"Custer's Boots" by Rebecca Martin on Kansas Historical Society

"George Armstrong Custer wore these boots while riding with the Seventh Cavalry on the Great Plains.

Elizabeth Custer's final glimpse of her husband came as the Seventh Cavalry marched out of Fort Lincoln onto the Dakota plains in May 1876. The regimental band played "The Girl I Left Behind Me" as General George Armstrong Custer led his command toward Montana and death on the Little Bighorn River.

Ironically, Elizabeth Custer was one army wife who insisted on not being left behind. She claimed to be "the only officer's wife who always followed the regiment." Her stories of life on the Plains with her beloved "Autie" are as entertaining today as when they first appeared over a century ago.

Widowed at 34, Elizabeth Custer began writing to supplement her meager army pension. Kansas is the setting for two of her books, Following the Guidon (1890) and Tenting on the Plains (1893). Her legacy to the state also includes this pair of her husband's boots.

The boots donated by Mrs. Custer "traversed a great deal of the Western frontier," she wrote in a letter preserved in the Kansas Historical Society's collections. Purchased from a Philadelphia bootmaker for forty dollars, the boots endured campaigns that took the Custers "from near the Mexican border to the Viscinity [sic] of the Canadian frontier..."

Read complete text full of interesting information on Kansas Historical Society site. The article was written by Rebecca Martin in November 1995.