Boots and Saddles or, Life in Dakota with General Custer by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

Married life Įlizabeth Custer and her husband George had a loving but tumultuous relationship. After Custer, just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg (where he played a significant role), was promoted to Brevet brigadier general, Judge Bacon finally relented and they were married in Monroe at the First Presbyterian Church on February 9, 1864. He was from a poor, undistinguished family, and the judge hoped his daughter would have better than the life of an army wife.

She eventually returned these feelings, but her father refused to allow then-Captain Custer into the Bacon home or to permit her to meet him outside it, much less get married, as George proposed in the final week of 1862. He later wrote that he fell deeply in love with her as of their first formal meeting. She had briefly encountered her future husband George Armstrong Custer as a child, and socially met him again in the autumn of 1862, when he had returned to Monroe on leave from the first year of the American Civil War. Her father hoped she would make a good marriage with a man from her own elevated social status, and she rejected several suitors. I feel the responsibility beyond anything in my life before or since.' Įlizabeth Bacon was both beautiful and intelligent, graduating from a girls' seminary in June 1862 at the head of her class. Judge Bacon, nearly ten years later, stated 'I have ever felt the force of these words. As she was the only one of the judge's children who would live to adulthood, her father doted on her, being charged by his dying wife to '. Tragedy marked much of her childhood, with her three siblings and mother all dying before Elizabeth's thirteenth year. Her father had profitable investments in real estate and other business ventures. 1798), a wealthy and influential judge and state representative. She has been portrayed by a number of actresses, starting in the 1940s in films and later on television.Įlizabeth 'Libbie' Bacon was born in 1842 in Monroe, Michigan, as the daughter of Daniel Bacon (b. Largely as a result of her decades of campaigning on his behalf, General Custer's image as the gallant fallen hero amid the glory of Custer's Last Stand was a canon of American history for almost a century after his death.Įlizabeth Custer never remarried and died in 1933, four days short of her 91st birthday. Left nearly destitute in the aftermath of her husband's death, she became an outspoken advocate for his legacy through her popular books and lectures. She spent most of their marriage in relative proximity to him despite his numerous military campaigns in the American Civil War and subsequent postings on the Great Plains as a commanding officer in the United States Cavalry. Elizabeth Bacon Custer (née Bacon Ap– April 4, 1933) was an American author and public speaker, and the wife of Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer, United States Army.

Boots and Saddles or, Life in Dakota with General Custer by Elizabeth Bacon Custer