In Tenting on the Plains, originally published in
1887, Elizabeth Custer chronicles the journey with her legendary husband,
General George A. Custer, from the time of his leaving the Army of the
Potomac in 1865, through Texas, New Orleans, and to the western frontier.
The General's first post-war assignment was to stabilize
Texas.
General Custer not only had his own Division to
organize and discipline, but was constantly occupied in trying to
establish some sort of harmony between the Confederate soldiers, the
citizens, and his command. The blood of everyone was at boiling-point
then. The [Confederate] soldiers … came home obliged to begin the
world again. The negroes of the Red River country were … all desperate
characters in the border States… it certainly was difficult to make
them conform to the new state of affairs. The master, unaccustomed to
freedom, still treated the negro as a slave. The colored man, inflated
with freedom and reveling in idleness, would not accept common
directions in labor.
Much of Tenting on the Plains is about the daily
routine of military life of the era.
The very ants in Texas, though not poisonous, were
provided with such sharp nippers that they made me jump from my chair
with a bound, if, after going out of sight in the neck or sleeves of my
dress, they attempted to cut their way out. They clipped one's flesh
with sharp little cuts that were not pleasant, especially when there
remained a doubt as to whether it might be a scorpion. We had to guard
our linen carefully, for they cut it up with ugly little slits that were
hard to mend.
Still, there was plenty of action, particularly out West.
In one of these ravines, six hundred savages in full
wardress were in ambush, awaiting the train of supplies, and sprang out
from their hiding-place with horrible yells as our detachment of less
than fifty men approached. Neither officer lost his head at a sight that
was then new to him. Their courage was inborn. They directed the troops
to form a circle about the wagons ... Not a soldier flinched, nor did a
teamster lose control of his mules… This running fight lasted for
three hours...
General Custer's myth is created, and then magnified, by
his wife in the three books she wrote about their life together (Tenting
is the first in chronological order, although it was the second of the
three to be published). Her descriptions of the daily rigors of travel,
survival, and the people encountered, have become classic historical
literature – and in this case, enlivened by the perceptive eye and mind
of a woman who, in her own right, became a heroine of the time.
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