George Custer, Libbie’s, husband, met this change in his life and career as most military men, in the past and the present, embrace new orders. It was not only a chance to climb to a higher rung on the ladder of his chosen profession, but it was also a new adventure.
Nothing quite like orders to a new duty station puts a sparkle in the eye of a professional military man, or such a spring in his well-polished boots. It’s a phenomenon that often far exceeds the proud thrill of first time fatherhood or possibly even winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps it is a character trait, or diseases, that not even the devoted military wife can bare explain. Which ever it is, George Armstrong Custer had it, and he had it bad.
It is putting it mildly to say, as Elizabeth Custer penned in her noted book of her and George’s life, Boots and Saddles, that when orders came for the 7th Cavalry to go into the field once more, “General Custer was delighted.”
Like today’s solders and marines tromping through a strange and steamy jungle or the sailor, with his mighty ship bounding over the wide ocean, Custer was a true cavalryman. He felt that a life in the saddle, galloping across the open plains to whatever destiny awaited him, was the true calling his God had intended for him. It was, and is, another aspect of this unexplainable disease that the military wife finds it better to not try and explain, but just to silently accept.
Elizabeth says that not an hour had passed after receiving the official document announcing their change of station then their house was torn up. In the midst of the hurried confusion of packing she did manage to escape for a short time to a corner with an atlas. Almost fearfully, she located the route from Kentucky, where they were residing at the time, to their new home to be in the Dakotas. Years later, she wrote that it seemed they were going to Lapland.
But now that Libbie and George were alone a side of the man emerged that serious historians somehow often fail to mention. Libbie admits that from the first days of their marriage that her husband celebrated every change of duty station with high and hilarious emotions. But this time it seems that Custer’s demonstration of joy far outshone anything previous. At once his boyish pranks began and there was no possibility of getting back to the serious business of packing up their belongings until his mirth had ran its course.
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