by Tatjana Soli
* * *
THE BLACK HILLS EXPEDITION was to be gone two months, with regular mail drops during that time. The arrival of the mailbags was akin to Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July rolled together. The wives tittered in anticipation like children and went off separately to each savor her “treasure.” In the evening a group made the ascent of the hill behind the fort and stood guard with the sentries, squinting into the far distance, hoping to conjure scouts carrying messages from their loved ones. If they could not have that, they gladly would have settled for an approaching rainstorm, but most days they received neither.
Libbie was going stir-crazy at the small circumference of her world, warned off going outside the limits of the fort and hill. It was then she began to ride the surrounding prairie in her sleep. Over many nights her dreams changed from riding over dull prairie to traveling through lush meadows filled with flowers. She imagined stuffing her mouth full to choking on luscious berries and letting icy mountain water cascade down her throat. When she woke she realized Autie’s letters from the expedition had quite invaded her imagination.
* * *
A SMALL BLACK SPECK, a high whine, and then the sting. Libbie swatted and found a small spat of blood on her arm. With an almost biblical vengeance, the grasshoppers made way for the mosquitoes. Instead of staying just one day, though, the mosquitoes took up permanent residence. She had considered the Red River in the South the ultimate in mosquito persecution, but Fort Lincoln put the Southern mosquitoes to shame. The wind blew and the insects hitched a ride, arriving to torment them.
In the heat of the day, the women escaped inside, but in the evening they longed for fresh air and any bit of coolness they could find. At Libbie’s suggestion, therefore, the ladies concocted the most outrageous uniforms against the scourge. They wore overcoats on top of dresses, scarves around their necks, hats and gloves to cover any exposed flesh. Libbie took honors for a device made out of reeds covered with netting that fit over the head, resembling a kind of demented beekeeper’s bonnet. Another lady discovered that if they wrapped their legs, ankles, and feet in newspaper, then put on stockings, they were well protected down to their shoes. They shuffled along in these uncomfortable costumes, fanning the air clear around themselves. It did not pay to examine oneself in the mirror, nor to look too closely at one’s neighbor. Their lives took on a dreamlike unreality. In this way they sat on their porches and held vigil.
* * *
SHE DID NOT KNOW what to make of Autie’s first mail delivery, in which he went on at great length about the sublime beauty of the virgin territory they were reconnoitering: the pine forests, cold rushing streams, lush meadows of flowers and fruit that informed Libbie’s dreams. In that same mail delivery, another wife had a letter from her husband describing the unbearable hardship during the first two hundred miles of the trek before they reached the Black Hills: blistering heat, brackish and undrinkable water, a dust storm that almost overwhelmed them. Why did Autie omit all these details? What other unpleasant realities did he hide from her?
Since their marriage she had been aware of his purposeful shielding of her from the harsher facts of the soldiering life. He had not shared the horrors of the War nor later of the Indian battles; he did not admit to the myriad dangers he encountered on each campaign. She learned more about the Washita battle from the newspapers than from his lips, and yet she did not fault him the omission. Whenever possible she tried to ferret out the gory details he was exposed to, and yet she would never concede to the knowing. It was part of the myth of their marriage, their unspoken vow to each other to deny hardship.
She knew the dust storm was true, because it had reached the fort, too.
Libbie, unable to enlist any of the other women, had made the walk up to the sentry post alone. Alongside the guard, she squinted out in the direction from which the scouts would appear, realizing perfectly well that the last post had occurred scant days before. It would be a week or more before she again heard from Autie, but she needed to have a concrete task so she chose that. The horizon glowed like a penny. She called to the sentry, fearful of irritating him with her woman’s anxiety. He studied it for a few moments with his field glasses, and his face paled.
“Get the women inside,” he said.
Indian raids often made their appearance this way, the dust kicked up from the running ponies creating a voluminous cloud that heralded their warpath. The sentry checked for bullets in the chamber of his pistol, his hand shaking, then handed it to her with a gruff nod.
“Use it if you need.”
The penny cloud on the horizon was moving too fast and growing too large for Libbie to make it back to her house in time. It moved at an impossible speed for men on even the fleetest of horses. She stumbled on the loose gravel on her descent, scuffing her palms, kneeing a hole in her skirt. By the time she reached the house, her hand holding the pistol trembled. The usual blue-marbled sky overhead had turned the rust of dried blood. The door handle sparked to the touch, hot as an iron. Eliza opened the door from inside, using a kitchen towel to grip the metal.
Not Indians, but an attack nonetheless. A sirocco, one that turned air to metal. Libbie looked back, and it seemed the end-times. Her eyes felt abraded by sand as if she hadn’t slept in days. Skin became leathered. Whatever had somehow escaped the calamity of the insects earlier that summer was now incinerated. Green became a memory. Plant life petrified in the dry heat. The earth rang hard like an anvil.
An irrational anger took hold of Libbie. The poor souls of the fort had struggled in that purgatory for so long, this last blight seemed cruel and purposeful. A punishment. It would have been the greatest relief to her to fire the pistol at the sky, but the price in tarnished reputation was too steep. A few hours later both the storm and her fit of pique passed.
