"The Girl He Left Behind"

A Moment in Time

Kansas Historical Society

A monthly series from the Kansas Historical Society

Elizabeth Custer's final glimpse of her husband came as the Seventh Cavalry marched out of Fort Lincoln onto the Dakota plains in May 1876. The regimental band played "The Girl I Left Behind Me" as General George Armstrong Custer led his command toward Montana and death on the Little Bighorn River.

Ironically, Elizabeth Custer was one army wife who insisted on not being left behind. She claimed to be "the only officer's wife who always followed the regiment." Her stories of life on the Plains with her beloved "Autie" are as entertaining today as when they first appeared over a century ago.

Widowed at thirty-four, Elizabeth Custer began writing to supplement her meager army pension. Kansas is the setting for two of her books, Following the Guidon (1890) and Tenting on the Plains (1893). Her legacy to the state also includes a pair of General Custer's boots, on display at the Kansas Museum of History. The museum, a division of the Kansas Historical Society, is located on the grounds of the Society's new Kansas History Center in Topeka.

The boots donated by Mrs. Custer "traversed a great deal of the Western frontier," she wrote in a letter preserved in the Society's collections. Purchased from a Philadelphia bootmaker for forty dollars, the boots endured campaigns that took the Custers "from near the Mexican border to the Viscinity [sic] of the Canadian frontier."

The Custers lived in Kansas from 1866 until 1871, while the U.S. Seventh Cavalry was headquartered at Fort Riley to protect settlers and railroad workers on the western Plains. The already tense atmosphere escalated as army troops engaged in violent campaigns against the Southern Cheyennes, Sioux, Comanches, and other tribes.

Small and slender with delicate features, Elizabeth Custer seemed physically unfit for a life in the field. Although in many ways Libbie (as she was known to her friends) was a traditional nineteenth-century wife, she found nontraditional camp life invigorating.

From the first days of their marriage during the Civil War, the Custers lived together in military encampments whenever possible. Separation, though often unavoidable, was agony. "It is infinitely worse to be left behind, a prey to all the horrors of imagining what may be happening to one we love," Libbie wrote years later.

Mrs. Custer joined her husband in the field whenever it was reasonably safe to do so. During her years in Kansas, she encountered prairie fires, an earthquake, mutiny by soldiers at Fort Riley, and a cholera epidemic. Yet, she wrote later, "there was never a suggestion of returning to a well-regulated climate."

Tenting was particularly dangerous during storms. Shortly after Libbie joined her husband on Big Creek near Old Fort Hays, a nighttime squall blew down their "rag house" and drenched her possessions. Mrs. Custer borrowed her husband's dry underclothes to wear beneath a wet dress and donned a pair of cavalry boots. "The tent might go down nightly for all I cared then," she wrote in Tenting on the Plains. "Every thought of separation departed, and I gave myself up to the happiest hours, clamping about the tent in those old troop boots, indifferent whether my shoes ever dried." Her fondness for the boots she later donated to the Museum may date from this event.

Elizabeth Custer was not the only female camp follower with the Seventh Cavalry, but she was the most faithful. Other officers' wives occasionally joined their husbands in camp, and young ladies visited the Custers at Libbie's invitation. The presence of comely single women made the Custers' tent the center of camp social life. Billiards, croquet, target shooting, and even buffalo hunting were enjoyed by men and women alike. "This wild jolly free life is perfectly fascinating," Libbie wrote a friend in 1869. "We dress as we like and live with no approach to style."

The Custers left Kansas when the Seventh Cavalry was reassigned in 1871. Stationed in Kentucky for a short time, the Custers pined for the West. "A true cavalryman feels that a life in the saddle on the free open plain is his legitimate existence," Libbie observed. Their wish to return to the Plains was granted in early 1873 when they received orders to report to Fort Lincoln in Dakota Territory. Three years later, during a disastrous campaign against the Sioux, General Custer and five companies of the Seventh Cavalry were killed.

For the remaining fifty-two years of her life, the "girl" Custer left behind devoted herself to protecting and defending his reputation. Elizabeth Custer shaped the public's memory of her dead husband through lectures, magazine articles, and books. She was lobbying Congress for a museum at the Little Bighorn battlefield when she died two days before her ninety-first birthday in 1933.

George Armstrong Custer's boots and a transcription of Elizabeth Custer's letter of donation are on display in the permanent gallery at the Kansas Museum of History. The museum is free and open to the public from 9:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday, and 12:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m., Sunday.

On the first weekend in October, the Society will invite the public to celebrate the dedication of the new Kansas History Center at 6425 SW Sixth Street in Topeka. This complex includes the Kansas Museum of History, the Koch Industries Education Center, and the Society's new Center for Historical Research housing its extensive research collections. Staff is preparing to move the collections from their current location in downtown Topeka this summer.

For more information on the Kansas History Center's programs or collections, call 785-272-8681; TTY 785-272-8683.