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"Tenting On The Plains OR General Custer In Kansas & Texas" by Elizabeth B. Custer" is a warmly human, first-hand account of the hardships, disappointments, fun and flattery, joys, and heartaches of General Custer's devoted wife, who accompanied her military husband to the (then) desolate plains of Kansas & Texas during 1865-1868 following the end of the American Civil War.
In her descriptions of the joys and sorrows, the glory and the grief, the courage and the sacrifices of the U. S. Cavalry troopers of the Plains, Mrs. Custer has served the purposes of truer-than-life history. For her facts are indisputable and first-hand, even if heavily slanted in her husband's favor. Her pages are crowded with pictures of a type of life that was almost extinct, even as she was recording it. Washington Irving in his Indian stories drew on records of a dead past. Mrs. Custer drew on living records of an intense present.
It was during this period that Custer's famous 7th Cavalry was formed with him as commanding officer. Later to be Indian fighter extraordinaire in the general public's mind, his organization of the 7th Cavalry & its training are covered as well as its first skirmishes with the Plains Indians which would ultimately end in disaster at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Mrs. Custer proclaims the coming "glory" of the 7th, but the relative ease with the Indians were defeated in these & similar episodes during the coming years, got Custer believing in his own myth of invincibility. This contributed to the foolhardy decisions and poor strategic planning that led to his death, and the massacre of his command, at the Little Big Horn in June 1876. Here from an eyewitness, are the events that have captured the imagination of generations of Americans, spawned dozens of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and numerous movies and TV shows, most of the latter extreme flights of fancy; some racist, while others are downright silly.
In her descriptions of the joys and sorrows, the glory and the grief, the courage and the sacrifices of the U. S. Cavalry troopers of the Plains, Mrs. Custer has served the purposes of truer-than-life history. For her facts are indisputable and first-hand, even if heavily slanted in her husband's favor. Her pages are crowded with pictures of a type of life that was almost extinct, even as she was recording it. Washington Irving in his Indian stories drew on records of a dead past. Mrs. Custer drew on living records of an intense present.
It was during this period that Custer's famous 7th Cavalry was formed with him as commanding officer. Later to be Indian fighter extraordinaire in the general public's mind, his organization of the 7th Cavalry & its training are covered as well as its first skirmishes with the Plains Indians which would ultimately end in disaster at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Mrs. Custer proclaims the coming "glory" of the 7th, but the relative ease with the Indians were defeated in these & similar episodes during the coming years, got Custer believing in his own myth of invincibility. This contributed to the foolhardy decisions and poor strategic planning that led to his death, and the massacre of his command, at the Little Big Horn in June 1876. Here from an eyewitness, are the events that have captured the imagination of generations of Americans, spawned dozens of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and numerous movies and TV shows, most of the latter extreme flights of fancy; some racist, while others are downright silly.