The Removes

by Tatjana Soli

  He’d taught Libbie the joys of sleeping outdoors and believed she loved it almost as much as he. If only she was with him now, he’d feel more himself. In her letters it was clear her torment at their separations weighed on her.

  * * *

  THE CAVALRY’S NEWEST assignment was to police the stagecoach routes. In the middle of the night he’d sent a veteran officer of the territory with a troop from the west end of camp to determine their exact location on the river vis-à-vis the nearest station they were charged to guard.

  Custer was dreaming he was still riding in the saddle, the dream so sharp it was interchangeable with being awake, when a shot went off from the pickets.

  —Indians!

  Shapes could be seen in the murky distance of near dawn. Mounted warriors appeared spectral and nightmarish in war dress. The shriek of battle cries terrified his men unseasoned to the sound.

  Dry throats. Soldiers raced to corral the remuda inside the wagon circle to prevent stampede. The Indians’ first tactic was to steal the enemy’s horses. Rifles loaded, the soldiers formed a skirmish line.

  Ponies approached.

  A lookout reported a group of eighty warriors. Custer’s cavalry far outnumbered them so he held back for a closer target, knowing his soldiers’ fingers itched.

  The enemy lined up along a ridge, creating a magnificent, pagan phalanx. Custer had not felt such a thrill since he faced a line of Confederates. He recognized it was one of the finest and most imposing displays he’d witnessed: brilliant war bonnets, painted horses, lances, bows and arrows bedecked. Painted faces fierce as the devil. Riders so practiced they seemed a mythical manhorse beast. Worthy opponent indeed.

  The sky lightened, though a heavy mist still obscured the scene. His soldiers ached to fight.

  The foremost line of ponies halted. Riders parleyed then withdrew to a bluff. Those behind turned and moved farther away.

  The camp as a single entity let out a breath of relief, leavened with scorn. They grumbled about the “Injun reveille.”

  —Can’t let us civilized sleep?

  Custer cursed his own caution, and recognized he’d been bested. More important, he knew the reports he’d received were all wrong. The Indian was a canny fighter, and the army had some catching up to do if it hoped to win.

  An hour later the heavy fog carried the sound of running horses on the east side of camp. A trick? Was the retreat a ruse to attack them unprepared?

  Soldiers rushed to rearm only to discover they were being attacked by their own—the veteran’s troop sent out the night before. They had drawn their guns as they galloped through the camp, thinking it an Indian one. They had mistaken their own corralled horses for ponies, Custer’s conical Sibley tent for an Indian lodge, certain that they had headed in a straight line toward the overland trail several miles away, the land having tricked even a veteran tracker of the area. The troop had inadvertently circumscribed a half circle and arrived at the other end of camp, the fog hiding the camp’s true aspect until they landed inside it, the head of the column ready to eat its own tail.

  After the initial confusion, great hilarity rose among the soldiers at the mistake. Diplomatically, Custer commended the attacking party’s bravery at aggressing against an unknown and much larger camp in order to subdue it. Their mistake, he advised, was in not knowing the lay of the land and the size of the camp before charging. So unlike the chary Indians earlier who had reconnoitered and left. He omitted the likely fact that if the Indians had attacked they would now be dead, as would his misguided troop had the camp been foe instead of friend. Despite his ill-applied courageousness, this gray-haired veteran of many successful campaigns had to endure being remonikered He Who Rides in a Circle to Kiss His Own Arse, and his legend followed him for the next few years until he died at Summit Springs, Colorado, fighting against the Cheyenne.

  * * *

  UNSUCCESSFUL IN THEIR SCOUT to look for camps, the column limped into Fort Hays. There Custer discovered that Hancock, the harsh “father” to the Indians, had let himself be bamboozled by the oily-speaking Kiowa chief Satanta. He’d gone as far as to let the chief sup at his table. So infatuated was Hancock, he’d gifted the Kiowa with the uniform jacket of a major general, complete with sash and plumed hat, regalia soldiers had to work long and hard to earn the right to wear.