There was a code among the wives. They cheerfully accepted the hardships of the frontier, and it was a sign of dishonor to complain of the life to the outside world. They considered their own roles as important in their way as the men’s: they brought civilization, which would be the lasting victory, not the brute force being used at the moment.
Even among themselves there was rarely any admission of flaws in their spouses. Drunkenness, profligacy, gambling, these were part and parcel of outpost life. There were darker defects that only showed themselves as bruises on the women’s faces and arms, on parts hidden under clothing. A few suicides occurred over the years by soldiers and one by a laundress whose husband abandoned her. They could only pray that those despairing souls found a kinder life in the next world.
In subsequent mail deliveries, Autie wrote of finding a large hidden cave with the skeleton of a white man outside it. Among his belongings were initialed buttons that matched the letters of an old beau of Libbie’s. Autie, prankster, wrote that said beau must have escaped into the wilderness in order to avoid marrying her.
Autie went on to assure her that the regiment was maintaining healthful routines, no drinking or gambling permitted. Other wives received letters describing the exact opposite condition—considerable drinking and gaming. These were trifling disparities, though, when the main news was that Autie was safe. He wrote that there had been no fighting with Indians. Only later did she learn that it was because they were holding a Sioux chief hostage.
LIBBIE
Although mail deliveries from the Black Hills were infrequent, the fort had regular contact with the outside world through Bismarck. One of the wives received a letter from her sister, also a military wife, about a captive settler woman recently returned to her community. The woman was quite out of her mind, having suffered a year’s captivity by the Comanche before her rescue. Her husband, overjoyed on her return, had after a few months moved out to a brother’s house. All the women took a morbid interest in this dark tale of an unknown woman’s demise. The fear of becoming just such a victim circumscribed their lives each and every day.
Libbie could only add her small knowledge of the return of the
two captives that Autie had effected years before.
The famous incident occurred in Texas while Autie tried to bring the last of the tribes off the Llano Estacado. During their short stay at Camp Supply the two women lived in a kind of isolation within the larger population, which would have been cruel punishment in any other circumstance. Autie noticed they only took council and comfort from each other. The soldiers, so zealous in their rescue, had become uncomfortable with the results because although the two women lived and breathed, ate and talked, they had lost what was most precious to their being and to their families.
After hugs, kisses, and tears, the brother of one of the women captives insisted his sister take off the native garb she had been dressed in, which she quickly did, borrowing an old tattered dress from the cook. Libbie did not add that Autie, too, seemed ambivalent about the outcome of the rescue after he was heralded in the newspapers for it. He did not keep in correspondence with the women, which was uncharacteristic on his part.
Without a doubt Autie would have shot Libbie rather than let her endure any such suffering in captivity. She, on the contrary, would want him back at any cost, even if he were missing limbs or was otherwise disabled. Would he really rather her dead than returned under such deleterious circumstances? She knew, without question, that Tom would never have shot her. Despite being so frightened of the stories of depredations, Libbie may or may not have found the strength to shoot herself. One could never know how one would act in extremity.
Stories like those took on a life of their own, engendering others.
One of the wives told of a young girl she knew in her hometown who had swallowed kerosene on her return when the magnitude of her ruination for marriage became apparent.
Another chimed in that a young bride captured after being married only a single month, once rescued from captivity and finding herself a widow, never spoke a word of her ordeal. In a short time she had gone off to another state where she was unknown. There she remarried and had five children. The wives marveled at the woman’s strength and prepossession. The room was quiet for a moment while each of them explored within themselves if they would be strong enough to act thus, and of course they prayed, asking for deliverance from such a fate, hoping they would never be required to face such trials.
The society of the fort became an extended family of sorts, with all the expected rivalries but also loyalty against the outside world. None of the women mentioned the infamous and less known incident of which they were all surely thinking.
The 7th had been patrolling an area rife with rebellious Cheyenne and Sioux when a hunting detachment by pure chance came across a small group of buffalo skinners, including a captive that had been long assumed dead, along with her half-breed family member.
Although surprised by the Indians, once attacked, the soldiers defended themselves honorably. In the course of the conflict, due to quick reconnaissance they realized the presence of captives. Imagine with what renewed ferocity they fought once they understood the life of two white womenfolk hung in the balance. Once they had subdued the aggressors, the two women were delivered into their protection and in due course brought to Autie. He was overjoyed and allowed reporters to document the story of the brave rescue.
When some of those same newspapers started to call the incident a massacre of Indian women and old men, he fell into a dark mood and withdrew. He refused to see one of them when she requested an audience to discuss a search for her children, still being held captive.
A year later while Autie was back east, Libbie was paid a visit by the woman, along with her uncle, a preacher. She had glimpsed the girl through a doorway when she was first rescued, and had been quite haunted by her distress. Libbie was curious how she had settled and what was her true nature, removed from the traumatic terms of her captivity.
The uncle was personally affronted by the fact that Autie wasn’t sitting at the fort waiting for just such a visit although no advance request had been made by letter. The acting commander thought perhaps an audience with Libbie would mollify him.
