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The Widowed Ones: Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn
The town of Monroe, Michigan, was blanketed in snow on the morning of December 25, 1876. The yard in front of the Custers’ home and the street beyond resembled an unfinished painting. Much of the canvas was perfectly white, waiting for an artist’s hand to bring color into the scene. Elizabeth sat by the window in her room watching the morning light struggle through the fog and cold. At some point, she would need to get dressed and join her in-laws for breakfast, but she lacked the will to move. It was her first Christmas without her husband, and the near paralyzing grief she thought she had learned to control found her. Elizabeth turned away from the window, and her eyes settled on a framed photograph of Custer sitting on her bureau. She remembered the awful moment when she had first heard the news of his death. She would never forget the devastated look on the faces of the wives who had also lost their husbands that day. “From that time the life went out of the hearts of the women who wept,” Elizabeth wrote in her memoirs, “and God asked them to walk alone in the shadows.”
To learn more about Elizabeth Custer and the other officer’s wives who lost their husbands at the
Battle of the Little Bighorn read The Widowed Ones.