  Mere weeks later, Satanta led a war party that attacked a nearby fort, stealing army horses while wearing his military booty. He had the courtesy to tip said plumed hat at his enemy and waggle his uniformed backside at them as he made off.

  This was an enemy unlike that of the War. Custer felt sure that his superiors lacked sufficient knowledge of their adversary to successfully defeat them. He would remedy that to his own advantage.

  He knew the Indians felt cheated because the government had not kept its treaty promises. Not enough annuities of food, clothing, ammunition, or guns had been issued over the winter when most needed. The presence of surveyors also had the tribes in an uproar. Surveyors meant railroads, meant fewer buffalo, meant starvation. The only item in surplus for the Indians seemed to be whiskey, for which the young warriors had a great affinity, and peddlers managed to find their way through the most dangerous of territories to supply it. If only he could find soldiers as brave.

  As his troops waited at Fort Hays for their own supplies, which were long in coming, they watched the cold rain beat down on the flat, iron-hard land without relenting. After days it had liquefied to a sticking muck that hindered the men and horses to the extent that they were discouraged from heading back out.

  Custer was impatient at the inactivity, the lost momentum, and the strain of being separated from his Libbie. Everything had happened so fast during the Rebellion, constant battles and skirmishes, and during the rare lulls the distance between Virginia and Washington was short enough to be easily closed to see her.

  At a stop on another thousand-mile surveil on the Platte River, he got a letter from Sheridan reprimanding him for his lack of engagement with the Indians. Don’t go soft like Sully and Hancock. I need my fighter. That’s what I brought you here for.

  His orders were to continue policing stage stations, farms, and rivers, ridding them of hostiles.

  What that meant in fact was long rides accomplished either in the rain or the heat or the wind or some unholy alliance of all three guaranteed to wear down both man and beast. Horses regularly dropped from exhaustion or starvation. No Indians took up residence at the locations reported, so by the time the troop arrived they found only fired houses and mutilated civilians. Not an Indian in sight.

  Sometimes they arrived upon great gouged fields that indicated campgrounds recently abandoned, fields scratched by travois poles. Nearby fields shorn of grass by grazing herds. Sometimes they would find a lone teepee erected, a dead old woman inside, and they would wonder at the callousness of such a people. These sightings inspired fear, conjecture, mystery, as if they spoke of ancient beasts long disappeared from the face of the earth and not flesh-and-blood men such as themselves.

  In his disgust at noncontact, Custer blamed the men, who in truth were for the most part happy to miss an encounter with the enemy. They marched with only the goal of their next meal. Their pay was paltry and used up on dearly priced alcohol as a palliative against the abuses of the march and their commander. The only thing that would hold them together was battle, and for all Custer’s efforts he could not scrounge them up one.

  While camped along the Platte seven soldiers deserted on the strongest horses and another five walked out in plain sight of the command. They were headed for higher pay mining gold, unheard-of mutiny that if continued in such dangerous territory might end the whole troop. The army’s only safety lay in its numbers. Official orders were to shoot deserters, and Custer made sure both officers and enlisted knew this. Now he gave the order to bring the deserters back dead or alive. The horsemen got away. The others were brought in, three wounded, one of whom died later that day. As far as Custer was c
oncerned, the deserters had only themselves to blame.

  Unlike the grief he’d experienced over each soldier’s death during the War, writing a separate letter to each family, Custer didn’t spill tears over this callow fellow. How was he supposed to fight with such apathetic talent? Among the Indians there was no such thing as desertion—those were the kind of men he should be leading—and these cowards could chew on that. There was a definite shift in his men’s sympathies away from him, but he knew that would be corrected later in battle.

  * * *

  MARCHING THROUGH the monotonous distances, what Custer would not have given to lie under the shade of even a single tree. Instead he laid his head under prairie milkweed, coneflower, and goldenrod. He could hardly remember the verdant forests of Virginia; they seemed to belong to someone else’s life. In his current existence, all had turned stunted.

