NOW I AIN’T MENTIONED Pard for a while, but he was still with me and not getting any younger. Fact is, he had turned downright old, as it took me a while to realize, for seeing him all the time, mostly nowadays sleeping in my tent except when I brought in the grub or when he relieved himself, on which trips I went along so he wouldn’t do it noplace in the encampment where it would make someone mad. Being with him so much I was slow to notice the gray when it first started on his muzzle, and if he didn’t respond as quick as once to what I said, I thought he just wasn’t interested in what I was saying or had got miffed because he could smell Annie’s dog George on me after I would come back from visiting with the Butlers, not realizing he was getting deaf.
George by the way had died while the Wild West was in Toledo in Annie’s native state of Ohio, and her and Frank give him a big funeral at the private property of a fan, burying him wrapped in the satin and velvet banner hung at the show while he was performing, with his name embroidered on it in gold, and the whole troupe come from B.B.W.W., including the Indians, some of whose women made wreaths and chanted their death songs, which you got to admit was more than a slight gesture on the part of people who might of ate him had they been back home.
Back on the ranch, it seemed Cody was so on the outs with his wife that he let her stay alone in the Welcome Wigwam, which meant the people he took home with him from the show had to jam into a smaller house on the property, which didn’t rightly affect me and Pard, for we always bunked in a harness room of one of the barns. Bill was trying without success to get divorced from Mrs. Lulu, who hated everything he did including most of all the Wild West and had gotten him to put all his money and property in her name and didn’t want to share it with him. Also she was real jealous of some of the female performers that had appeared with him in his stage plays and now, in addition to Annie, in the Wild West.
I might just say here that Buffalo Bill tried throughout the rest of his life to divorce Lulu and never did succeed. It wasn’t easy to do in them days, not to mention that despite their eternal quarreling him and his lady had a deep attachment to each other though not hitting it off in the fashion of Frank and Annie Butler.
I thought Pard might perk up some when he got back to open country as opposed to the back lot of the show when camped in some eastern town or traveling in the baggage car every couple of days, but in fact as the weeks went by in Nebraska he seemed to get wearier, spending more and more time wrapped up in an old horse blanket and having to be nudged awake when the time came I thought he should visit the outdoors, like before I blew the lamp out at night, so he wouldn’t be woke by the need to make water and blunder around in the dark, maybe getting kicked by a horse, for even his daylight vision wasn’t what it once had been, nor his balance.
Pard was at the end of his life, but I wouldn’t admit that to myself until it got to the point where he lost most of his interest in eating, for food is a dog’s religion, of which you might say Pard was a priest or maybe even the pope: there had been a time when I had to sleep on my leather articles, including boots and belt, lest he chew and swallow such in the middle of the night. I would catch him eyeing many an animal big as a burro, considering whether he might be able to bring him down and have enough meat for the next week—make that two days, for though the size of the coyotes from which I always figured he come in part, he had a bear’s capacity for grub, one emerging from hibernation.
Well, not wanting to turn this story of mine into a tearjerker, when so many of the people I was close to had died, most at real early ages, I won’t dwell on the death of a dog who nobody had knowed well but me, for I don’t count my brother Bill or whoever Pard come from before that, an Indian camp likely. He hadn’t lived a bad life, for what dogs require is food and company, and I provided both, with him returning the favor when he could. It was ten years since him and me joined up together, plus he wasn’t a pup when we met, so he had put in what was a lengthy lifetime for a four-footed creature of his day, and if you count it according to the difference between dog and man of seven years to one, Pard had lived twice as long as most of the people I ever knowed, Sitting Bull, not far beyond fifty, being ancient.
So one winter morning Pard did not wake up, staying under his blanket even after I had gotten the little iron stove so hot nobody but a dog could of come near it, as he would have if he could, drying his nose till it was like sandpaper, and if you touched it at such a point you would think him sick, but that was when he had been well. I knowed only death could keep him away from a source of heat in the icy season, but I pretended otherwise, patting the blanket and kidding him as a slowpoke who wouldn’t get to breakfast before it was all gone into the bellies of others, but all I felt was a stone replica of a dog, hard and cold like it had been outside all night in the snow, but when I wound the blanket tighter and picked him up, he wasn’t as heavy as I expected though having turned to rock, or even as he had been when alive, especially in recent years when he got less exercise but ate more. His spirit had obviously been real hefty.
I had quite a job with pick and shovel to penetrate the soil, having first to clear away a three-foot drift of snow and keep it off. The usual wind that blows across the plains, having no natural hindrances, was persistent as ever, but the work went quicker when I got below the frostline, and I kept going to some depth, for I didn’t want no animal to dig Pard up and chaw on him.
