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The Widowed Ones: Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Elizabeth Custer and Annie Yates sat on the front porch of the Yates home watching Annie’s children playing in the yard. A stack of papers rested in the laps of both women, and, when they weren’t distracted by the unremarkable daily tasks of their new lives without their husbands, they sifted through the letters and government paperwork that had steadily arrived since late July 1876.
The summer of 1876 had passed slowly. The men who died at the Little Bighorn were sorely missed. Elizabeth had taken to sleeping with one of Custer’s shirts. It smelled like him, and, at night when she longed to have him near, it helped ease her pain. Annie spent evenings after the children were in bed writing letters to her deceased husband. She knew he was gone, but she had an overwhelming need to communicate with him about their little ones and the difficulty she was having moving on. Elizabeth and Annie had found unique ways to deal with their grief and by mid-fall were venturing out into public, if only to visit one another. Maggie Calhoun, on the other hand, still struggled, refusing to leave her parents’ home to even attend church. “Now that Bubbie is gone,” Maggie shared with Elizabeth about James Calhoun’s death, “…I do not feel that mentally I am fitted to fill any position of usefulness to others.”
Nettie Smith’s correspondence to Elizabeth revealed her struggle to move forward from the tragedy as well. “Last night I found a diary kept by Smithie on the Yellowstone Expedition [1873] in which so often he writes of his ‘little wife’. In one place he says, ‘These are hard marches, but it is consoling to know that we are marching toward my little wife Dudds. God bless her! Only about a month separates us.’ Oh, if that last part could only be true now. I realize the terrible truth more and more every day. Where shall we find the strength to endure?”
The Widowed Ones 3
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