Read The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn for Free Online Page B

arrangements for both Libbie and his younger sister, Maggie, who was married to Lieutenant James Calhoun, to accompany the regiment to the first campsite on the Heart River, about fifteen miles away, and then return to Fort Lincoln the following day. Soon after leaving the garrison, as they mounted a steep hillside that led to a wide rolling plain to the west, Libbie looked back on the column of twelve hundred men, spread out for almost two miles, and saw an astonishing sight.
    By that time, the sun had risen far enough above the Missouri River to the east that its rays had begun to dispel the thick mist in the valley below. As white tendrils of dissipating fog rose up into the warm blue sky above, a mirage appeared. A reflection of about half the line of cavalry became visible in the brightening, mist-swirled air above them, making it seem as if the troopers of the Seventh Cavalry were marching both on the earth and in the sky. From a scientific point of view, the phenomenon, known as a superior image, is easily accounted for: Light rays from the warm upper air had caromed off the colder air in the valley below to create a duplicate image above the heads of the troopers. But for Libbie, whose fears for her husband and his regiment had been building all spring, “the future of the heroic band seemed to be revealed.”

    T hey camped beside the beautiful cottonwood-lined Heart River, in a flat, grassy area surrounded by rounded, sheltering hills. Before the tents were set up, the soldiers combed the area for rattlesnakes, some of which proved to be as thick as a child’s arm. Custer had several members of his family accompanying him on the expedition. In addition to his younger brother Tom, recently promoted to captain, there was his brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, and Custer’s twenty-eight-year-old brother, Boston, who was entered into the regimental rolls as a civilian guide. Accompanying Custer for the first time and serving as a herder was his eighteen-year-old nephew, Harry Reed. Reed and his uncle shared the same nickname of “Autie,” which dated back to Custer’s first attempts to pronounce his middle name of Armstrong.
    At some point Libbie and Custer retired to their tent, where Custer’s striker had placed some boards across two sawhorses and topped them with a mattress. From the first, Custer and Libbie had enjoyed a passionate physical relationship. When the two were courting during the Civil War, Libbie kept a diary in which she recorded their first extended kiss. “I never was kissed so much before,” she wrote. “I thought he would eat me. My forehead and my eyelids and cheeks and lips bear testimony—and his star scratched my face.”
    After their marriage, she began to learn that her new husband had his quirks. Despite being a wild-eyed warrior, he seemed to be always washing his hands. He also brushed his teeth after every meal, and even carried his toothbrush with him into battle. He had a 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