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None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead:
The Story of Elizabeth Bacon Custer.
George Custer raced his stallion, Jack, at full speed over the seemingly limitless grass-covered plateau miles away from the main entrance of Fort Riley, Kansas. The foam-flecked animal was inches behind Elizabeth and her fast horse, Custis Lee. Both riders urged their horses on to even greater speed, the cold wind biting at their smiling faces.
George steered his ride along the foot of a high hill. Reaching a steep decline, he abruptly brought his horse to a halt. Elizabeth, riding sidesaddle and dressed in a black riding skirt, uniform jacket, and a light-blue felt hat with a leather visor in front known as an excelsior hat, pulled farther ahead of her husband. Quickly looking around, George turned Jack in the direction of a narrow trail through a flinty apron of rocks. He followed the crude path as it wound around the hill and then suddenly dropped back down, coming out the other side of the steep decline in front of Elizabeth. She waved playfully at him. The horses found their rhythm and broke into a smooth gallop. Elizabeth glanced over at George and giggled like a little girl. The two rode on toward a distant, tumbled pile of thunderheads, sooty black at their base and white as whipped cream where they towered against the dome of the sky.
They slowed their horses and stopped next to a cluster of rocks. George dismounted and helped Elizabeth down from her mount. Draping their arms around each other they stood quietly, staring at the land stretched out before them. “The prairie was worth looking over,” Elizabeth noted in her memoirs, “because it changed like the sea.” “People thought of the deep-grass as brown, but in the spring it could look almost anything else,” she added, “purple, or gold, or red, or any kind of blue.”
To learn more about Elizabeth Bacon Custer and how she lived to glorify her husband’s memory read None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead.
