Seize the Sky

CHAPTER 2

THE sun hung a hand high above the horizon when the last wagon was hitched and all troopers stood in formation for parade review through the fort. Libbie, and Custer’s own sister Margaret, who had married handsome, solemn James Calhoun of L Company, both sat sidesaddle, anxious and waiting to get under way. Earlier that spring Custer had applied for, and won, a transfer of Calhoun’s younger brother, Fred, from General Terry’s infantry to his own regiment of cavalry. Fred Calhoun, everyone knew, had married Custer’s young niece, Emma Reed. Custer wanted his family gathered round him with the coming campaign and his approaching hour of glory.

“Is all in readiness, Custer?”

General Alfred H. Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota, sat ramrod straight atop his gray charger.

“We’re ready, sir!” Custer exclaimed exuberantly. “Shall we press on?”

“By all means, Custer. Let’s march.”

He shouted to his bugler, Henry Voss. “‘Boots and Saddles,’ Sergeant!”

With the brassy explosion of those first few notes from Voss’s bugle, there arose over the baked-mud parade a chorus of cheers and huzzahs. The army would be hard-pressed to find a single one of these men clambering aboard their mounts who didn’t consider a march across the prairie highly preferable to a summer spent lollygagging around Fort Lincoln. Each and every one of these men in blue cheered and slapped themselves onto saddle leather, happy as only a horse soldier could be. Each knew he had a grand opportunity to whip some Sioux and come riding back home with a victory beneath his army belt. Word from the scouts themselves was that they’d have an easy time of it—what with joining up with Colonel John Gibbon riding out of the west leading his cavalry and infantry both, and General George Crook marching up from the south with thirteen hundred more.

A few of the old files had been grumbling over the last few days despite the promising odds, asking themselves why they had to go along anyway. With that many soldiers and those few redskins … why, there damn sure wouldn’t be enough warriors to go around to make this trip worth a teetotaler’s spit. Hardly enough Sioux bucks to make the fight worth the trouble of loading a carbine or working up a sweat arguing with a pack mule.

“Boston! Autie! You ride back with Tom. Hear, now?” ordered Custer.

The two young men pulled their horses out, whipping them back to Captain Tom Custer’s C Company. Brother Boston, youngest of the Custer boys, all of twenty-five and a civilian forager on the army payroll for seventy-five dollars per month for these past five years, had taken a leave of absence since the third of March to accompany his two older brothers on this Sioux campaign. And young Autie—Harry Armstrong Reed—named after his famous uncle, an adventuresome, fresh-faced farm boy of eighteen years, loped after his Uncle Boston back to join Uncle Tom’s troops.

“Bugler!” Custer roared at Voss. “Sound the advance! Center guide, forward, ho!”

Custer nodded to General Terry before he spurred off to fetch Libbie. Sister Margaret would await the passing of husband James Calhoun’s L Company.

Behind General Terry arose that familiar creak of slat bed, freight-wagon wood, tire iron, and harness leather, the slaps and curses of wagon master and teamsters as they set the regiments in motion. Custer’s cavalry and Terry’s infantry, hooves and boots and wheels all cutting and chopping at the rain-soaked, sun-hardened dreariness of the parade. Having spent the last two days and nights on Cannon Ball Creek some three miles below the fort in preparation for this campaign, the men were itching to head west at last.

Out from the fringes of Officers’ Row stepped the genteel wives, each waving a handkerchief in farewell and dabbing at her eyes with that most private, painful sorrow of parting. Many more women and children surged out from along Soapsuds Row, where the wives of enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, some mopping at their own red eyes with apron corners, gathered to see their men off. Some of the children marched and skipped beside the procession itself, singing along with the troopers as it seemed the entire fort bellowed out that stirring theme for the gallant Seventh Cavalry. Some of the young boys even waved scraps of cloth tied to the ends of sticks held high overhead, while toddlers furiously beat on old tin pans like drums.