Both claimed to have sent voluminous correspondence to the fort, which had gone unanswered, and had finally decided to risk coming in person. Libbie at first thought they lied, as Autie was usually meticulous in answering all mail, considering it his public duty. But there was his strange coldness on the matter, the fact that the rescue was tarnished. Libbie suspected they might be telling the truth.
She had made sure she was well dressed and had Eliza put out a nice assortment of teas and cakes. Libbie entered the room late, in a flutter of silk and scent, speaking to them like long-known acquaintances, a trick she had learned in the parlors of Washington and New York.
“Reverend, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”
Josiah Cummins stood tall, imposing, in his ill-fitting homespun. His features were large and unfinished as if he were a sketch the artist had been overwhelmed by and abandoned. When he came to shake her hand she smelled the odor of cellars and root vegetables. There was something subterranean about him, which was odd since by vocation he should have been closer to the heavens. His impression compared unfavorably with the average eccentric she encountered on the frontier, and her heart sank at having allowed herself to be bullied into accepting the visit.
“Mrs. General Custer…”
“Libbie, please. Shall we sit down and enjoy some tea?”
“Perhaps I should say a quick prayer of thanks?”
“That would be lovely. We don’t receive—”
“O Almighty God, the Sovereign Commander of all the World, we bless and magnify Thy great…”
The prayer was neither quick nor particularly thankful, but it gave Libbie an opportunity to observe the girl.
She stood in the corner by the door, ill at ease, as if the surroundings might gobble her up. Libbie was used to such behavior from the various Indians who came to petition Autie, but had never seen it in a white person. The truth was that Libbie had accepted the visit partly motivated by prurience in meeting a former captive. In person, the girl broke Libbie’s heart, and she immediately wanted to mother her.
“Come, dear. Sit by me.”
The girl didn’t move, hardly seemed to understand the words directed at her, but she flinched when Josiah spoke.
“Go, Anne! Say hello to Mrs. Custer.”
She came carefully, wearing slippers that were unsuited for use outside or for traveling. They were now threadbare and filthy. She wore the plainest of clothes, with no feminine corset to tie in her waist. Libbie regretted putting her own on, uncomfortable as always with the unnatural constriction.
The girl had a striking face and form, or she formerly had. Now her skin was sun darkened, her limbs hard and sinewy like twisted rope. But the unnerving thing was her gaze, the eyes furtive and darting. Libbie would describe it in no other way than it was like having a doe trapped in her parlor. She’d seen deer so frantic that they’d risk broken limbs to escape enclosure.
“What was your name again, sweetheart?”
Libbie held the girl’s hand in her own as she sat on the edge of the settee, ready to spring at the least provocation. The hand was shockingly hard and callused.
“Anne.”
The word came out so softly it was as though the girl regretted revealing it to the room.
“What a beautiful name. It means full of grace. Anne was the mother of the Virgin Mary.”
No one spoke, so Libbie plowed on. She had learned her role of hostess well.
“A lovely name to go with a lovely face. General Custer will be so sorry to have missed your visit.”
“I am equally sorry,” her uncle said. “We are here on the urgent matter of reparations.”
“Oh, yes,” Libbie said, distracted as she stirred a lump of sugar, rare luxury, in her tea. The girl was looking at the china teacup as if it were a puzzle to pick up.
“Come, dear, it won’t bite.”
Libbie took a small, dainty plate and placed a few tid
bits on it, setting it on the girl’s lap.
“You simply must try one of Eliza’s apple fritters. I’ve been told they are the best in the territory. Eliza is from the South, and they know their cooking down there…”
Neither Anne nor the uncle paid the smallest notice to her words.
“Reverend, please have some tea.”
“The Lord does not encourage the drinking of stimulants.”
“Yes, I’m sure, but then…”
Libbie was already tiring of the visit and thinking how to bring it to a graceful conclusion.
“General Custer’s word would go a long way in Congress to get my niece’s application for reparations accepted. We are hoping for land and a monthly stipend. Perhaps you would put in a word?”
“Oh,” Libbie stalled. “I don’t get involved in the general’s official matters. I’m sure Autie…”
The girl plopped the entire fritter in her mouth and then, cheeks bulging, stood so that the china plate slid off and fell to the floor, shattering.
“Look what you’ve done!” Josiah yelled.
He jumped up from his seat, treating the accident as a major maliciousness on her part, but Anne had already moved across the room, oblivious, and now stood at the window.
“Oh, it’s nothing at all,” Libbie said.
It was one of the precious plates from her bridal trousseau. She cursed her foolishness in using her fine china.
“I’ll just call Eliza to sweep it up.”
Now Libbie stood, watching Anne’s rigid back as she pressed herself to the window. What could she be looking at? Was the girl unwell?
Josiah, his breath rancid, came close to whisper in Libbie’s ear.
“Now you understand what I’ve been given back. She’s no longer right in the head. I hope you see the duty in getting her compensation.”
Libbie moved away on the guise of giving Eliza instruction.
On her hands and knees, Eliza swept up the shards. She resented Libbie entertaining such poor folk and causing her the extra work.