  At times he wondered at this great hunger of conquest. The isolation of the plains was a terrible thing. It threw one back on oneself, and some men found themselves sorely failing the trial.

  When the cavalry came upon a farmstead, the people were unused to society. They hunched against the wind and turned partly away. The leather-skinned men stood with legs squared apart, as if expecting the next blow of bad news. Their women, worn haggard by endless work, ran to fetch cups and spoons. The children, shy with the wobbly look of colts, stood silent and enthralled. Men in uniform were heroes. Custer recognized these people as his own, bludgeoned by the drear sameness of such a hard life. He felt sucked back into his past.

  Custer’s father had been town blacksmith while he saved for years to buy a farm. Their big, always hungry, happy family could have been these settlers. He had been so determined to escape such a fate, but how far from it was he really? Tom, too, followed the call of adventure. The Custer boys were not meant to bend knee to the land. He knew the Plains tribes felt the same way and that the peace agreement, with its intention to turn them away from hunting and fighting to a life of agriculture, was a doomed one.

  Permission was asked and granted to water at one particular homestead’s well. The woman of the house offered the officers weak grain coffee, which they gladly accepted. Custer’s hand shook as he reached for a cup, and he steadied it with the other. Out back could be found the small, mounded graves of departed children. It was not a life to which he wanted to subject his Libbie. Conversation centered on the ravages inflicted by the Indians in that part of the state, the cattle stampeded, the houses set afire, the neighbors killed. The army was there to deliver them from such scourges.

  At another homestead, a man had his oldest daughter serve homemade bread with blackberry jam while he told of the mother’s abduction months back. She had traveled with neighbors to the nearest town for provisions. Their wagon was attacked. Some were killed, others taken captive. The daughter had tears in her eyes as the father voiced the commonplace that he sincerely hoped his beloved had gone to join the Lord.

  All the land south of the Arkansas [River] belongs to the Kiowa and Comanche, and I don’t want to give away any of it. I love the land and the buffalo and will not part with it.… I want the children raised as I was.

  I have heard that you want to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don’t want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when I settle down I grow pale and die.

  A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers; but when I go upriver I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that, it feels as if my heart would burst with sorrow.

  —SATANTA, KIOWA CHIEF, SPEECH GIVEN IN 1867 DURING THE MEDICINE LODGE TREATY NEGOTIATIONS

  LIBBIE

  The separations were unbearable, but the reunions divine. When Autie at last returned, it was not to a tearful wife but to one with newfound vigor. She was thriving despite the harsh environment, like a flowering weed springing up in the most arid of soils. They settled into a period of marital bliss.

  Nothing in her surroundings had changed. The accommodations were just as problematic. The wind blew as fiercely, lodging gritty dust in every corner of the house, in clothes, hair, eyes, and ears. Eliza complained that dirt even got into her cooking. Yet when Autie was there it was the difference between a gloomy, rainy day and a bright, sunny one.

  Libbie felt guilty that her great happiness came at the expense of his. The obscurity of his present circumstances grated on him, led to his periods of silence, but now he threw himself into consolations such as his hunting and taxidermy. He became a more attentive husband. They would lie abed late in the mornings to tickle, the dogs lying all around and on the bed, until Eliza brought a breakfast tray, tsk, tsking at the muddy paw prints on the sheets, and they were forced to behave. Those were honey-filled days.

  When at last Tom’s transfer to the 7th came through, Autie’s happiness expanded because he was never so happy as when roughhousing and playing pranks with his brother, and then it was like having two unruly boys in the house. Their favorite game was “romps,” chasing each other through the house playing tag. Tom created barricades between the rooms with furniture—he would stack the dining room chairs chest high in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, then slide the table between the study and hallway. Eliza would be irate at the chaos and threaten to quit, and Libbie would retire to her bedroom and close the door, a signal that she was off limits.

