Texas Attorney General Office

From the time of her husband's death at the Battle of the Little Big Horn until her own death fifty-seven years later, at the age of ninety, Mrs. George Armstrong Custer devoted herself to defending or embellishing her husband's reputation. This account, the second in Elizabeth's trilogy of her life with the General, focuses on the period immediately following the Civil War, when the Custers were stationed in Louisiana, Texas, and Kansas. She portrays the aftermath of the Civil War in Texas and life in Kansas while her husband took part in General Winfield Hancock's 1867 expedition against the Indians between the Arkansas and Platte rivers. Throughout, she provides detailed descriptions of an army officer's home life on the frontier during this major period of Indian unrest.

First published in 1889, H. H. McConnell's Five Years a Cavalryman remains one of the best accounts of what it was like to be an ordinary cavalryman on the post-Civil War frontier. Posted for five years (1866-1871) with the Sixth U.S. Cavalry at Fort Belknap and Fort Richardson, in West Texas, McConnell gives the unglorified inside story on his fellow enlisted men and the officers, reporting candidly on the heavy drinking, their general disorganization, their boredom and their thievery. Regarding the Texas Rangers, he admits that they might be tolerable Indian fighters, but in frontier towns, where they would engage in "shooting scrapes and rows" with its citizens and soldiers, they were more a threat to peace than keepers of the same. His tolerant attitude toward Native Americans is evident in his coverage of the arrest and trial of Satanta, Big Tree, and other Kiowas at Fort Sill, in which he grants that General William Sherman's concurrent visit to the post negatively affected their trial. In the foreword to this edition, William H. Leckie summarizes McConnell's frontier career and discusses his attitude toward the Tenth Cavalry "buffalo soldiers", the Texas Rangers, and officers such as Colonel Ranald MacKenzie.