Custer's Father and The Horse Presented to Him

1878

Mrs. Custer has a room at Lansing full of relics of her late husband. His pet, a Scotch hound — a great creature into whose eyes he used to look and say to his wife that no one could doubt that animals had souls — is in possession of a Cleveland lady, but the other animal, who traveled with him always by flood and field, sometimes across the saddle and sometimes put into a box and forwarded from station to station, is in his father's possession, as is also the horse which he rode up to the time of his death and which carried him to the very scene of slaughter.

The horse was purchased by some of Custer's brother officers and presented to Mrs. Custer, who gave it to her husband's aged father. The elder Custer is a feeble old man with snow-white hair, but not a day passes but that he mounts his "Artie's" steed — (Custer's middle name was Armstrong, abbreviated into "Artie") and takes a gallop along the road.

He talks of his dead son continually: "All my boys were good boys to me, but you know 'Artie' was my baby," he will say piteously. A great friend of Mrs. Custer, who brought her late husband's aged father from his Western home to West Point, to attend the burial, saw a pathetic little sight that will show how much the poor old man — old enough to have been Custer's grandfather — thinks of his dead hero.

One day she sought Mr. Custer in the barn, she found him in the stall devoted to his son's steed. He had come in from a ride, and having fed the animal, had gone to sleep with his arm thrown over the horse's neck, and his white, hair streaming over its glossy coat. There were tears, too, on his withered cheeks.