Following the Guidon

"Following the Guidon" by Elizabeth B. Custer" is a warmly human, first-hand account of the hardships, disappointments, fun and flattery, joys, and heartaches of General Custer's devoted wife, who accompanied her military husband to the (then) desolate plains of Kansas & Nebraska during 1868-1870, to combat the Plains Indian uprisings following the end of the American Civil War.

In her descriptions of the joys and sorrows, the glory and the grief, the courage and the sacrifices of the daring 7th Cavalry troopers of the Plains, Mrs. Custer has served the purposes of truer-than-life history for her facts are indisputable and first-hand, even if heavily slanted in her husband's favor. Her pages are crowded with pictures of a type of life that was almost extinct, even as she was recording it. Washington Irving in his Indian stories drew on records of a dead past. Mrs. Custer drew on living records of an intense present.

It was during this period that Custer's fame as an Indian fighter was born in the general public's mind. His destruction of the Cheyenne and their allies in Custer's attack and destruction of one of their main village in the "Battle of the Washita" is discussed as well as its aftermath in influencing Indian life and their attitude towards the ever encroaching White settlers. Mrs. Custer proclaims the "glory" of this victory, but its relative ease along with similar episodes during these years, made Custer believe in his own myth of invincibility. This contributed to the foolhardy decisions and poor strategic planning that led to his death, and the massacre of his command, at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876.

Here from an eyewitness, are the events that have captured the imagination of generations of Americans, spawned dozens of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and numerous movies and TV shows, most of the latter extreme flights of fancy; some racist, while others are downright silly.

There are approximately 94,350+ words and approximately 314+ pages at 300 words per page in this e-book.

NOTE: This book has been scanned then OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been applied to turn the scanned page images back into editable text. Then every effort has been made to correct typos, spelling, and to eliminate stray marks picked up by the OCR program. The original and/or extra period images, if any, were then placed in the appropriate place and, finally, the file was formatted for the e-book criteria of the site. This means that the text CAN be re-sized, searches performed, & bookmarks added, unlike some other e-books that are only scanned---errors, stray marks, and all.

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