When the hole was deep enough I let him down by the lariat lashed around the bundle at nose and tail, and I says goodbye to my old comrade in English, Cheyenne, and Lakota, and begged his pardon if he had come from another tribe instead and might of been insulted by the language of his enemies. The important matter was nothing concerned with his death but rather how him and me took care of one another over all them years of life, which death had ended but could not otherwise affect now it become memory. You can think less of me, if you want, for being so close to a dog, but that will matter to me about as much as it would of to Pard.
But I’ll be the first to admit my life was wanting for human companionship, especially of the respectable female sort, and while I was sure looking forward to meeting Mrs. Custer when we reached New York City during the next season, I knowed it would be more practical for me to get a girlfriend who wasn’t confined totally to my imagination, and I thought maybe the latest young woman to join the Wild West might be a candidate, for though being a bit on the plump side she was comely, with a head of dark curls and neat little features, and she had a saucy way when talking to you I found quite taking, until I become aware that every other man had that same effect on her. Her name was Lillian Smith, and she was a sharpshooter, real good at that art, rivaling Annie Oakley, but what I didn’t care for was her boast that with her arrival Annie was done for.
Of course Annie couldn’t understand why Colonel Cody had hired the “California Girl,” as Arizona John Burke billed her, for in addition to herself there was young Johnny Baker, who Annie had trained to shoot and was real good at it while having the sense not to compete with his teacher; but master showman that he was, Cody knowed not only that you couldn’t have too many sharpshooting young ladies for the public, but the natural competition between them would keep each with a keener edge that she was likely to maintain on her own, for even such a levelheaded person as Annie was not above envy, her being all of twenty-six by this time, whereas Lillian was—well, let me first tell you an ironic particular. If you remember, when I first laid eyes on Annie Oakley only the year before, I took her for a schoolgirl. In the case of Lillian Smith, I figured she was about Annie’s age. Fact is, Lillian was fifteen at the time. I reckon it was that “ample” figure of hers that misled me: the term was Annie’s, who seldom spoke of Lillian without using it.
In truth Annie never had a good word for her professional rival, suspecting her of loose morals just because Lillian wasn’t as prudish as her, and when I says after all the girl wasn’t married, that observation put Annie on the outs with me for a while, and I tell you as happened so often with women it was me who lost on that deal, for I had too much competition from the cowboys to get far with Lillian (who within a year married one of them named Jim Kidd) and anyway she was a bit young for me though I never looked my age. Annie was cool to me for a time even after the thing with Lillian was over.
Now we spent the entire summer of ’86 in one place, Staten Island, at a resort called Erastina, to which regular ferries come across the bay from the city, passing the newly erected Statue of Liberty. The opening had been preceded by a big parade through Manhattan, with all the Indians, the Deadwood stagecoach, the cowboys on prancing broncos, wagons full of buffalo, and so on, the star markswoman on her horse, wearing a fancy outfit of her own design and needlework, labeled OAKLEY on both sides, prominent enough so it could be read by the crowd as she went by. I doubt she would of gone to this trouble had Lillian Smith not been elsewhere in the parade, for when we was back in camp Frank had to bring the doctor, who found Annie had so bad an ear infection that blood poisoning had set in and she went to the hospital for a few days, rushing back while she was still weak so the public wouldn’t have time to replace her in their hearts.
They never did, not taking that much to Lillian, who didn’t have Annie’s style and charm, nor figure, and while Johnny Baker was a first-rate shot and Bill Cody himself regularly performed, always from horseback, there was something special about a pretty girl with a gun. Men thought it was sexy, and I guess women wanted to be like her.
Now that Sitting Bull wasn’t there nor my Cheyenne bunch, I didn’t have no particular job, so I made myself useful, throwing up glass balls and clay pigeons for Lillian Smith, Johnny Baker, and Buffalo Bill to break, and giving Frank a hand with Annie’s act. I also done some translating with the current troupe of Sioux, headed by an Ogallala name of American Horse. And if they needed an extra actor for the Deadwood stage during the attack by Indians, I might fill in, riding shotgun. Cody usually stuffed the interior of the coach with celebrities, politicians, or visiting foreign dignitaries, who got a kick out of being shot at with blanks and being in mock danger of being scalped.
But when the re-creation of Custer’s Last Stand was being readied, I really had to be included. I still never managed to tell Cody of my personal connection with the real thing, how I was certainly the only genuine white survivor in the world. As for the Sioux now with the show, it was hard to tell if any had participated in that fight, for the white feeling against them that had killed Custer was still strong, so any which had took part might be leery of admitting as much. On the other hand, there was also plenty of whites, especially in the eastern cities, generally people who though having a horror of violence, admired Indians for being ruthless killers and would reward any as such, buying photos and souvenirs, like with Sitting Bull, so undoubtedly there was Indians ready to confess more than they had ever done. The event was ten years earlier by now: the young men had only been kids then, if they was anywhere near the Greasy Grass that day in June.
