by Tatjana Soli
Anne had no choice but turn and go back, sink into the tub, put on another’s clothes, sit in the salon, butter her bread and drink her coffee, and tell stories of her abduction for the afternoon entertainment, all to survive. Mrs. Custer had to leave early before the tea started, and they never did meet that day.
LIBBIE
Trees. Fort Lincoln was distinctly without them. West of the fort lay country that stretched out seemingly for thousands of miles without a single tree, hardly any bushes, the only growth being along the river. Soldiers would ride in blinded, their eyes scorched by the alkali reflection from the hardpan earth. Horses that would allow it were blindfolded and led by feel.
Wind. The land was plague to constant, sand-laden wind that wore out the features of both land and people. Domesticity was doomed by great clouds of dust that dimmed the sun, shortened the horizon, and eddied in great sheets of tan, adhering to doors and windows, dusting furniture and floors, so thoroughly coating them that even the hue of their clothes took on the tint of sepia. Libbie did not like to think it, but she was sure it formed a portion of their diet, between breathing it in, eating it in their food, and drinking it in the sulfurous-tasting water.
Libbie loved it.
With no summer campaign planned, she happily watched the spring grass grow without its usual association with an approaching campaign. The only trick was to get Autie actively involved in projects and hobbies to avoid boredom. As soon as the snow melted, he went off hunting, cataloging a whole zoo of conquests. Libbie’s great project, in which she enlisted him, was to soften the harshness of their surroundings with trees. When the first grass began to come up, indicating thaw, soldiers equipped with shovels marched down to the riverbank and dug up hardy young cottonwoods, the only tree that survived in that climate, to transplant around the buildings. Libbie joyfully watched the progress of her nursery, and if there was grumbling about turning the men into private gardeners for the commander’s wife, she steadfastly ignored it.
She had heady visions of tree-shaded windows, treed bowers forming a small park for picnics and outdoor concerts, a cottonwood grand allée to be used for special occasions so that crowds might be shaded during parades or even the occasional wedding. If she had used logic, she would acknowledge that in all likelihood they would be transferred within years if not months, but no woman planning a home could think like that. She was no longer the young innocent from Monroe. She planted with no hope of seeing her efforts come to fruition. Such detachment was an acquired ability. She wondered if this was how God felt, content to trust in the goodness of his creation to survive on without him.
This forced domesticity met with resistance. Autie feigned interest in the forestation of their area, but he frequently was subject to black moods where he sat in his study all day, talking to no one. He grappled with demons he did not share with her.
His new passion was buffalo hunts. Regularly he was requested by Sheridan to lead them for visiting celebrities. The ensuing stories and pictures in newspapers gave the army necessary goodwill from the public. Libbie went out and entertained in camp, setting table with candelabra and crystal in the wilderness to the great astonishment and delight of the guests. She was fast becoming a legendary hostess of the West. Theirs was an envied matrimony; no one guessed their recent discord.
One day when a group was out riding, a party of warriors appeared over a hill. Gunshots were exchanged, and Custer and a few of his officers spurred their animals to drive them off. He gave orders to the man left to guard the women.
“Whatever happens to us, make sure the women are safe. Especially my Libbie!”
Minutes passed. The officer waiting with Libbie and the other ladies had his gun ready.
Libbie began to tremble and cry.
“Autie will be killed!”
Suddenly over the hill Custer and the officers came galloping back, surrounded by the Indians. As they came closer, the women realized with astonishment the men were laughing.
“You didn’t even realize they were the guides, Old Lady! Not even Golden Buffalo! You should have seen your face.”
Libbie turned away, her face hard.
“You are cruel,” she said.
* * *
DURING THEIR SEPARATIONS he had written to her feverishly every day, but now that they were in daily proximity they sometimes hardly talked.
All that hot summer it was the duty of the men to pour barrels of water around the trees to ensure that they took root and survived. Many of the soldiers came from farming backgrounds and knew the methods of horticulture. Unable to make a living thus they had joined the army for little more than room and board. Libbie spent long hours outside discussing strategies to create verdancy in a place hostile to it. When a number of the trees, only as high as her waist, sported new green leaves, they cheered.
* * *
AUTIE RECEIVED ORDERS to escort the Northern Pacific Railway through Wyoming and Montana, in an action that would come to be called the Yellowstone expedition.
He wrote to her of coming across a most lovely red-tailed deer, rosy as a sunset, the first of its kind he’d seen. He was too far away to get a good shot at it. Each day he felled at least two antelope, growing acquainted with a new Springfield that he bought himself, the army being too parsimonious to supply its soldiers with them. He wrote that he was the envy of all the officers for having it. Tom even vowed to abstain from alcohol and gambling until he had saved enough to buy his own. In his letter to Libbie, Autie congratulated himself that he had thus turned a soul away from vice. He did not mention Tom’s failure, that his drinking had worsened, that he’d had to reprimand him several times more.
When confronted with a Sioux ambush, a reporter along on the expedition wrote that fear was not an element in Autie’s nature; he exposed himself freely and recklessly.
