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None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead: The Story of Elizabeth Bacon Custer.
Elizabeth Bacon Custer left an estate valued at $113,581.00. The Appomattox table went to the Smithsonian Institution, along with Armstrong’s sword and scabbard. Her executor’s stored most of her mementoes at West Point, awaiting the building of a museum at the Little Bighorn Battlefield or their dispersal elsewhere. Almost $5,000 in a trust fund became the basis for George A. Custer and Elizabeth B. Custer Scholarship Fund for Daughters of Army Officers at Vassar College. Today it still provides scholarships.
In 1934, one year after Elizabeth’s death, Bobbs-Merrill published Frederic Van de Water’s Glory-Hunter: A Life of General George Custer. In the first iconoclastic biography of the boy general, the author portrayed the major figure as a perpetual adolescent, addicted to fame and responsible for defeat at the Little Bighorn. Unable to reconcile his subject’s contradictions, Van de Water incorporated them into his story. Custer, a man either loved or hated by his contemporaries, “seems in his brief time to have been many men.” He was “paradox; the word made flesh.”
Regarding Custer’s family life and marriage, Van de Water softened his judgment. Elizabeth’s books and her fifty-seven years of loyalty convinced him: “The love his wife bore him and he bore her may be George Armstrong Custer’s most intrinsically sound fame.”
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.