It took a while to get everything prepared for this act, like having some artists paint a great big canvas backdrop representing the valley of the Little Bighorn, which probably looked believable if you hadn’t never seen the real one, and having cavalry uniforms made, and so on, and meanwhile we had to give the usual shows at the Staten Island site, where the attendance was so good, day and night (with gas, flares, and fires lighted for the latter), that Cody and Salsbury decided to stay in New York for the whole winter, moving the Wild West into Madison Square Garden as of that November, hiring a writer name of Mackaye to design a program that was more like a theatrical presentation than the previous series of exhibitions of riding and shooting.
The result was billed as “The Drama of Civilization,” consisting of five separate parts, beginning with “The Primeval Forest,” showing Indians and wild animals rented from a circus (some, like the African lion instead of a cougar, not authentic), and going through “The Prairie,” with a buffalo hunt, a fire on the plains, and a stampede; the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin,” the old standby from the very first show of B.B.W.W.; the “Mining Camp,” supposed to be Deadwood, destroyed at the end by a cyclone so forceful it sometimes knocked over the stagecoach in reality, being made by enormous fans driven by steam power. The final act was Custer’s Last Stand.
Between each of the above came an interval of the riding, roping, Indian dances, and marksmanship exhibitions from the show as done in the outdoor arenas. Cody, Johnny Baker, and Lillian Smith all did their specialties, but Annie Oakley’s nose was still out of joint on account of the California Girl, so not only did she exceed herself with all manner of firearms, pistols, shotguns, and a variety of rifles—the people what ran the Garden had the roof raised twenty-five feet for the sake of the shooting acts—but she added tricks done on horseback, untying a bandanna from around her mount’s ankle while hanging from a sidesaddle, picking one of her hats off the ground, and so on, while maintaining her personal modesty with costumes that despite this vigorous activity never revealed more of her leggings than when standing still.
We performed the Last Stand as long prepared for, and of course it was quite a spectacle with the Indians milling around the hillock where Buck Taylor in his fringed jacket stood heroically, firing his pistol, and around him the cluster of blue-jacketed soldiers, including me as an unidentified sergeant, but of course it never looked much like the actual event or any other fight I ever saw between the cavalry and the Indians, for in real battles awful sights and sounds are interspersed with long stretches like time stopped and nothing is happening, and then you are looking at the fellow next to you, and a bullet hits him in the head and his brains splash all over you.
What I’m saying is not critical of the Wild West version, for in an association of several years now I had become a professional, and this was show business, with no blood spilled and the dying usually represented by the victim clapping a hand to his chest, so the audience could tell where he was supposed to be shot. The firing of blanks was a lot louder within walls and a roof than outdoors, and would of deafened me had Cody, a veteran of the stage, not warned us to stuff our ears with cotton. And of course it was him who come up with that finale which never happened but didn’t actually change the historical truth of Custer’s death while adding the positive character that Bill Cody always was at pains to represent.
After Buck Taylor clasped the bosom of his jacket and flopped down in fake death, the rest of us having previously gone under (myself taking care to lay out of his range, so as not to have his big carcass falling on me), and the Indians stopped yelling and shooting, in rode Buffalo Bill in a fancy buckskin suit and big white sombrero, leading a bunch of cowboys who scattered the redskins and joined Bill in a sad salute to the fallen while a lighted legend appeared on the canvas backdrop: TOO LATE.
Now if you recall, my own idea concerning the re-creating of the Last Stand had been to use it to get a personal connection with Mrs. Libbie Custer, so I was real excited when I heard she had accepted an invitation to attend opening night, but I had so many chores to do back of the scene during the early part of the show that I couldn’t get out and see where she was sitting, which Annie told me on coming off her own performance was a box-seat section for guests of honor all festooned with bunting. And during the act itself, I couldn’t look around the audience while shooting blanks at the Indians with my Springfield carbine, and soon there was too much smoke to see through anyway.
Right after the show was as busy for me as just before, for we didn’t have as large a company as when outdoors and at moments of commotion everybody not one of the stars had to pitch in, getting the horses into their stalls, putting away equipment, moving scenery into position for next day’s performance, so by the time this was done all the audience had long gone, Mrs. Libbie C. with them.
I found Bill Cody in the office him and Salsbury had back of the arena, and I says, “I wonder how it went over with Mrs. Custer.”
“Take a pew, Jack,” Buffalo Bill says, “and help yourself from the bottle yonder.” Over to the side, Nate Salsbury and several male assistants was counting stacks of bills on a table. They was all wearing pistols, and standing to the side was a big officer of the New York police, with tall blue helmet and a handlebar mustache. I couldn’t see no armament on him but a billy club. “And while you’re there, pour one for Sergeant O’Leary.”