I don’t believe I’ve ever witnessed a human being so alive, so absolutely suited to his purpose. He is one of the finest specimens of soldier to ever grace the ranks of the US cavalry.
Autie returned safely, a hero, with no mention of his skirmish with the Sioux, or the fact that he’d neatly upstaged his commander, Colonel Stanley. He only told her of having come across three head of army cattle lost during Stanley’s failed attempts of the summer before. It was a small lesson in miracles that the beasts had somehow survived the twin dangers of wilderness and Indians, but they did not survive the danger of hungry cavalrymen’s bellies.
* * *
IN THE FALL, the trees began to wither. No one had told her that their earlier behavior was a false health, that their seeming vitality was a variety of death throe. She should have remembered the logs cut for their buildings, how the walls sprouted tender shoots of green months after being built. Instead, excited as children, they took delight in the small, hand-sized patches of shade, watching their dogs and the native birds take shelter underneath them.
After the trees revealed their true state, Autie ordered them cut down for kindling. A few hung on in a stunted, enfeebled state, a reminder of great expectations come to naught.
Many, many years later, as a widow living in New York City, she received a letter from people stationed at Fort Lincoln. They enclosed a leaf—the size of a man’s outspread hand and healthy!—from the tree in front of their former quarters. It was tall and spread out to provide welcome shade on the yard and porch. By then she had forgotten the cottonwoods, but they had survived, even thrived, despite her neglect. She looked at that leaf for hours, shocked at its defiant, glorious existence when so much else had long disappeared.
* * *
THERE WAS ONE TREE that belied all her efforts to pretend that their only enemy was the climate. The tallest object for many miles around on the eastern side of the fort, it had a thick trunk, and when the wind blew a perfect snowfall of seedpods flew in all directions. It was truly a magnificent specimen, and when Autie and she first spotted it, they rode full speed to explore its possibilities for shade. It was one of the good day
s when Autie was his old self. As they rode closer, they saw its strange burden—Indians used it as a scaffold for remains. Corpses, wrapped and bound in blankets, were tied to its main branches. The tree was laden—they counted eight bodies—and their anticipation of relaxation soured. They left the shade chastened and returned to their sun-baked purgatory.
* * *
THEIR TIME AT FORT LINCOLN was the longest period of uninterrupted domesticity they would ever have. It was Libbie’s only glimpse of what life might have been like if Autie had found other occupation in business or politics.
He never talked of it, but in the end none of his various and prolonged visits back east led to any solid offers of employment. Powerful men were only too glad to share their table and their company with a celebrity, a war hero and Indian fighter, but they did not take seriously his occupying any other role.
These failures made Autie explore ever more questionable ventures. He agreed to be a spokesman for the railroad, then the representative of a mining concern, neither position leading to any income. Many officers languished professionally in the drought after the War, and Autie joined these. He had gone long in being distinctly unpromoted, so long the possibility diminished as quickly as the Dakota precipitation. Thunderheads and slanted rays in the distance indicated rain sublimed before reaching the ground. Autie’s financial fortunes proved just as fickle.
In truth Libbie did not believe him suited to these other pursuits. Every time he went before Congress, he got tangled in the deep ruts of partisanship. He always left with more enemies than when he came, including no less a personage than President Grant himself, who almost prevented him leading the expedition against the Sioux at the Little Bighorn.
During one of his trips to Washington, Libbie went back to Monroe to visit family and friends, doing an accounting of her own. Her life was so unlike the civilian existence of her friends. Life in the army was about constant motion. When one was stationary it was harder to see the inevitable changes in life, they happened so subtly. By the time one did notice, all one could do was mourn what was already past.
Motion put one on the same rhythm as life itself. It became an addiction, one that Autie had in large measure, one that he shared with the Indians, an austere nomadic life that did not allow for attachment toward hearth and home, but one that he deeply admired. Against her natural tendencies, Libbie grew to share that love, albeit in smaller measure. She felt sorry for her peers that had stayed behind, confined to the town’s small possibilities. It came as a rude shock when some of those same matrons exhibited a condescending attitude toward her life.
“Poor Libbie,” they said. “Blowing like a leaf in the wind, no permanent home. Stranded in those forsaken outposts. How we admire your endurance.”
Libbie resolved that her next visit would be long in coming. Although packing a large quantity of cologne and face cream for her return to the Territories, she did not regret her choices.
* * *
DURING THE FORT LINCOLN PERIOD, Autie as fort commander served as a kind of Great Father, and the tribes came in regularly with their complaints and troubles. Although he would gladly have given them their provisions upfront and seen them on their way, their code frowned upon charity. They insisted on the formality of pipe smoking and long recitations of their plight. In their abacus, the destruction of the buffalo, the incursions on their lands, the partial and shoddy level of “payments” on the reservation justified their grievances. The unspoken was that it also justified the vengeance certain elements took.
The dignity of the Indians impressed Libbie, especially one chief who in lieu of jeremiad removed his blanket and shirt in silence, revealing a body damningly reduced to skin and bones. Libbie had Eliza send him a heaping plate of dinner to eat in Autie’s study, but even as she did it she understood what a paltry and inadequate gesture it was.