  Often, furious crashing sounds downstairs would be followed by thunder up the staircase, and the door would burst open to admit two grown men, cannonballing onto the bed, dogs in hot pursuit. The three would lie there in silence, she in the middle determinedly reading her book, Tom and Autie on each side, breathing hard from their exertions, the dogs falling asleep, paws trembling in dreams of hunting. This was the happiness of family, one new to her. True, there was the usual shuffling of pride between siblings, but there was also deep love and respect between the brothers. They each knew the other’s weaknesses, poked each other mercilessly for it, but were loath to admit any defect to the larger world.

  Autie thrived on activity, not a natural condition on such a remote outpost, so Libbie made sure there were always people around. Regularly she invited single young ladies from Monroe to stay with them, in this way enticing Autie not to take flight back east again. The females were a natural lure to get the bachelor officers to come often for dinner, and it created the necessary frisson of social interaction. They all stayed up late at night playing the piano and singing. Dances were arranged. Many of the women returned from such a visit engaged. In the light of normal life, the girls were often mystified at their choice of romantic partner, claiming they had been enchanted by the extraordinary surroundings, and called the nuptials off. Frequently, Tom stayed out courting, once prompting Autie to send a suitcase to the young lady’s front door. Autie and Libbie hoped for a sister-in-law to materialize from these outings, but it never came to pass.

  On the rare days when the wind died down and the temperature was tolerable, they took great pleasure in organizing riding parties for picnics. They traveled in a group of twenty or more, there being safety in numbers. Alongside these brave soldiers, Libbie felt brave, too.

  Autie always rode far in front, restless and alert. He loved to race, and so challenged, she raced.

  “First one to the bluff gets pie, the other gets nothing!”

  They were off, their horses neck to neck. Autie never said it, but she knew he was impressed at her daring. The truth was Libbie was terrified and exhilarated in equal measure. After the novelty of racing wore off, his next favorite trick was to lean over and lift her out of the saddle as she rode. All she could do was hold on to her horse’s reins and pray. One time he lifted her clear over to sit in his lap as the horses raced in tandem. There was no description of what it was like to be suspended above the thundering hooves. One wrong move, she could have been trampled, but he held her as if she were his own life, so steady she gladly accepted wh
atever befell her. When they reined in and returned to the picnic, the company cheered and said they might get jobs in the California rodeo when their military days were done.

  * * *

  AFTER ONE SUCH PICNIC they returned late and collapsed into their bed. A young lady from Monroe was staying with them for the summer. Her room was the guest bedroom by the stairs. Autie mumbled something about getting a glass of warm milk and not to stay up. Libbie fell back asleep, waking hours later to a still empty bed.

  She worried. A childhood habit that had strengthened in adulthood, she always imagined calamity in those days, and so put on her shawl and opened the bedroom door. There was Autie in his nightshirt coming out of the guest bedroom. Libbie thought she must be dreaming until after him the girl came to stand in the doorway. Naked. The golden glow of the candle cast light on her figure—long golden hair that fell to her waist, full milk-white breasts, and rounded thighs—so that she resembled the marble statues of Venus found in books. When Autie reached out his hand and laid his fingers on her hip, the girl must have felt something, a quickening, because she lifted his hand to her lips.

  Libbie stood transfixed, sickened. Her world slowly wobbled, teetered, threatening to break into a thousand pieces, her bold choice of husband a failure, raising the possibility that she might return to Monroe in humiliation. Refusing to go back to her old life, she slowly walked forward. When the girl saw her she gasped, covering between her legs with one hand, across her breasts with the other. Libbie went to Autie like a sleepwalker, raised her hand, and stroked his cheek. She came closer and kissed his lips. Then she moved to the stairs.

  “I’m going to heat up the milk. Will you join me?”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY the whole fort readied for another picnic. They started out early with a site by the river as their destination, an area sheltered by cottonwoods and the rarity of lush green grass, from proximity to water. When they reached camp the mules were quickly unpacked and the cooks started fires. Libbie directed that blankets be laid out under the trees. Groups of men and women promenaded up and down the banks of the river, and Libbie thought the scene compared to the idyllic resorts of the east coast.