Following the Guidon

"Hunting, joking, story-telling on the march and around the camp-fire lost some of its charm as winter really set in. Although it is the custom of soldiers to make light of hardships, there were new features in this winter's campaign which needed all their fortitude to meet and endure."

Elizabeth Custer, the devoted wife the general who would fall at the Battle of Little Big Horn, had no illusions about what would be required to force southern Plains Indians onto reservations. Drawing on her husband's letters to her, she describes the Seventh Cavalry's risky winter campaign that culminated in November 1868 with the capture of a Cheyenne village on the Washita River.

Following the Guidon shows Libby Custer shuttling between summer camp near Fort Hays, Kansas, and winter quarters in Fort Leavenworth. She observes frontier army life up close: the discipline and frivolity, tent housekeeping, the resourceful open-air cuisine, regimental quarrels and romances, the omnipresent rattlesnakes and buffalo shot from train windows, the Custer menagerie, the wildness of Ellsworth and Hays City, the presence of California Joe and Wild Bill Hickok. Libby accompanies the men on their hunting expeditions, relates the stories of scouts and teamsters, and always gives a human aspect to a difficult juncture in Custer's career.

Following the Guidon, originally published in 1890.