[Music] Perhaps it is not necessary to say that the events mentioned in the letters are not imaginary.

Perhaps the letters themselves tell that.

They are truthful accounts of experiences that came into my own life with the army in the far west.

Whether they be about Indians, desperadoes, or hunting, not one little thing has been stolen.

They are of a life that has passed.

All flowery descriptions have been omitted, as it seemed a simple, concise narration of events as they actually occurred was more in keeping with the life and that which came into it.

Francis M. A. Roe, from Army Letters, from an Officer's Wife.

[Music] This episode of Cottonwood Connections we have is a guest, Marla Matkin, who is a Kansas native and has portrayed primarily.

She's famously portrayed Elizabeth Bacon Custer.

But she has studied extensively on women in the west and especially the women that were with their husbands at military posts.

So you have portrayed Elizabeth Custer, how long did it take you to do the research?

I know you're still researching, for that that information, it never ends.

I think it took a year or more before I could put something together.

Then you just kind of tinker with it, you know, until you get it where you want it.

And one of your early ones was here at Cottonwood.

Right.

In fact, I think I'm not so sure I didn't debut her here.

I think maybe you did too.

I think I debuted her here.

So, Mrs.

Custer, was she well taken care of at the post that her husband was assigned?

Oh, yes.

And I know she wasn't with him all the time.

You can tell us about that.

For instance, when he was down here in Kansas, often she wasn't here.

The only place he was commanding officer was Fort Abraham Lincoln.

She played a very prominent role there.

She and Annie Yates, they considered Elizabeth to be the sun and Annie to be the moon.

These were both very well-educated, talented, charismatic women.

They kind of led the social pattern there at Fort Abraham Lincoln.

But I found with these women, they either loved the life, they tolerated the life, or they detested the life.

Now, she loved it.

By tolerating the life, the women wanted to keep their family together.

So, they stayed with these men on these posts.

If they detested it, some of the women went back east and they had a long-distance relationship with their husband.

But the women who loved the life, they're the ones who wrote the books.

And they've written some fascinating, because many of these women were well-educated, refined, had grown up in middle-to-upper, middle-class homes back east, and they fell in love with this guy in the uniform and the brass buttons and the braid.

But when they came out here, neither the woman nor the man really knew what to expect.

He was a duty officer, so he knew that.

They weren't prepared for this.

And often there was no officer's row in the beginning, but they began to construct them because they knew these men would be happier if they had their wives and family with them.

They had a custom called ranking out.

If they came on post and there was no quarters for them, and they outranked somebody, all they'd do is go in the door and say, "My wife and family and I have moved here.

There's no quarters.

I outrank you, and you're going to have to move."

And sometimes it'd cause a domino effect on Officer's Row as one officer bumped another and so on and so on.

And you may have awakened that morning in lovely quarters, and you're spending the evening in a chicken coop, or a tent, or something like that, you know, to tell something else better came along.

And they didn't have a regular tour of duty.

You know, they could be transferred.

They may be someplace three months or two years, you know, they never knew.

Now, the military did move them, but it precluded moving large pieces of furniture.

What they'd often take was barrels of China and silver, which we don't even use much now.

But it allowed them, once they got to where they were, they could entertain in a manner into which they were accustomed.

And even out here, these officers' families were expected to entertain and be social and good hosts and hostesses.

And the children, if possible, were educated by the school on the fort, too.

Yeah, they often had.

And sometimes these wives would teach the school, or they'd home - a lot of the officers sometimes home school their children.

And they were sent away once they got to a certain age to a higher form of education, because they were officers' children and they were expected to.

And it was surprising a number of these men were West Point men out here.

Education was important to them.

But, like I said, for these women who loved the life, and they wrote of it, they're fascinating accounts, because when the men wrote their books, they wrote about, you know, training and trails and battles and stuff.

The women wrote about the home life.

So if you combine the two books, then you get an accurate picture of what it was like to live on a frontier military post.

But some of these women, I mean, this gave these women a freedom and an opportunity.

Back in the East, these women were nothing more than appendages of their husbands.

But when they came out here, they could think, they could make decisions, and their husbands counted on them because they were gone often.

And some of these women really rose to the challenge, and they hated to go back East because they were going to lose that.

But out here, they had their rights.

Yeah.

Being an officer's wives is a status.

Yes.

Okay.

What about the non-commissioned officers with wives?

Well, to a certain extent, they did.

And surprisingly enough, there were laundresses on post.

Once in a while, as they made more money than did enlisted men by about twice as much, they were good marriage candidates.

Plus, they got their own home, they got a food ration, and they had the ability to visit the post-surgeon, if need be.

So once in a while, when one of these marriages occurred, and he was a non-com, then they'd live on an officer's row, and it was a little hard for some of these women to initially mix, to think that they had to accept a laundress as one of their compadres.

Different cultures.

Yeah.

But usually that worked itself out.

They had to depend on each other.

They were far away from home and family.

Their only communication was letters.

And so if somebody became sick or something like that, you depended on your family of the military to get you through this, to help take care of you in this situation, and you'd for them.

Often if their husband was killed or died, they had about a month, and they had to make other arrangements, because those quarters were for military families.

Yeah, because on both of the spouse, the male spouse, they were kicked out, basically.

They had a time to do it.

Yeah, a certain amount of time.

And to work out the pensions, if there were.

And they were small in the beginning.

And that's one of the things Elizabeth did.

She petitioned for greater recognition and financial support to these women.

And they did grow over time.

They were never great.

And oftentimes they had to go home to family, or something like that, and especially if they had children, to be able to survive now with no husband and a small pension.

But yeah, these women found themselves out here, and many of them became accomplished horsewomen.

They could ride better than the soldiers could.

And they always rode sidesaddle.