“Now, Colonel,” said the policeman with a big wink, “you wouldn’t want me to defy regulations.” But he throwed down the drink I handed him so quick his mustache stayed dry.
“As to the lovely and gracious widow lady,” Cody said, “she congratulated us on our exhibition.”
“You saw her?”
“She left the premises not three minutes ago, Jack, with her little all-female entourage. The saintly woman remains devoted to her departed husband, ten years gone. Would that she be a model to all American wives.” No doubt he was thinking of his troublesome Lulu, but at the time all that mattered to me was I had missed the only person in the world I wanted to meet.
Right at this moment I was so disappointed I didn’t care what she thought of the show, but I asked him anyway.
“How could she but admire it?” Cody says, “when its sole purpose was to spare no expense to deepen the luster of her glorious husband’s reputation as a soldier and a man.” He swished the whiskey around the glass, then swooshed it down his hatch. “I told her, ‘Your presence on this occasion will attract the attention of all the good women of America, who will share your pride and my triumph.’”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Let me tell you,” says he, “how she responded. ‘My dear Colonel,’ she said, ‘your exhibition is the most realistic and faithful representation of a western life that has ceased to be with the advance of civilization.’”
“Is she still real pretty?”
Cody piously lowered his eyelids, then raised them. “The lady is an angel,” says he, with a hint of reproach in his voice, like the question was coarse. He was always holier-than-thou when talking about the ladies, and I ain’t going to comment on that, except to note that it might of give Lulu a nasty laugh.
As if it wasn’t enough to hear how close I missed meeting Libbie Custer with Buffalo Bill, when I dropped in on Annie Oakley, she tells me Mrs. C. had come backstage to personally congratulate her on her shooting and trick riding.
“Where were you. Jack?” asked Frank. “We said afterward, ‘Too bad Jack didn’t come round.’”
“I was working,” I says with some bitterness. “I ain’t a featured performer, you know.”
I regretted that as soon as it was uttered, but to show you the kind of person Annie was, she says sweetly, “He’s teasing you, Jack. Mrs. Custer invited Frank and me to tea on Sunday.”
“But I’ve got an appointment with one of Annie’s commercial sponsors that afternoon,” says Frank. “I want you to escort Annie.”
I tell you, they didn’t come nicer than the Butlers. What I suspected from the first was that Frank never had no other business and that he just did it as an act of friendship, knowing of my interest in the lady. But here’s the way men can sometimes be even when doing a favor: when later on I told him of my suspicion, he says, “You were doin’ me the favor, Jack. My idea of a good time isn’t lifting a teacup with my wife and some widow.”
I worried the next few days I’d break a leg in some strenuous part of the show, like when the Deadwood stage ran into the cyclone, or I’d fail to get out of Buck Taylor’s way when he bit the dust as Custer, but I survived to dress in my best suit of clothes and a clean shirt with a new collar bought for the occasion and so tight at first I thought any tea I swallowed wouldn’t get past my adam’s apple, and me and Annie went over to East 18th Street, where Mrs. C. had her flat, Annie for once not in her shooting outfit but looking like a grand lady in a silk dress and a coat trimmed with fur and a great big hat like was the height of fashion.
Well sir, there she was, opening her door herself, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, who I had last seen when she was the lovely young wife of the still living General though his days was already dwindling fast by then, the sweetheart he wrote to most every day when separated from her, on account of whom he had once got court-martialed for joining her without permission in the middle of an Indian war.
He was ten years dead by now, and she had endured a decade of grief, but to my eyes was still beautiful as a forty-four-year-old woman, which was middle-aged for that time, and real old to the likes of Lillian Smith. Her eyes was still of that luminous gray, her hair yet of a rich and lustrous brown, that soft round face still with the blush of rose in the cheeks. She was wearing black, as I heard she done all the time ever since Custer died, but her present dress looked fashionable in its cut. She was of about my own height.
I didn’t have no interest in any other human, including even Annie, when in the presence of Libbie Custer, who apart from her beauty and grace I was connected to in the most special way there was, next to having saved her own life: I had been with the closest person to her in all the world when he was rubbed out.
There was pictures of her husband all over the sitting room, atop every table and along the mantelpiece, as well as a marble bust, showing him in one or another of his many versions of uniform, almost always wearing stars, more often the two of the major general than the one for the brigadier, the brevet ranks he had gained in the Civil War and for which he had been called the Boy General, being in his twenties, whereas during the last decade of his career, the one he is best remembered for on account of how it ended, he had been but a lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army, though nobody ever addressed him that way. Officers was generally addressed by the highest rank they ever reached, as a matter of military courtesy, so you can’t blame Custer in that regard.
