The wife of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer had celebrated her 31st birthday with her husband less than a week earlier in a railroad car on the train carrying the Seventh Cavalry Regiment to a new assignment in Dakota Territory.

She had been born in Monroe, Mich., on April 8, 1842, the lone survivor of the four children of Judge Daniel and Sophia Bacon. Despite her parents' earlier objections, she married the Civil War hero on Feb. 9, 1864, when he was on leave in the home town they shared. (His father, a blacksmith, had moved to Monroe from New Rumely, Ohio, on Dec. 5, 1839.)

For the first nine years of their marriage, she had enjoyed -- and suffered through -- a series of adventures with her flamboyant spouse: in a Virginia farmhouse near the Army of the Potomac; in Washington, D. C., until the war ended; on troop duty in Texas, Kansas and Kentucky. She wrote that her husband celebrated each move "with wild demonstrations of joy;" and when orders came to send the regiment to Dakota, she said it seemed like they were going to Lapland.

The Dakota Southern Railroad had been serving Yankton from Sioux City for just six weeks when the first contingent of the Seventh Cavalry arrived on April 9 and the remainder two days later. The Custer baggage included their greyhound dogs, a litter of pups and "cages of mocking birds and canaries."

The Yankton Press of April 9 announced that "the camping ground of the 7th Cavalry (to be known as Camp Sturgis) has been selected on the beautiful flat adjoining and east of the Rhine." Tents were erected for the 40 laundresses with the unit, while the wives of the officers -- except for Libbie Custer -- found rooms, probably in the St. Charles Hotel, then a wooden three-story building on the northwest corner of Third and Capitol.

Elizabeth -- with her black servants, Mary and Ham -- elected to stay near the camp in a rented, half-finished cabin which she described in her memoirs:

"The place was equal to a palace to me. There was no plastering, and the house seemed hardly weather-proof. It had a floor, however, and an upper story divided off by beams; over these Mary and I stretched blankets and shawls and so made two rooms.

"It did not take long to settle our few things, and when wood and water were brought from a distance, we were quite ready for house-keeping, except that we lacked a stove and some supplies."

Though the weather was threatening, Mary walked into town with her market basket to buy basic necessities. She also tried to buy a stove, but the dealer would not deliver it that evening, a situation which was to have serious repercussions later. The cavalrymen and their women -- grown accustomed to the warm weather of the South -- had been warned facetiously that the Dakota climate consisted of "eight months of winter and four of late fall," but they were hardly prepared for what was about to happen.

On Sunday, April 13, a chilling rain began to fall, and it continued through the day. That night it turned to snow, and on Monday a furious blizzard driven by a northwest wind engulfed the town and the Seventh's encampment. Hurriedly, Custer ordered his men to take the unit's 700 horses into Yankton where they found shelter in public and private stables and cow sheds. The 202 mules were turned loose and found their own protection in the timber by the Missouri River.

In the cavalry the horses came first, while the laundresses -- some of them with children -- were literally abandoned in the camp. On Tuesday morning -- with the snow still falling -- a small group of Yankton men, described by the Press as "good Samaritans," set out to rescue them. According to the paper, "they found many of the women and children in a distressing plight ... covered with the fast drifting snow and nearly crazed with the apprehension that they were to perish." They were taken to safety in town in sleighs hand-pulled by soldiers. A rumor had circulated that several babies had been born by laundresses during the storm, but Libbie later wrote that there had only been one.

Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Custer, exhausted from the demands of his command during the long trip and the unexpected blizzard, returned to Libbie and the unheated cabin, feverishly ill with what some historians have called pneumonia. The regimental surgeon made his way through the storm to deliver medicine and to order his commander to bed. Libbie was to make sure he took the medicine every hour.

Everyone survived the ordeal, and Lt. Col. Custer -- then just 34 years old -- was restored to health. (There is apparently no record of what happened to the dogs, the canaries and the mocking birds.)

Before a small box stove was finally brought to the cabin, Mary had made coffee and fried some bits of steak and a few potatoes over short pieces of candles she had cut up. This, according to Libby, revived her husband and hastened his recovery.

The storm subsided as quickly as it had come. The Seventh Cavalry regrouped, and the remaining stay in Yankton was relatively pleasant. On May 7 the unit left for Fort Abraham Lincoln in northern Dakota, Libbie Custer riding horseback next to her husband, while the other officers' wives and laundresses boarded the steamboat Miner for the long trip up the Missouri. Three years later much of the regiment and Custer himself were annihilated in the fateful battle at Little Big Horn in Montana.

Following her husband's death, Elizabeth devoted much time to defending his actions in his final battle. With a beginning pension of just $30 a month, she determined to defend his honor against all critics, including President Grant. To support herself further she turned to writing, and her first book -- Boots and Saddles -- was published by Harper & Brothers in 1885. Chapter 2, titled "A Blizzard," and chapter 3, "Western Hospitality," told of the brief sojourn in Yankton. Additional books -- Following the Guidon and Tenting on the Plains -- followed.

In her later years Libbie traveled extensively, was in much demand to give readings from her books and to speak of her experiences as the wife of a man made especially notorious by the Anheuser-Busch Brewery which had distributed some 150,000 colored prints of two popular paintings, "Custer's Luck" and "Custer's Last Stand," for display in the nation's barrooms.

She joined an artist's colony in the Catskills where she met noted writers like Mark Twain, was involved in a movement to preserve old frontier forts and was active in the founding of a home for needy girls, especially those of military families.

Always she challenged the contemporary detractors of her husband, and it was said that she won her personal "last stand" by out-living them all.

She died on April 6, 1933, just two days short of her 91st birthday. She was buried at West Point next to Lt. Col. Custer whose body had been reinterred there after full military honors. By then a new generation of Yanktonians had pretty much forgotten that she had once been at least a small part of the town's history.

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Originally published April 14, 1997