The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn by Nathaniel Philbrick Read Free Book Online Page A

her true rival for Autie’s love (at least the kind of love she cared about) was not a woman, but Barrett, whom Custer had first met in St. Louis almost a decade ago. “They joyed in each other as women do,” she wrote, “and I tried not to look when they met or parted, while they gazed with tears into each other’s eyes and held hands like exuberant girls.” The prior winter, when Libbie and Custer had been in New York City, Barrett had been starring as Cassius in a lavish production of Julius Caesar, a politically themed play that had special relevance during the last days of the Grant administration. By the end of their stay in New York, Custer had seen his friend perform in the play at least forty times.
    Despite the play’s title, Julius Caesar is really about the relationship between Cassius and his friend Marcus Brutus, and if Barrett’s edgy personality was perfectly suited to Cassius, Custer must have seen much of himself in Brutus. After assassinating the increasingly power-hungry emperor for the future good of Rome, Cassius and Brutus learn that Caesar loyalist Marc Antony is rallying his soldiers against them. Cassius, whose motivations from the start have been less than pure, is for letting Marc Antony attack first, but Brutus, ever the forthright idealist, will have none of it. They must act and act quickly.
There is a tide in the affairs of men [Brutus insists]
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the Current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
    Forty times Custer watched Brutus deliver that speech. Forty times he watched as Brutus and Cassius led their forces into war. Forty times he watched them struggle with the realization that all was lost and that they must fall on their own swords, but not before Brutus, whom Marc Antony later dubs “the noblest Roman of them all,” predicts, “I shall have glory by this losing day.”

    O n May 27, nine days after saying good-bye to their husbands, Libbie Custer and a group of officers’ wives made their way down to the Fort Lincoln landing on the Missouri River. The steamboat Far West had arrived that morning, and her captain, Grant Marsh, was supervising his thirty-man crew in the transfer of tons of forage, ammunition, and other supplies onto the boat’s lower deck. By the end of the day, the Far West would be headed up the Missouri for her eventual rendezvous with the Seventh Cavalry on the Yellowstone.
    When a riverboat came to the fort, it was customary for the master to host the officers’ wives in the boat’s dining room, and Marsh made sure that Libbie and her entourage were provided with “as dainty a luncheon as the larder of the boat would afford.” As the women took their seats at the table in the narrow, nicely outfitted dining room, Libbie requested that Captain Marsh come and join them. This was a duty Marsh had hoped to avoid. He’d chosen the Far West because it was the most spartan of his boats. She had plenty of room for freight but minimal accommodations for passengers. As he later told his biographer, he “did not wish to be burdened with many passengers for whose safety and comfort he would be responsible.” Since Mrs. Custer had a reputation for following her husband wherever he went, Marsh had a pretty good idea why she wanted him to join her for lunch.
    He soon found himself sitting between Libbie and the wife of Lieutenant Algernon Smith. The two of them were, he noticed, “at particular pains to treat him cordially.” And just as he’d suspected, once the meal had come to an end, they requested that he talk to them privately.
    When Libbie and Custer had parted on the morning of May 18, it had been a heart-wrenching scene. Custer’s striker, John Burkman, remembered “how she clung to Custer at the last, her arms tight around his neck and how she cried.” From the hill