Elizabeth B. Custer

From the time of her husband's death at the Battle of the Little Big Horn until her own death fifty-seven years later, at the age of ninety, Mrs. George Armstrong Custer devoted herself to defending or embellishing her husband's reputation. This account, the second in Elizabeth's trilogy of her life with the General, focuses on the period immediately following the Civil War, when the Custers were stationed in Louisiana, Texas, and Kansas. She portrays the aftermath of the Civil War in Texas and life in Kansas while her husband took part in General Winfield Hancock's 1867 expedition against the Indians between the Arkansas and Platte rivers. Throughout, she provides detailed descriptions of an army officer's home life on the frontier during this major period of Indian unrest. This edition, an abridgment of the original 1887 edition, with an Introduction by Jane R. Stewart and a Foreword by Shirley A. Leckie, brings together in a single volume one of the most significant documents of the Old West, here made accessible to a new generation of readers.

Few figures in American history are as arresting as George Armstrong Custer, America's Hostspur. His career ranged back and forth from depths of disgrace to heights of glory. If he was no classroom scholar, he was a magnetic battlefield commander. From dead last in his 1861 class at West Point, he rocketed to the rank of Brigadier General at the age of twenty-three. Along the way, every step of his career was dogged by controversy. Readers will be forever indebted to Elizabeth Bacon Custer for her trilogy of first-hand accounts of life with the General. In Following the Guidon, she covers that period when Custer's career was again in ascendancy. Custer was recalled to duty from ""exile,"" after being court-martialed, to help with the growing Indian wars. The first major engagement, recounted here, is the Battle of the Washita.

The honeymoon of Elizabeth Bacon and George Armstrong Custer was interrupted in 1864 by his call to duty with the Army of the Potomac. She begged to be allowed to go along, thus setting the pattern of her future life. From that time on, she accompanied General Custer on all of his major assignments, aside from the summer Indian campaigns - ""the only woman,"" she said, ""who always rode with the regiment.""Her story, told by herself, is an absorbing adventure. Moreover, there is a added bonus - a gentle, loving portrait of George Armstrong Custer, husband and man, by the person who knew him best, his wife. Her absolute devotion to him is revealed in every line of her account, which ends, appropriately enough, with the day on which she received the news of the disaster at the Little Big Horn.