JULY 16: A Chat With Mrs. Custer

On July 16, 1890, a reporter from The Spokane Falls Review writes about his interchange with Elizabeth Custer. It’s titled, “Mrs. Gen. Custer. Chat With the Distinguished Hero’s Widow.”

 Libbie Custer stopped in nearby Cour D’Alene, Idaho, during a fact-finding mission through cities in the West to visit with Army veterans who served with her late husband, George Armstrong Custer.  The research was for an upcoming book.

George Custer’s widow, Elizabeth ‘Libbie’ Custer. (Credit: Library of Congress)

 The reporter’s glowing account read:

“To look in the soft gray eyes and kindly face of Mrs. Custer is to know that you have met a woman whose many years of varied and thrilling experiences have given no trace of the sham hauteur of so-called society, nor the un-approachfulness of a literary character. But she impresses one as being the graceful embodiment of a strong, noble, earnest, yet tender-hearted woman, of vivacious temperament, whose wide range of thought and feeling must have peculiarly fitted her to be the companion of a frontier general and cultured gentleman.”