I was, and am, trying to be fair to the man, who I think I made it clear earlier on, had always rubbed me the wrong way from the first I seen him, though I was already prejudiced by reason of his attack on Black Kettle’s camp at the Washita, where my Cheyenne family was killed. I didn’t like him no better after I seen him die—that, which will happen to us all, being no distinction in itself—but I thought he done it real well. He had lost the fight, his men, his lovely wife, his future, his military reputation, more than enough to ruin a man’s sense of himself, but Custer never wavered in his absolute belief that he always done the right thing. If reality said otherwise, it didn’t speak to him. I think I would of been fascinated by his case even without a personal connection, for I was exactly the opposite type, as maybe you have discovered, hearing about this life of mine. There has been little of my own motives I was ever sure of, and still less of my deeds. Looking from one angle, my existence has consisted of a series of regrets. I doubt if Custer ever had a single one. I think if God said to him in the Afterworld, “George, I’m going to give you a test. I’m going to turn back the clock to your arrival at the Little Bighorn, and you can do it all over again in the light of what you know now. Would you do anything different?” And Custer would say, “No, sir, nothing whatever.”
It ain’t that he wouldn’t, but rather that he couldn’t: that’s always the thing to keep in mind about him.
Here I am, meeting Mrs. Libbie after all them years and instead of talking about her I am going on about her husband ten years dead and gone. Well, so it happened on the occasion of which I speak, led by her. She started off by saying how much the General would of admired Annie’s prowess with firearms, and how he would share her own approval of the care Buffalo Bill had taken in reproducing the battle so accurately, though she admitted she turned her eyes away for the last moments.
When Annie complimented her about the book she had recently wrote, Mrs. Custer continued on the same subject, for the book was all about the General, and she said she wanted that, and the other writing she was doing now for the papers, to bring in enough income so she could apply most of her efforts into getting rid of the “monstrous” statue of her husband which had been erected at West Point.
When Annie asked her how she liked New York, where she had now lived for some years, Libbie said how kind the people had been to her, but her only truly happy memories was those from when she and the General visited the city, with its fine restaurants and shops and the theater that he so loved.
“Mr. Lawrence Barrett,” said she, “was his closest friend, and his picture hung in Armstrong’s study in our residence at Fort Lincoln.”
Barrett was a famous actor of that day. There was some who said Custer picked up certain dramatic flourishes from him, but I assure you if there was any tutelage it went the other way. Nobody had to teach the flair to George Armstrong Custer, though none of the pictures here on display did him justice in that respect, as in fact most photographs did not, which was real peculiar and not true, for example, of them of Bill Cody, who was always as handsome in pictures as in life, which I found was generally true of people experienced in performing: I reckon they knowed how to hold their face so it would catch the light.
Now, Lawrence Barrett could probably of taught that to his friend, for the camera of that time didn’t do no favors for Custer. His color looks sallow and hair seems drab if not dirty and his mustache in need of a trim. His everyday uniforms look dingy, whereas the fancy attire he had specially designed for himself, with stars and brass buttons all over it, appears foolish. But I guess if you never seen the General on one of the spirited horses he rode, you can never get a sense of the figure he cut, the mount prancing and snorting, Custer giving the impression that he was restraining the animal only by the force of his will, showing what looked like an easy left hand on the reins while his right went to doff his hat and sweep it through the air. Too bad he died before Mr. Tom Edison perfected the cinematograph. (Edison by the way come to see the Wild West on Staten Island, and he too congratulated Buffalo Bill on it.)
Now Annie had introduced me, the way Cody always did when I was meeting someone for the first time, as Captain Jack Crabb. I had gotten so used to the title that I never thought about it, but all of a sudden now I had to do so, and it was an awkward moment.
Having talked incessantly about her husband for the first half hour or so, Libbie Custer suddenly looks directly at me for the first time and says, “Please forgive me, Captain. As the wife of a cavalryman, I am remiss in not asking which was your regiment? I am only certain that it was not the Seventh of my day, for I knew each of Armstrong’s officers as if he were a member of my family, for in fact he was.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says I. “The title’s honorary, so to speak.” Now no man likes to lessen his credit with the ladies, who quite rightly admired our gallant military men, so I hastens to add, “But I was with the Army in other capacities....” And here I hesitated, for throughout the ten years that I had to prepare for meeting Mrs. Custer, I had still never decided just what I was going to tell her about her husband’s final moments. How much of what I could say would only cause pain?
