After writing about 100 pages, I re-read them and started thinking about who I put at Fort Abraham Lincoln when the news came in on July 5. I went back to the notes I had put together last summer and realized I had some things wrong. When I rechecked the sources, I think I got it right. Or as near as I can with the resources I have access to.
I wish I could get to the libraries at Fort Abraham Lincoln and the Museum at Monroe to look at Libbie's papers.
Reading Katie Gibson's description of July 5th, I realized that I had misread it. She was at Fort Rice along with Kate Benteen, Lotte Moylan and Eliza DeRudio. She actually mentioned these four as being with her that evening. They had heard the news but didn't have the details especially if their husbands had lived. They decided to spend the night together, except, she wrote those who had children. In that list would be Mrs. Benteen and Mrs. DeRudio. The others slept on the floor and the way she described it, it sounds as though there were more than just Lotte and Katie. At daybreak the entire post heard the steamboat whistle and they all tore down to the traders' which also served as the post office.
I think Mrs. Godfrey was also at Fort Rice. She told her husband that she also couldn't sleep. She was at home - they had kids although I don't know how many at that point - anyway, at dawn someone tapped on her window. She asked if her husband had been killed and the person said, "No, dear, your husband is safe and Mrs. Moylan is safe but all the rest are killed."
Other wives who might have been at Fort Rice are Alice McDougall, Grace Edgerley, and Meda Mathey. Their husbands all survived with Reno and Benteen. So at Fort Abraham Lincoln besides Libbie Custer were Maggie Calhoun, Annie Yates, Nettie Smith, Mollie McIntosh, Frannie DeWolf and Eliza Porter. All their husbands were killed.
Libbie writes of a "young wife" sobbing in her lap.
Frannie DeWolf's husband was Acting Assistant Surgeon and only transferred to Fort Abraham Lincoln in March of 1876 so the other women didn't know her well and she then. She was a hospital matron when she met James DeWolf at Camp Warner in Oklahoma Territory. That does not sound to me like someone who would sob in another woman's lap.
Eliza Porter's had been in the regiment since October 1969. From 1872 to 1874 he was with the Northern Boundary Survey up near Canada. They had two boys. She left as soon as she could after learning of the lieutenant's death. His body was never found although his bloody coat with two bullet holes in it was found in the empty Indian camps. Married in 1869, she wasn't a new bride.
I think the new bride was probably Maggie Custer Calhoun, especially considering her emotional and physical collapse afterwards. She spent almost a year suffering terrible migraine headaches, reduced to almost permanent invalid status. Happily, she was able to find her way out of her grief.
So with Libbie on that hot evening of July 5 was Maggie Calhoun, Mollie McIntosh, Nettie Smith, Annie Yates and Emma Reed, Armstrong's niece. Of these women, Annie was the only one with three kids, George (4), Bessie(2) and Milnor just 1. Unhappily, he was retarded, evidently from the rough time Annie had birthing him.
Also, I had considered that Lotte Moylan and Alice McDougall were at FAL because they are in one of the famous photos of officers and wives gathered on the steps of the Custer House, but knowing the Lotte was definitely at Fort Rice, it follows that they had come together to FAL at the time of the photo.
