Elizabeth Bacon Custer
We use Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor and cautionary tale, but why this battle and this man? In part because Libbie never abandoned rule number seventeen: keep everything going and let nothing ever be at a standstill. After his defeat and death in 1876, she spent fifty‑eight years lecturing, writing, and tending the legend of Custer as a hero.
Elizabeth “Libbie” Bacon Custer took one look at George Armstrong Custer and decided she wanted to be his wife. Her father, a far better judge of character, staved off the marriage for years, but finally, when Custer was promoted to brigadier general in 1864, against his better instincts, he allowed the marriage.
While she was waiting, Elizabeth embraced her hopeful future Trad Wife goal with a long to do list:
- Be a careful nurse
- Make his home snug
- Improve and educate yourself in every way, that he may not weary of you
- Be prepared at any moment to follow him at an hour’s notice and rough it like a man
- Keep everything going and let nothing ever be at a standstill.
And more, many more.
But despite her initial Trad trappings, the marriage was everything Lizzie wanted: excitement, friends, an interesting life:
“It is infinitely worse to be left behind, a prey to all the horrors of imagining what may be happening to one we love,” she wrote. During their years in Kansas she withstood prairie fires, an earthquake, mutiny at Fort Riley, and a cholera epidemic, yet later insisted “there was never a suggestion of returning to a well‑regulated climate.”
Libbie and Custer co‑starred in a romantic pursuit of glory and fame, playing out the roles of cavalier and lady. Custer, theatrical to the core, perfumed his blond hair, dressed in elaborate uniforms—from brocaded velvet during the war to buckskins in the West—and topped it all with a red tie and wide‑brimmed hat to protect his fair skin. Fun Fact, before he was promoted, his regime had tapped him to play Juliet in their next Shakespeare performance.
Libbie was at camp during the Battle of Little Bighorn. Not one cavalry soldier survived to tell the story of “Custer’s Last Stand.” Two days later, scouts found Custer’s nude, unscalped body among a ring of dead cavalry horses where he and roughly forty men had rallied for a final, doomed stand.
Lillie was a strong writer, and most of what we know of Custer came from her own work.
Libbie stood at the eye of this perfect storm of narrative, image, and performance. Her devotion helped create and sustain a myth that justified unfettered westward expansion. When we talk about “taking up space,” Libbie reminds us that not all space is neutral. Some stories expand to fill the room, while others are pushed to the margins. Knowing who built the myth—and why—becomes part of reclaiming the frontier of our own imagination.
Words by Elizabeth Bacon Custer – Boots & Saddles or Life with General Custer 1
Gathered in the ineffaceable twilight
A gully concealed information
before the Morning ground smoked
Behind the established nearer
Rough windows
Age figure of a firing season
Quietly and dim
Suddenly a terror
We are sorry we left