Everyone at Fort Abraham Lincoln knew the words to “Garry Owen,” a sprightly Irish drinking song adopted by Custer upon the formation of the Seventh Cavalry after the end of the Civil War:

We’ll break windows, break the doors,

The watch knock down by threes and fours;

Then let the doctors work their cures,

And tinker up our bruises.

As Custer and Libbie passed by the Indian camp just west of the fort, Lieutenant Charles Varnum signaled his thirty Arikara scouts to fall into formation. Weeping squaws and wailing copper-skinned children trotted along the column, grasping for one last touch of a loved one riding off to fight ancient tribal enemies—the feared Lakota Sioux.

Warriors all, these Ree scouts wore their finest feathers and smeared themselves with paint for this grandest of marches, every man among them singing his personal chant of war medicine more loudly than the man beside him. The air filled with a high-pitched screeching, wailing din that for a moment threatened to drown out the lusty bass voices of the troopers belting out their favorite song. Yet as blood stopping as was that scene played out beside the Indian lodges, no clamor could overshadow the bright, courageous verses of the Seventh’s fighting song.

We’ll beat the bailiffs, out of fun,

We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run;

We are the boys no man dares dun,

If he regards his whole skin!

That pounding of Arikara drums along with the singsong wail of Indian scouts was almost too much for Libbie. Somewhere deep inside she sensed this campaign was not to be the easy, surgical strike into the Indian heartland everyone claimed it would be. Something told her all too many of these men who trotted behind her husband this bright May morning would not be coming back.

“By all the saints!” Custer exclaimed, suddenly rescuing Elizabeth from her melancholy reverie. “Take a look behind you, Libbie. Now, isn’t that as grand a sight as you’d ever hope to see?”

She turned for a moment to watch the long, snaking bullwhip procession in column-of-twos winding its way out of that cluster of gray buildings, leaving the squalid prairie post far behind.

“Yes, Autie!” she agreed, calling him by that nickname used only by family. “I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else but by your side.”

He peered into those dark, calf brown eyes framed by that shimmering chestnut hair tied up around her face, every strand neatly stuffed beneath a riding bonnet and veil. “You are a spoiled little girl, Elizabeth Bacon Custer.”

“Just what makes you call me spoiled, General Custer?”

“First, there was your father, the esteemed Judge Daniel Stanton Bacon of Monroe, Michigan—God rest his soul—to give you everything your heart desired. And now you have me to do the very same thing for you.”

“My darling, darling Bo,” she said, pouting her full, lightly rouged lips. “Daddy gave me but one thing I ever truly wanted.”

“And … what was that, Rosebud?”

“Why, George Armstrong Custer,” she slapped a glove at his buckskinned forearm. “The one and only thing I ever truly wanted I had to get myself! And that was you!”

To her surprise Custer tore up the bottom of her veil and pressed his lips to hers—surprised, for she had never allowed him any more than a sterile peck on the cheek when in public. As he drew away, Custer found her eyes had grown as big as china saucers: full of wonder, a coy haughtiness, but not without a hint of genuine pleasure.

“I’ll miss you, Libbie … truly I will,” he whispered above the noisy clamor.

She turned away before her tears began to flow. “We have such a splendid life together, you and I, don’t we? I shall miss you while you’re away. These are always the darkest hours … your leaving.”

Suddenly she swirled back to look at him with a start, compelled by something to do so. The sun hung directly behind his head in its rising, its light refracting a reddish gold off the bristles of his hogged haircut. In that instant it appeared Custer had cloaked about him a strange light, an aura of some otherworldliness, not unlike the halos that encircled the heads of saints in those Bible storybooks back in Monroe, where she had attended seminary.

“My dear, dear Bo—I will miss you so very … very much.”

Instead of Spa we’ll drink brown ale,

And pay the reckoning on the nail,

No man for debt shall go to jail

From Garry Owen in glory!

More than a half mile in advance of the columns now, Custer reined up atop a hill and turned to watch the advance.