For that matter, I had still to bring myself to a conclusion about the man. If I got to thinking about what I admired in him, I quickly reminded myself of the good reasons to think him basically an enemy. On the other hand, whenever I got to hating his guts as the bastard who, while the regimental band blared “Garryowen,” rode down on that peaceful Cheyenne village on the Washita one winter morning, I remembered him all by himself, the way every person dies, on that hill above the Little Bighorn. At least he always knowed what he was, like his Indian adversaries, unlike me.
However, I never needed to worry when it come to Mrs. Custer, who after that briefest of acknowledgments of my presence went right back to her singleminded concern, as I expect she would of done even if I had a distinguished military career to brag about. Fact is, if she thought about it at all, she would probably have preferred me never to of heard a shot fired in anger, so the General could monopolize all the valor in the world.
Well, now you are thinking that meeting the lady at long last, I had all my illusions shattered, that she turned out to be the perfect fanatical widow for the most self-centered man of his time. But in fact I wasn’t disillusioned at all and if anything the crush I had always had on her in my imagination was now as strong in reality though of a different nature. I begun to think that there must of been a side to Custer I never knew about, if a lady like Libbie could be so stuck on him.
Annie of course, being a woman and a happily married one herself, was interested in that subject without having my own personal connection to the General, who she knowed about only as the martyr portrayed in the press and also in the description Sitting Bull once give her of Custer, I guess thinking it would please her, for as I said before, the Bull wasn’t nowhere near the General at the Greasy Grass: “standing like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him.”
“There is a charming story that has been told by others,” Libbie said, “of how my husband and I first met, as children, in my hometown of Monroe, Michigan. Armstrong had come from Ohio to visit his sister. I was swinging on our front gate, and as he walked by, I cried, ‘Hello, you Custer boy!’” She made the first real smile since we arrived, aside from the polite kind, and it was like the sun come out. She must of had them dimples already as a little girl. She would of been just the right age to of said the same to me, had I been lucky enough to live on a street full of white porches in Michigan. I could just imagine her melodic voice calling me “you Crabb boy.”
Annie too was real taken by this. “And you both fell in love right then,” says she, leaning her head at a sentimental angle.
Mrs. Custer was sitting close enough to reach over and lay her hand on the back of Annie’s. “Would not that have been delightful, my dear,” she says. “But alas! this incident did not happen. It is fictional.”
Annie’s face fell at that news, and damn if I didn’t feel disappointed too. Libbie had a way of taking others into her way of seeing things. So when she goes on and tells how she really met “Armstrong,” who now and then, in an especially tender memory, she called “Autie,” I got so caught up in the narration that even though I knowed how their courtship come out in the end, I was in real suspense during the account of the many months Custer begged for her hand, first from a reluctant Libbie, who was the belle of Monroe, sought after by everybody wearing pants, including some so bold they tried to steal a kiss but was rebuffed, and then after he had conquered her heart, from her Pa, a judge who was one of the pillars of society in the region.
In fact I still think it was remarkable of Custer to give so much attention to being a suitor when he was at this same time fighting in the Civil War, nowhere near Michigan, and not just serving his time, either. He was just out of West Point, where he graduated last in his class, having done little during his years there but pull pranks and gather demerits, but once he started to lead cavalry charges he become the Yankee J.E.B. Stuart and whipped the Rebs in almost every encounter, the result being he found himself the youngest brigadier general in the Union Army at the age of twenty-three. Finally even old Judge Bacon had to give in and accept him as a son-in-law.
Now, from the side on which I had been acquainted with the man, the aspect presented by his widow was new. I had heard of his brilliant record in the War, but what was mentioned most often by the fellows I had knowed in the Seventh Cavalry en route to the Little Bighorn before they was all rubbed out, was how much higher the casualties was in Custer’s command than in any other, so that was another record set by the Boy General. My point in bringing it up here is to say I never thought about it while listening to Mrs. Libbie tell me about her hero, who she at first saw as just another young man she had to keep from being too fresh, also a person of no social standing, from a Democrat and Methodist family, while she was from a quality line and a product of the Young Ladies Seminary and Collegiate Institute.
For a little while anyway I got so involved in this account I was rooting for Custer, a young fellow trying to rise in the world. I felt some similarities to him, even at my current age.
“But at the source of my father’s objections,” Libbie went on, “was a chance event that occurred early in the War. He was returning home one evening when he saw, staggering along the street nearby, a thoroughly inebriated young man in an Army officer’s uniform.” She pursed her sensitive lips and looked ruefully into her lap, then raised her head with another smile. “Unfortunately my father recognized that young officer as the Custer boy, whom at that time I had not yet met!”
Now to show you how caught up in this I was, I took Custer’s side: he was on leave from a war, for heaven’s sake. Who was he to be criticized by some old teetotaling civilian? But I never said anything, and just as well, for Libbie goes on to say though it was true that young Autie was at fault on this occasion, only good come of it.
