TENTING ON THE PLAINS, or Gen'l Custer in Kansas and Texas
New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1893. Second Edition. Hardcover. 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. Octavo: 403, [1, blank], 9 [ads], [1, blank] pp. with a frontispiece with tissue guard, 15 full-page plates, and 8 textual vignettes, all wood engravings by Harley, et al., after photographs and illustrations by A. Berghaus and Frederic Remington, as well as a map. In the publisher's tan coarse-weave unsized cloth binding, with a blind-stamped horizontal band with brown-stamped rule, wrapping to the spine, a brown-stamped vignette of soldiers firing at mounted Indians, arrow devices, and titling on the rear panel; and a bland-stamped horizontal band with brown-stamped rule, wrapping from the front, brown-stamped ruled tail band, vignette of a tent, and titling on the spine. Period ownership inscription to the front flyleaf. Mild dust staining to the top edge. The boards are uncommonly fresh. Provenance: from the Publishers' Bookbindings collection of Ellen K. Morris and Edward S. Levin. Very good. Item #80352
Price: $100.00