he saw fit. The final screw, the young man’s execution, came in 1867.
It seems doubtful that Ulysses Grant lost much sleep over Mexico—no action was taken nor threats issued: the only consequence, for our story, is that Custer got sent to Texas, as described. The complete indifference that Custer displayed on that strange journey—indifference to the suffering of his troops—was to reappear in spades at the Little Bighorn. He did not consider that an eighty-three-mile forced march might put his weary troops at a disadvantage when they finally had to face what had frequently been described to him as a huge mass of Indians. The battle plan in his own head was all that mattered to him, and by the time he sensed his folly it was too late.
