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None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead: The Story of Elizabeth Bacon Custer.
“Few men had more enemies than Custer, and no man deserved them less.”
Author Frederick Whittaker – 1877
Persistent raindrops tapped against the windows of Elizabeth Custer’s Park Avenue apartment in New York. The prim, 74 year-old women, dressed head to toe in black, Victorian clothing, stared out at the dreary, foggy weather. She wore a pensive expression. Her graying hair was pulled back neatly into a tight bun, a few loose tendrils had escaped and gently framed her small face. Her throat was modestly covered with lace.
The room around Elizabeth was grand in size and filled with items she had collected from her days on the western plains. Framed drawings of the Kansas prairie, a trunk with George’s initials across the top, photographs of friends and family at various outposts, and an assortment of books on subjects ranging from travel beyond the Mississippi to the types of wild flowers that lined the Oregon trail were among her treasures. The sparse furnishings in the apartment were covered with newspapers and journals. A small desk was littered with hundreds of letters.
Elizabeth glanced at the clock on a nearby table then clicked on a radio housed in a gigantic cabinet beside her. As she tuned the dial through static and tones, a bright, maroon light sifted into the hollow of the dark room. At the same time the fog outside the window lifted a bit and the vague, misty outlines of palatial apartment buildings, museums, and churches came into view.
Elizabeth found the radio station she was looking for and leaned back in a plush chair as a voice described upcoming programming. She pulled a shawl around her shoulders and sat patiently waiting. After a few moments an announcer broke in with pertinent information about the broadcast. The program Elizabeth was tuned in to was Frontier Fighters and the episode was entitled Custer’s Last Stand. The airdate was June 26, 1926, 50 years after the Battle at Little Bighorn.
As the reenactment unfolded, Elizabeth’s eyes settled on a photograph of George hanging on the wall above the radio and she remembered that awful moment. The devastated look on the faces of the 20 wives who lost their husbands the same day she lost hers would never be forgotten. “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 on alone in the shadows.”
To learn more about Elizabeth Bacon Custer and her marriage to George Armstrong Custer read
None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead: The Story of Elizabeth Bacon Custer.