Not only did Indians ask for an audience but also settlers living outside the fort, few and far between as they were. After a year of drought and two years of devastation by grasshoppers, the military was assigned to distribute rations to carry civilians through to the next growing season.
The year before, Autie had met a grizzled old character, a hermit of sorts, who lived on the same side of the river as the fort, among hostile Indians and too far away from neighboring whites for help. One could not begin to guess his age—his skin had weathered to a wooden texture, his hair was white and bristling from his own barbering, and many of his teeth were missing. To his credit, he seemed unaffected by these afflictions. His blue eyes were happy; he smiled and laughed as often as he talked. His words faltered, then came in spurts, the habit of solitude making his conversation rusty in company. He claimed kin in Tennessee, toward whom he harbored a great “despise,” and so although he was already old and feeble, he nonetheless set out for a place of his own. He preferred his barren spot rather than treat their mendacious ways.
Shyly he would question Autie about the great cities of the east—Washington and New York—as if they were as out of reach as the moon or ancient Constantinople.
“Cities, no, cities do not sit well with my nature. Years ago I set out to live in St. Louis because of a female.”
Here, Autie, pretending to be scandalized, winked at the man.
“You know how it is. The crowding! Houses piled one atop another so that you can hear what your neighbor talks of at breakfast. Streets so crowded that you can get run over by a carriage or a horse if you aren’t careful. The howls of dogs and babies day and night. Bars! Whorehouses!”
Here the old man remembered Libbie’s presence in the room and shushed himself.
“Sorry for my filthy tongue, ma’am.”
For a moment he sat blinking but then started right back up.
“Drinking! Fighting! Fornicating! My head hurt every day for two months until I took my permanent leave. I never did return, never will. Said goodbye to the idea of a wife.”
“Aren’t you lonely, though?” Libbie interjected.
She found the old man’s ideas subversive and joked that her Autie might empathize too much.
“No, can’t say I am, missus. None but an Indian woman would live out here anyways. Present company excepted. I think God has created the goose, and he has created the wolf. Each has his right way to live. I have found mine.”
“Which are you? The goose or wolf?”
She knew Autie would be amused by her engaging the man thus, but he took the question seriously and thought hard on it.
“Neither, ma’am. I believe I take after the rhinoceros.”
Dead silence in the room as Autie and Libbie swallowed the laughs that threatened to erupt.
“A fearsome animal that commands respect, yet I believe feels quite differently about himself from his own vantage.”
“I see.”
“I have been on the prairie long years, and she has taken good care of me. I shall die here.”
Libbie gave a small shudder that the man could speak of his fate so lightly.
The hermit bowed and held Autie’s hand in both of his roughened ones, thanking him for the previous year’s supplies, which, meager as they seemed, kept him going the whole winter long.
Autie bit his lip. “I’ll have my men come around and check on you weekly. Let them know if you are in need of anything.”
“You are too kind to me, General.”
The hermit never left his little ranch except to bring in pelts and crops, afraid to leave the place vulnerable to destruction from the warring tribes. During the long winters, he left his house only by laundry line, back and forth to the barn. A sad way to end a long life, but the man seemed to have made the best of it. He had brought a few undersized molty coyote pelts in gratitude.
“To put around the lady’s neck,” he said.
“I’m sure she would much love that. Wouldn’t you, old girl?”
Libbie smiled and remained silent. Sometimes female decorum was a welcome thing to hide behind.
Autie gave the old man his allotment of rations and then threw in some extras from his private supplies. The hardship of the ancient pained him as if the man were his own father.
Months later, Golden Buffalo, along with two other scouts, reported riding by the ranch on their way back to the fort, and it appearing deserted. Worried, Autie sent a search party to ride out and check on the man. On approach it was clear the place had been defiled. Household items lay strewn on the path leading to the house. Livestock had vanished. The place had the desolate feel of being abandoned. Getting closer, they could see the house was charred although still standing, an effigy of itself, the inside empty and in ruin. One of the troopers went to the barn and there found the old man lying in a halo of his own blood, his skull bashed in.
When word of his demise reached them, both Autie and Libbie were brought low. The unfairness of it, having someone so harmless come to such a violent end, made them feel keenly the precariousness of their existence in such a place. But as singular and exceptional as the old man was in his situation, he was not unique. That was the great privilege of their days living on the frontier—regularly they met extraordinary individuals who were heroically brave, generous, and kind. It took a special sort to make it out there, and they inspired Libbie.
* * *
IN THIS RELATIVELY FALLOW PERIOD, Autie in frustration turned to hunting with a vengeance, planning it almost as carefully as he would a military campaign. In one letter during the Yellowstone expedition, he cataloged his kills: 41 antelope, 4 buffalo, 4 elk, 7 deer (4 of them blacktails), 2 white wolves, and a red fox. Geese, ducks, prairie chickens, and sage hens without number.
They had constant company between regular faces at the fort and outside visitors drawn for a variety of reasons to the frontier. To each, Autie sat in his chair very elder-statesman-like to regale them with hunting stories, anecdotes in which he always starred, and outright brags of his accomplishments large and small, including full lists of his recent kills.