The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn

sensitive stomach; she later recalled how “the heartiest appetite would desert him if an allusion to anything unpleasant . . . was made at table.” Although he and his brothers liked to roughhouse and play practical jokes with one another, and Libbie’s and Custer’s letters are full of ardor and romance, Custer was also a man of long, seemingly impenetrable silences. Once, after the two had sat side by side for close to an hour, Libbie attempted to nudge him into conversation by claiming, “I know just what you have been thinking.” But instead of revealing his thoughts, Custer merely chuck-led and lapsed once again into silence.
    Custer had a winning, if unrealistic, belief in his own perfectability. Just as he had once stopped swearing and drinking alcohol, he would put an end to his gambling, he assured her, but the poker and horse racing debts continued to pile up, and they were always broke. And then there was the issue of women.
    From the start, Libbie had known there were others. Even during their courtship, Custer had also been trading letters with an acquaintance of hers from Monroe. If Frederick Benteen is to be believed, Custer had frequent sex with his African American cook, Eliza, during the Civil War, with the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah during and after the Washita campaign, with at least one officer’s wife, and with a host of prostitutes. There is a suspicious letter written by Custer to the young and beautiful sculptress Vinnie Ream, who is known to have had passionate affairs with General Sherman and Franz Liszt, among others. In the fall of 1870, Libbie and Custer reached some sort of crisis, and in a fragment of a letter Custer expresses his hope that “however erratic, wild, or unseemly my conduct with others may have been,” he had not lost forever Libbie’s love.
    The two seem to have put this incident behind them, perhaps in part because Libbie could give just as well as she received. Benteen claimed that Custer’s wild ride to Libbie back in 1867 had been prompted by an anonymous letter warning that one of his officers, the charming, well-educated, and alcoholic Lieutenant Thomas Weir, was paying too much attention to his wife. Custer later complained about Libbie’s correspondence with two of the regiment’s more handsome officers: the strapping Canadian Lieutenant William Cooke and the dark and moody Irishman Captain Myles Keogh.
    In the end, it was their mutual belief in destiny—specifically Custer’s—that saved their marriage. Soon after the Washita campaign, Custer had melodramatically written Libbie, “In years long numbered with the past when I was verging upon manhood, my every thought was ambitious—not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great. I desired to link my name with acts and men and in such a manner as to be a mark of honor, not only to the present but to future generations.” Libbie could not have agreed more. As she told the future wife of one of Custer’s officers, “[W]e army women feel that we are especially privileged, because we are making history.”
    The move to the Dakota Territory seems to have reinvigorated their marriage. During the Yellowstone campaign in 1873, Libbie spent the summer in Michigan awaiting the completion of Fort Lincoln. Her time at home gave her a glimpse into the life she might have led (“so monotonous, so commonplace”) had she married someone besides Custer and raised a family. “I am perfectly overwhelmed with gratitude,” she wrote. “Autie, your career is something wonderful. Swept along as I am on the current of your eventful life . . . [e]verything seems to fit into every other event like the blocks in a child’s puzzle. Does it not seem so strange to you?”
    Even more exciting, his long, well-written letters about his adventures along the Yellowstone showed her where their future lay. “My ambition for you in the world of letters almost takes my heart out of my body,” she wrote. “I get so excited about it. . . . [T]he public shall not lose sight of you. . . . [D]o not fail to keep notes of everything that happened.” The following year Custer published My Life on the Plains to great acclaim (although Benteen later called it My Lie on the Plains ), and he was even then, in the spring of 1876, preparing a memoir of the Civil War. That winter he’d been contacted by the country’s leading speakers bureau, the Redpath Agency, and plans were already in place for him to begin a lucrative