blessing upon this bounty you provide for us all. Here within your sight, our Father, we again ask your forgiveness … and ask that you help us forgive those who have trespassed against us.”
Custer felt the gentle, insistent pressure of Libbie’s leg against his own beneath the mahogany table.
This last year of enforced separation from the army had taken its silent toll upon the Custers in many subtle ways. Worst of all—for him—there was no more intimacy shared between them. Barely controlled beneath the surface, Custer burned with a raging desire for this pale-skinned, auburn-haired beauty. Yet even before the sentencing at Fort Leavenworth, Libbie had begun to refuse him. Gently, lovingly … yes. No longer able to submit to his insatiable hunger. For too long now she had been unable to give him what they both so desperately wanted: a son.
“We ask that all things be made right in your kingdom on earth, as they are made right in heaven above. Amen.”
On cue, male voices around the table echoed “Amen” as they hurriedly stuffed napkins in their collars.
“I’ll get it!” young Autie Reed shouted. He leapt up sending his chair clattering across the hardwood floor, heading to answer an insistent rap at the front door. A moment later the towheaded youngster tore back into the dining room, flagging a telegram addressed to his famous uncle.
“It’s from Sheridan.” Custer gripped the envelope as if afraid it would fly off on its own.
“Open it, dear,” Libbie prodded, her heart already sensing that the envelope would take her beloved Autie from her, a parting she had come to dread more than anything on earth.
Custer ripped at the envelope, sending it fluttering to the rug beneath their feet. Between his trembling fingers Sheridan’s words leapt from the page.
Hd. Qrs., Dept. of the Mo.
In the Field, Ft. Hays, Kans.
Sept. 24th, 1868
GEN’L G. A. CUSTER
Monroe, Mich.
Gen’ls Sherman, Sully & myself, and nearly all the Officers of your Regt., have asked for you; and I hope the application will be successful. Can you come at once? 11 Cos. of your Regt, will move about the 1st of Oct. against hostile Indians, from Medicine-Lodge Creek toward the Wichita Mts.
P. H. SHERIDAN
Maj. Gen’l Comdg. Mil. Dept. Mo.
“Ca-can I come at once?” Custer choked on the words with a characteristic lifelong stammer. He rose from his chair as family members pounded the daylights out of his back.
“I must go wire Philip.” He slipped the telegram to Libbie, the mist in his eyes answered by the tears clouding her own.
“Yes, dear Autie,” she said quietly. “Tell Philip you’re coming as quickly as you can.”
“My regiment … my men.”
“I know … we all know how you feel about your men,” she said before turning aside, blinking back the tears. All too well Libbie understood the army came first in his life, first in his heart. Back on that ninth day of February in 1864 she had readily accepted second place in his life. Elizabeth Bacon had become Libbie Custer—till death do they part.
“Go now, Autie,” she said bravely. “We’re all so happy for you.”
Bending to kiss her pale, upturned cheek, Custer then dashed from the room. The ground flew beneath him as he leapt from the porch, tearing down the brick walks to the telegraph office.
Giddy with excitement, he shook hands with everyone he met along the way, breathlessly telling them of the coming campaign and that he had been selected to lead his gallant Seventh into action again. He wildly pumped the arm of the telegraph operator before setting the old gentleman to work pounding out the message to his friend Philip.
Will start to join you by next train.
CUSTER
As a rusty sun came up in the east that very next morning, Custer boarded the first express train out of Michigan heading south and west toward the frontier and the shining destiny that beckoned him. He knew he would ache for her from time to time, but reminded himself:
That evening he stared into a sky dripping like coal oil across the western horizon, scratching the ears of his favorite pointer, Blucher. Dear Blucher and Maida, two staghound pups, were Custer’s only companions now. Dusk became night and the locomotive spit cinders into the sky.
At that very moment out on that aching expanse of the western prairie those same bloody atrocities committed by the roving bands of Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne warriors coupled with the army’s blessed clemency for their own marvelous, curly-headed “Boy General” both conspired to set in motion the gears of a crude bit of machinery that would grind slowly, inexorably slowly, over the next eight years.
* * *
Nipped by the cold frosts of lengthening autumn nights, the tall grasses across the prairie turned and dried withering in the incessant winds. Deer and elk grew restless, fought, and mated in their own ancient ritual of love and combat. Ponds slicked over with ice each night until the morning sun came to break the grip of so many things dead and dying on the land.
Near midmorning on 9 October 1868, a large band of painted, feathered warriors swept off the sandy hills, tearing down upon a civilian caravan of wagons returning to Kansas from Colorado Territory along the Old Arkansas Road. The Kiowas and Cheyennes caught the white farmers by surprise some ten miles east of the mouth of Sand Creek.
Blankets flapping, war cries splitting the air, they scared off the loose livestock herded beside the settlers’ train. What few oxen and cattle the first rush left behind were hitched to the wagons. Before the first sun went down on those farmers, the warriors finished off the harnessed animals, leaving the oxen to die a slow and noisy death while the battle raged around their bleeding carcasses.
The siege lasted for days with little hope for relief. Early the third morning the Indians captured Mrs. Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son Willie. When the warriors decided they’d had enough of these farmers, they hoisted their booty and two captives atop war ponies and spirited them over the low hills. Only Mrs. Blinn’s seriously wounded husband and the wagon master were left behind to send their prayers heavenward before limping to Fort Lyon.
It came as no surprise that before long those same young warriors sent word to the pony soldiers and Brevet Major General William B. Hazen, commander at Fort Cobb down in Indian Territory, stating their desire to ransom the white woman and her son.
Still, no one in the army’s higher echelons would wager on who the captors were—Cheyenne or Kiowa or Arapaho. An unfortunate ignorance, for at the same time, from his winter camping grounds along the Washita River, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle began to mediate the negotiations between the army’s General Hazen and those warriors holding the captives. Just when it looked like Black Kettle and the white general would make some headway in ransoming the white prisoners, General Sheridan himself learned of the negotiations and squashed Hazen’s peace machinery in midstream.
“I may not have learned much in my short tenure as commander of the Department of the Missouri,” the general snorted to his aide Lieutenant Colonel J. Schuyler Crosby, “but now, by God, I can connect Black Kettle’s bloody band of Southern Cheyenne with some of the white captives.”
“You’ve got them red-handed, sir!”
“And an old horse soldier like me knows where there’s that much smoke, there’s bound to be fire!”
“This is your winter to crush them, General.”
