Following the Guidon (Illustrated Edition). Elizabeth Bacon Custer

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СКАЧАТЬ To the Indian his captive is nameless. The chiefs had confessed that they had two white squaws, but by no means in their power could our people ascertain who they were. Finally the two figures descended from the pony, left the Indians, who were at a halt, and began to walk towards the waiting troops.

      General Custer, by the aid of his powerful field-glass, told young Brewster that one of the figures coming was short and stout, the other taller. As soon as any observation was made by General Custer regarding what his glass revealed, one listening soldier told it to another, and a tremor of excitement spread from one end of the long watching line to the other. As Brewster looked through the glass lent to him and saw the women, he began to believe that one of them was his sister, as she was of about her height, and he implored General Custer for permission to go to her. It was hard to refuse, but he was obliged to do so, fearing the boy's horror at the change in her would make him forget the necessity for caution, and attempt revenge before the prisoners had really reached our lines.

      The regiment of Kansas Volunteers had been organized to revenge some of the outrages to the border people, and with the hope of rescuing white prisoners, so General Custer gave them the privilege of first greeting their two States women. Three ranking officers went forward to meet the poor creatures, who, even then, except for their white skin, could hardly be distinguished from the Indians, so strange was their dress. Hardly had the officers advanced a quarter of the way when the waiting lad darted from his place beside General Custer, and sped on before every one until he had reached the women. As he clasped the taller of the two in his arms the soldiers knew that the sister for whom he had suffered so much was restored to him. The officers, in telling this story to us afterwards, always hurried over this part; they could not speak calmly.

      They all crowded round the poor girls, eager to shake their hands and welcome them; but the most daring, the most valiant among them, did not attempt to conceal the tears that rolled down their cheeks. Men who had laid the fair flower of chivalry, the loved comrade, Captain Hamilton, in the ground only so recently with tearless silence, now wept over the two captives. The longer they looked upon the poor creatures the harder it became to control their emotions. The young faces of the two, who not a year before were bright, happy women, were now worn with privation and exposure, and haggard with the terrible insults of their captors, too dreadful to be chronicled here. The rudely cut and scanty garment that barely covered them was made from flour sacks bearing the brand that our government purchases, thus proving that the Indians who captured them had been drawing rations from the United States Indian agency at the time. They had Indian leggings and moccasins, their braided hair and arms encircled with spiral wire, their fingers covered with brass rings, their necks with beads, were evidences that the Indians, by thus adorning their prisoners, hoped to mollify the wrath of the white man. Fortunately, the one woman on the expedition, who was General Custer's cook, and from whose temper, as I have elsewhere related, her soldier husband so often suffered, now forgot the rages and furies of her daily life, and gave the poor released creatures some of her clothing, clad in which they left in charge of the now happy brother for their homes when the first wagon-train coming with supplies went back to Camp Supply.

      The story of their life among the Indians was one of barbarous treatment and brutality; one had no knowledge that the other was a prisoner, as they had been captured separately, until they met in an Indian village, and after being traded about from one chief to another, they at last came to be owned by the same warrior. While together, they planned an escape. They did not know where they were, but stole out at night, and, guided by the stars, started north. With great joy they at last reached a wagon-road lately travelled. In the midst of this delight a bullet whistled by them, and soon they saw their owner in hot pursuit. New insults were inflicted, and more laborious work was loaded on the two after their return to the village. The conduct of the squaws, always jealous of white women, was brutality itself. The chief finally sold the two apart. With the terrible physical labor required of them, in addition to revolting indignities, it was a wonder they lived. They were almost starved, some days only being allowed a morsel of mule-meat, not over an inch square at most, for an entire day. The squaws beat them with clubs when the Indians were absent, and once one of them was felled to the ground by a blow from these same jealous fiends.

      After all this dreadful life, it would seem as if the two women might have looked for immunity from future trouble, but in one instance it was not to be. Two years after their rescue, two of our officers were riding past a ranch and saw a little Indian boy playing before the house. Seeing him, they were too much interested not to inquire who lived there, and found, when the woman of the house came to the door, that it was one of the captives, whose face, owing to the tragic circumstances of the release, was fixed indelibly on their memory. It was impossible for her to resist detaining them a few moments, recalling again her gratitude to the troops for her rescue. When they asked if all went well with her, she could not help confiding to them the fact that the husband whom she had married after her return, instead of trying to make her forget the misery through which she had passed, often recalled all her year of captivity with bitterness, and was disposed to upbraid her, as if she had been in the least responsible for the smallest of her misfortunes.

      In the many letters which I have looked over to obtain my few notes of a winter that was so eventful, I have found only occasional allusions to the hardships undergone; but, little by little, references were made after the return of the command that gave some idea of the self-denial and self-control which every one had to exercise. If afterwards any one exhibited the slightest sign of obstinacy, some teasing voice was sure to pipe up and say, "What can you expect of a man who has dined on mule-steaks?" General Custer could not eat mule or horse when they were all reduced to that desperate strait, but in his hunger he told me he used to think that he might, to save himself from starvation, make up his mind to eat his dogs' ears; and as they trotted along in front of him, quite happy over their mule breakfast, he looked longingly at these devoted friends, but with a hope that he might be spared the necessity of mutilating them.

      The soldiers bartered for everything. One came to General Custer to beg to trade some tobacco for a loaf of bread. He received the half of the last loaf, but the tobacco was declined, as it was not the habit of General Custer to use it. That night the remaining half of the loaf was stolen. A little sack of oats was carefully treasured in General Custer's tent for his favorite horse, and the hungry animals left loose to pick what grass they could under the edges of the snow, came at night sniffing and snorting around the oats in hungry search. The horses grew so expert in foraging for themselves that they learned to put one hoof on a fallen sapling and tear off the bark with their teeth, as a dog holds and picks a bone.

      It was on that campaign that I first heard of a sack made of a buffalo-skin to sleep in, and not even then should I have learned that such an invention was known, had not the handsome Adonis who used this clever device been unmercifully teased for indulging in so much luxury.

      Indeed, it was mostly owing to the tormenting spirit of raillery, that is the characteristic of officer and soldier, that many of the hardships endured came to my knowledge at all. When the attention of a group was called to some comical situation, reminding the bystanders of some desperate plight, either of danger or deprivation, in which an officer had been placed, I had an insight into what had been endured by them all.

      I suppose that I never should have heard of several incidents of the winter, had it not been that the Kansas Volunteers afforded some amusement to our men, from the fact that they, though brave men, were inexperienced campaigners, and their complaints did not escape our men, who considered themselves scarred veterans in comparison. For years, if any one said, talking of a hoped-for leave of absence, or describing some one who was lonely, I can see home just as plain, I knew that it referred to a volunteer who was heard by some of our men crying with homesickness, and confiding his woes to his bunkey. At heart our men were sorry for them, as there were some pitiful instances of nostalgia among them; but when they whined like children they were apt to encounter ridicule.

      At the time when the supplies were getting low and half-rations were issued, and still the expedition pursued a fresh trail, instead СКАЧАТЬ