Like some old wooden bucket spilled on the dry, thirsty ground and pouring forth its contents, Fort Abraham Lincoln sat forlorn and abandoned, emptied of men and life and purpose. All three two-storied barracks and those six detached officers’ quarters. The granary, administrative offices, a dispensary for the regimental surgeons … the guardhouse, ordnance depot, and powder magazine along with the commissary and quartermaster storehouses. Soapsuds Row, where the laundresses plied their varied trades, in addition to the quartermaster stables. Six cavalry stables capable of holding more than six hundred mounts, and the sutler’s store with a small, squat barbershop hunkered right against it. Not that far away sat a cabin of peeled cottonwood logs, crudely roofed with oiled canvas that served as a photographer’s cabin, where for the nominal price of a dollar, any soldier could send a tintype home to family and loved ones.

In the early morning’s cool breezes, the stars-and-stripes swallowtail guidons snapped feverishly, popping alongside the blue regimental flag bearing the proud eagle of the Seventh. Forward of them all sailed Custer’s own personal standard—a deep blue-and-scarlet silk of his own design, crossed silver sabers nearly covering the entire field.

Two full miles of army wound its way up the hills from Fort Abraham Lincoln, twelve hundred men: Terry’s single company of Sixth Infantry, two companies of the Seventeenth Infantry, Custer’s Seventh, plus one hundred seventy-six civilians—the entire procession mounted on or pulled by some seventeen hundred animals parading out of the badlands of the Missouri River. The spectacle included one hundred fourteen six-mule-team wagons, along with the thirty-seven two-horse teams and some seventy other vehicles.

At about two o’clock Custer chose a pleasant campsite appropriate for the entire command and the grazing of so many animals on the banks of the Little Heart River thirteen miles out from the fort. With Libbie beside him he rode to a gentle swell of land to watch the columns approach, his own heart pounding with martial pride at the sight spread before him across the gold and brown and green of prairie, the great land sprinkled with a bright carpet of its spring flowers.

“They’re your soldiers, Autie. No mistake of that,” she sighed as he slid the hat from his head and rubbed at the bristles of thinning hair. “You must care for each and every one of them as your own children.”

Custer looked at her strangely for a moment. “I always put the welfare of my men first, Libbie. What a strange thing for you to tell me.”

She shook her head, not at all knowing now why she herself had said it. “Look, Bo!” Libbie pointed down at the approaching columns. “You can see dear Tom down there!”

“Sure enough!” He laughed as they both waved to that tiny figure in creamy buckskins and a white slouch hat perched astride his dun mare.

“How much he dresses like you, Autie. That man fairly worships you, like young Boston, even little nephew Harry. Big brother, brave uncle—you are every bit of that and more to the whole family now. What would any of them do without you?”

Custer stared absently at Tom, still such a tiny, almost indistinct figure among that sea of blue tunics. “After this campaign, he’ll be his own man, Libbie. No longer any need of him following on my coattails. I’ll see to it. Tom is destined to ascend the upper rungs of the army ladder. And I—I’d like to take you on to Washington, my dear.”

“Washington?” She placed a delicate hand against her breast in surprise.

“No … you might fool others, Libbie,” he chided, “but you can’t convince me you haven’t thought of it many times.”

“Why, the last time we were there together was during the war. Our abbreviated honeymoon, as I recall.”

“Just start getting used to the idea!”

He swept her chin into his cupped palm, planting a kiss on her parted lips. Custer held his mouth to hers for a long time, until he finally opened his eyes to find her staring mule-eyed at him.

“At least you didn’t pull away this time,” he said, licking his lips, tasting the tantalizing flavor of her lip rouge. “Perhaps you enjoyed my touch.”

“Y-yes,” she finally stammered. “I have … have always enjoyed your touch—oh, how I will miss you, Autie!”

Libbie raised her ivory chin and closed her eyes for him this time. Her lips parted slightly, inviting.

Custer had never refused her.