“It was the very evening that Armstrong’s sister Lydia, whom he stayed with in Monroe, saw the same distressing sight, and thereupon exacted from him a promise never to be drunk again. Standing up erect as the soldier he was, Autie pledged, ‘Such a promise is not enough! I hereupon swear never again to let any form of alcohol pass my lips.’ And,” said Libbie, staring at each of us in turn, “he kept that vow to the end of his life.” She turned and looked at his bust. “There are many things the world does not know about my late husband. Would you think he would weep at a performance of East Lynne? Let me assure you he did.”
So there was something I shared with the man, after all: tears come to my eyes during that same show, when I seen it in Tombstone, and I would of been embarrassed had not some of them miners, along with a number of gamblers and other good-for-nothings sobbed so loud at times you couldn’t hear the actors speak.
“My husband,” said Libbie, “had one fault, and on our honeymoon in this very city he visited a phrenologist who, after a thorough examination of Armstrong’s head, identified that weakness.”
I admit this statement took me by surprise, for I was slipping under her spell by now. “Is that right, ma’am?”
“Overdoing,” she says. “The consequence of having an heroic supply of energy, and bravery, generosity, honesty, and goodness, the very traits in which his critics were and are so woefully deficient.” Her sweet face become stern during this speech, only to smile again now. “I should add merriment to his list of virtues. At West Point, Armstrong was habitually last in his class because he applied his gifts to mischief-making and not to his studies. In his final year the subject at which he did worst was cavalry tactics! From which he went into the War and became, in his earliest twenties, the outstanding cavalry commander on either side of the conflict. There can be no question as to that truth. At Yellow Tavern, his Michigan Brigade met head-to-head with the renowned Jeb Stuart’s Invincibles, and at the end of the day General Stuart was dead and Armstrong had prevailed.”
This was the time when Custer couldn’t be beaten and the origin of the famous “Custer’s Luck.” Now, I had fell into the mood in which I was momentarily eager to help Libbie in her cause. “I heard tell,” I says, “the General had his horse shot out from under him more than once.”
“Four times,” said she. “Once his boot was shot off, and he came back to Monroe to recuperate with a leg wound so slight that we were soon at a dance.” Her eyes sparkled. “A costumed dance, I might add. I went as a gypsy, with a kerchiefed head and carrying a tambourine.” She leaned towards Annie and said, “You’ll never guess Armstrong’s costume.”
Now if that had been directed to me, I might of said, without any ironical purpose of my own, “An Indian chief.”
But what Libbie mentioned was a name I didn’t recognize, and Annie didn’t neither, for I asked her about it later. I’m going to speak it here the way it sounded, Looey Says. Not till some years afterwards, when the Wild West performed in Paris, did I find out what she said—which I remembered due to its oddity—was what the French called their King Louis the Sixteenth. Fellow who told me that was some rich Frenchman who was crazy about cowboys and Indians, like so many of them was, and he never got tired of watching Coostair get rubbed out in the show. When I told him of the aforementioned, he says I must of heard the wrong number for the king. It had to be Looey Cat Horse or Looey Cans, that is, the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth, as nobody would want to be the Sixteenth, for during the Revolution they cut his head off. I was so ignorant at the time that I thought this Frenchie had gotten it wrong: George Washington whipped the King of England in the Revolution, but certainly never chopped off his head.
Though neither of us knowed what she meant, Annie and me joined Mrs. Custer in a genteel little chuckle, and Libbie proceeded to give an example of Armstrong’s wit at West Point which in fact I do still think was right clever. It was in a course in the Spanish language, and he asked the instructor how to say, in Spanish, “The class is over,” and the teacher told him, so Custer got up and left the room, followed by all the rest of the cadets.
“Once we were married, I was often the target of his teases, and Brother Tom would join him, having been his confederate since boyhood in guying their father, and they were still doing it when he was an old gentleman.”
At the Greasy Grass the Indians—some whites said Rain-in-the-Face personally—mutilated Tom Custer’s corpse so bad I couldn’t of told who he was had not his initials been tattooed on his arm: that’s how I last seen him. Along with Tom, most of the other younger male members of the Custer clan was rubbed out: the young brother Boston, and the nephew Autie Reed, son of the sister Lydia to who the future general give the no-drinking pledge, and sister Margaret’s husband, Lieutenant Calhoun. You couldn’t disregard such a loss, even if you wasn’t related to any of them. But the same thing happened to most of the Cheyenne families I ever knowed. No kind of grief is yours alone, no matter who you are, but it’s only human to think otherwise much of the time.
