"Boots and Saddles": Or, Life in Dakota with General Custer

by Elizabeth B. Custer

Overview

The honeymoon of Elizabeth Bacon and George Armstrong Custer was interrupted in 1864 by his call to duty with the Army of the Potomac. She begged to be allowed to go along, thus setting the pattern of her future life. From that time on, she accompanied General Custer on all of his major assignments, aside from the summer Indian campaigns—"the only woman," she said, "who always rode with the regiment."

Her story, told by herself, is an absorbing adventure. Moreover, there is a added bonus—a gentle, loving portrait of George Armstrong Custer, husband and man, by the person who knew him best, his wife. Her absolute devotion to him is revealed in every line of her account, which ends, appropriately enough, with the day on which she received the news of the disaster at the Little Big Horn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806111926
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	09/15/1961
Series:	The Western Frontier Library Series , #17
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	4.75(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

Louise Barnett is a professor of American studies at Rutgers University and the author of numerous books, including Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer, available in a Bison Books edition, and Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia.

Editorial Reviews

This is a warmly human, first-hand account of the hardships, disappointments, fun and flattery, joys, and heartaches of women who accompanied their military husbands across the sage, up turbulent rivers, over the badlands of Dakota into the far reaches of the Western frontier, during the Indian troubles of the mid-1870’s.”—Montana Magazine

From the Publisher

"This is a warmly human, first-hand account of the hardships, disappointments, fun and flattery, joys, and heartaches of women who accompanied their military husbands across the sage, up turbulent rivers, over the badlands of Dakota into the far reaches of the Western frontier, during the Indian troubles of the mid-1870s."

Montana: The Magazine of Western History