Inventing Custer by Caudill Edward;Ashdown Paul;

Author:Caudill, Edward;Ashdown, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dancing, Dukes, and Dollars

After winning fame as an Indian fighter, Custer next became a hunting celebrity. Summer 1869 saw decreased Indian raids in Kansas. Custer and Libbie were at Fort Hays, and he had the chance to indulge his passion for hunting. He resumed writing for Turf, Field and Farm, creating a popular series about hunting and the adventurous life on the plains. The series, in turn, enhanced his frontiersman image and drew other celebrities to him for hunts, including a variety of politicians and even P. T. Barnum. Libbie wrote that Custer had more than two hundred visitors for such hunts in summer 1870. All of this was a great step removed from his ignominious first buffalo hunt, which took place in 1867 during the Hancock expedition. When Custer saw his first buffalo, he gave chase on his horse. As he pulled out his pistol and prepared to shoot, the buffalo turned and charged. The horse reared. Custer fired and felled his horse with a head shot. The buffalo ambled off, and Custer was left stranded on the plains. A detail of the 7th later came along and rescued him.[24]

The Custers were nomadic during the next few years, leaving Fort Hays for Fort Leavenworth in October 1869. Custer took a brief leave to return east, visiting Sheridan in Chicago, the mayor of Detroit, and family in Michigan. When he rejoined Libbie at Fort Leavenworth in January, they enjoyed a social life of dances, dinners, and parlor games at the outpost. A bloody summer intruded on the revelry, and Custer moved troops between Forts Hays and Harker, oversaw patrols, and even led a detachment in mid-July. But the raids continued.[25]

That fall, the couple returned to Fort Leavenworth, but Custer soon was on the move again, turning a sixty-day furlough in January 1870 into a nearly six-month leave, during which he chased dollars instead of Indians or buffalo. He traveled to New York and spent time among the financial elite, trying to find investors for a Colorado mining venture. The fiscal dignitaries included John Jacob Astor, who invested $10,000. Custer and a partner offered two thousand shares at $50 per share, Custer himself subscribing $35,000 that he did not have. After several years of mining and assaying, the enterprise collapsed. But it had provided Custer the chance to court the Eastern elite, including New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley and New York Times editor Whitlaw Reid. In September 1871, he returned to duty, reporting to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where with Company A of the 7th Cavalry he was assigned to inspect and buy horses, duty the adventurous Custer surely loathed. He and Libbie were there for about a year and a half, during which Custer wrote for Galaxy, the first article appearing in May 1872.[26]

In a break from the Kentucky drudgery, in January 1872, Custer went on his best-known buffalo hunt. He and Buffalo Bill Cody were guides to Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia. The hunting party killed twenty to thirty buffalo on the duke’s January 14 birthday hunt.

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