But Libbie was thinking of the golden days now, and it was with a girlish giggle that she went on. “All of twenty-two, I was known to those two rogues as the Old Lady. It seems Autie could, by the universal rules of war, have commandeered a certain farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley as his headquarters, but it was ever his practice politely to request and not simply take by force—after all, so many of his favorite West Pointers were now wearing gray—and on this occasion the old Dutchman whose house it was replied, ‘Gentlemens, I haff no objections if you come in, but duh old lady, she kicks aginst it.’”
Well, she had many other stories about her all too short life with the General and I’m told went on to put them into a number of books that covered almost every day of the dozen years they was together, never allowing for no flaw in the perfect husband and peerless military leader, and either convinced most other people or anyway shamed most possible critics of him into silence so as not to rile her, who had suffered so much with no fault of her own, and loyalty in wives and widows was considered one of the prime virtues in a woman of that time. I never heard tell of her ever seeing another man socially in all the rest of her life except in a group. She was as much one of a kind as the late G. A. Custer had himself been, and I’m glad I met her, not only because of my crush, which I kept in that place in the heart designed to preserve such feelings forever, but also to give balance to my sense of the General. Though I doubt I ever could of learned enough to make me actually like him, I could at least see how she viewed the man and even feel for an instant anyway a personal regret that he had never survived that last campaign to go on a pre-planned Redpath Lyceum tour in the fall of ’76 and lecture on how he had punished the Sioux and Cheyenne during the previous summer.
Unfortunately, this nice occasion as Mrs. Custer’s guest ended on a sour note that probably nobody could be blamed for.
Mrs. Libbie was reminded again, when telling of some fancy dinner her and Armstrong was invited to by rich people, that her husband because of that long-ago vow couldn’t taste any of the champagne and other luxurious wines, but never having made such a promise herself, she could and did personally enjoy them. Now, thus far the reflection was a happy one, but suddenly she saddened. “I have reason to believe,” she said, “that the tragedy would never have occurred had his subordinates in Montana taken, and kept, a pledge against drinking.”
It was true that when it come to Seventh Cavalry officers and boozing, some smelled like walking stills, but I doubt it had anything to do with their defeat.
However, at this point I was so sympathetic to Libbie, I foolishly chimed in, “Some of the Indians claimed a lot of the soldiers at the Little Bighorn seemed drunk.” I think I have pointed out that redskins was inclined to say what would make white listeners feel better, and ain’t it interesting that people whether red or white think being drunk is a good excuse for any kind of calamity? Whiskey or the absence thereof would not of changed the outcome at the Greasy Grass.
But I had stuck my foot in it to mention Indians in Mrs. Custer’s presence. High color darkened her delicate cheeks, and into her eyes come a glint of hatred I wouldn’t of thought possible in a lady of such tender sensibilities.
“Please never mention savages in my presence,” said she, “or I must ask you to leave. I apologize: you are my guest, but I cannot abide such a reference.”
Now you might believe there wasn’t no depths I wouldn’t sink to in fawning over the object of my besottment, but you would be wrong in this case. I didn’t beg her pardon. Custer attacked that big camp on the Little Bighorn expecting to kill as many warriors as he could. That it happened the other way instead was altogether fair. He got what he had coming, not in terms of revenge but according to the fortunes of war. But I too had had loved ones killed by the enemy, and when this happened as an adult I sure hated the killer—George Armstrong Custer. So I never thought less of her for her feeling.
Well, I had accomplished one of my aims, to finally meet the lady who I had thought about so long, and I was not disappointed by her. Libbie Custer was the sort of woman who a lot of men would of thought was well worth losing their life early for, if God demanded such a swap, and I might of been one of them. It turned out she went on to last almost as long as me, give or take a few decades, living till the 1930s. I never saw her again except at a distance, in a box seat at performances of the Wild West, to which, wearing a jaunty, feathered hat, she was a frequent visitor, but her and Annie become pals, passing many an hour together in embroidering and female palaver, and Annie was the better for it in her efforts to improve herself in genteel ways.
Speaking of Annie, when we left Mrs. Custer’s place that day what she says was not about this occasion but rather how I ought maybe get myself another dog on account of missing old Pard so much.
Now I swear I had hardly ever mentioned Pard to her since telling her he died, a year earlier. So whether this was her womanly intuition or she was just reminded of the subject by her own purpose to replace little George with another pooch, I couldn’t say.
“Well, if I do I reckon it will have to wait till we get back from over the water,” I says, knowing Cody had told her as well as me of his latest bright idea, which for my money topped them all to this point. He was going to take the whole company across the Atlantic Ocean to perform for the Queen of England, the same that when I was a Cheyenne we called the Grandmother, who owned Canada.
Finally, in case you are wondering if Mrs. Custer gave us any tea, all I can say is I think she did, but I didn’t pay enough attention to it to remember.