A WIDOW’S CAMPAIGN

Elizabeth Bacon Custer outlived her husband, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, by 57 years. In the nearly six decades between the annihilation of her husband and five companies of the 7th Cavalry on the Little Big Horn River in Montana and her own death, Libbie wrote three memoirs. The most famous of these, Boots and Saddles, describes the couple’s experiences in Dakota Territory and the years leading up to the 1876 summer campaign against the Sioux that ended in arguably the most famous blunder in American military history. Two other memoirs (Tenting on the Plains and Following the Guidon, respectively) treat the immediate postwar period in Texas, where Custer performed Reconstruction duty, and the events of the 1868 Washita Campaign, in which Custer served under Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan. They are almost unmatched in their detail about many elements of the U.S. Army’s experience in the aftermath of the Civil War, and, more broadly, about the meaning of that war for the future of the American West. For the most part, historians have dismissed the books as filled with nothing but saintly depictions of an army officer who fell from great heights after the Civil War and died trying to reclaim his military fame. Critics of George Custer’s vanity and impetuousness especially deride the work of his wife, who smoothed the edges off a prickly subject and countered depictions of the Civil War’s “Boy General” as an officer who disobeyed orders and endangered his command. In consequence of Libbie’s decades-long defense of her husband, she often has been categorized as one of the most prominent “professional widows” of the Civil War era.

The label of professional widow followed several well-known women whose husbands participated in the Civil War. Without a doubt, LaSalle—as well as informing filmmaker Ken Burns’ documentary series on the Civil War.