They took the life to heart, you know.

The officers' families, as a rule, talking about day-to-day routines, often hired a female to come in and cook for them and clean, and take care of things.

But they were hard to keep, because like I said, women were short supply, so they were married off in no time at all.

And it might be that civilians, these posts had civilian employees too, and there were civilians living in the area.

So it wasn't always they were married off to military men.

And so these women were always in a quandary looking for help.

And that's when they went to using strikers, which were men from the enlisted ranks.

And they were responsible for their military duties.

And when they were completed, they'd come to the officer's house and take up cooking, cleaning, and child supervision.

You know, they were useful characters on post as well.

But with these maids that some of them had, didn't Elizabeth Custer have one for many years?

Yes, Eliza.

And she was a woman of color.

And they became very, very close.

Now Eliza left them right before they headed to Abraham Lincoln.

And she married a black attorney.

But she and Elizabeth always stayed in contact with one another.

And after Elizabeth was widows, she would come visit her in New York.

And she also helped Elizabeth remember these stories that she used in her books of what had happened when they were out on the prairies.

And there were other women on posts, such as the laundresses.

And they also made excellent midwives and housekeepers and things on post.

So they had other jobs that they did as well.

They were valued, but they were in their own classification too.

And they lived a little bit separately.

Yes.

A slang term was "Sud's Row."

"Sud's Row" or "Sudsville."

My name is Wendy Pritchett, and I'm here to show you how we do some of the laundry, laundress stuff.

Today we're mending.

The military came up and said, "We have a lot of mending for you to do today."

So I've been sewing buttons, and then later I have to help sew the stripes on.

So I've got to do that.

So we've got a busy day ahead of us.

And we're here at Fort Larned Historical Site.

My name is Shea O'Sullivan.

I am a native Kansan.

My family came out here and settled in the 1800s.

And I went to be a history major at KU, so that's part of the reason why this is interesting.

And I came to Fort Larned as a kid once before.

And so when the opportunity came up to volunteer, I was kind of excited.

Well, the laundress did a lot of the soldiers' washing and their mending.

And they had stains on their clothing.

They had to try and get that out for them.

The laundress basically was a very hard job to do.

Their hands would blister and hurt real bad.

And they would just ache times for them.

And they would have to use a washboard to scrub really hard to get the stains out and things like that.

I know they used borax for stains.

So that's kind of what they did.

And they got paid by the higher rank of the military.

The men would have to pay $2 a month.

And the privates and things like that would have to, they would pay $1 a month.

And it would come out of their paycheck.

So yeah, that's how they got paid for that.

They made more, actually they made more than the military men because of that reason.

And it really upset the soldiers for that reason.

They had clean uniforms Yeah, exactly.

And buttons that stayed on.

So what kind of fabrics and stuff were they dealing with?

Mostly wool.

And then just the trouser materials and things like that.

Some linens and stuff like that too.

But what these women did was very hard for them to do.

I don't think the men could do what they did unless they had the backbone of the women supporting them with doing the cooking, the cleaning, the mending.

And oftentimes in really desolate conditions.

We're the kind of only women out here for miles.

So I think a lot of that hard work, typically in the historical narrative, goes unnoticed.

I've actually read a diary of a bunch of the pioneer women.

But it was the Oregon Trail.

Some of those stories in there is something else.

And they had to learn a lot.

A lot of them had children along the way.

Stuff like that too.

So prairie life was not easy on the women.

A lot of diseases.

I don't blame her.

The water was really big.

And then they had to deal with snakes and bad storms.

It's an interesting period of history that I hadn't really previously gotten into.

But with the Santa Fe Trail and the fact that this fort was needed to help guide people on the trail, it's part of the founding of the West.

It's cool to come and see these places that are still so preserved like they were when they were in their heyday.

I think women out here being so far removed from the infrastructure and the cities and the culture back east, they had to kind of step up and do and be more out here just because there's nobody else out here on the plains.

That's my idea of how women were out here.

It's an honor.

It feels really cool because I don't know how many stories of the pioneer women that we just don't know.

We've lost.

Nobody's recorded.

And they made all the difference.

[music] But yeah, the number of women, of course, the women often not talked about were the women of the hog branches.

But every fort had one.

And you can deny it as much as you want, but every fort had one.

That's right.

And they were some distance away from the fort.

And of course, these were women of ill repute.

And they lived in nothing more than the hovels.

And it was many a soldier that lost a better part of a month's pay in an evening spent at a hog ranch.

They had to be off post in a certain distance.

Yeah.

Well, usually not on a reservation.

Yeah.

They weren't sanctioned by the military, but as long as they stayed within means, they were allowed to coexist.

You know, as long as they didn't have to be called down too much for... Because, you know, there was drinking and gambling and everything going on.

And so people kind of get out of hand at times.

I portray Elizabeth Polly at Fort Hays.

And she was a nurse.

And her husband was a hospital steward.

But they were civilian employees.

Most of these women were not trained nurses.

They learned on the job.

And I think that's what Elizabeth Polly did.

But these women on the forts and weren't immune from diseases.

No.

Because it's the thing that we heard about in the 1860s, late 1860s, the cholera epidemics.

Right.

If they did pass away from a disease or died on the post, would they be interred in the military reservation cemetery?

Well, yes.

They primarily had one.

Now, if you get to someplace like Hays, they had a civilian cemetery and a military cemetery.

And often they lost children.

They would be buried there.

And there's this wonderful account of this one officer's wife that was out mourning her child.

And she looked up, because the cemetery was away from the confinement of the post.

And she looked up and there was an Indian.

That scared to pieced -but he realized what she was doing.

So he came and stood next to her and mourned with her.

And she was very taken by this.

And so she invited him back to her quarters for food, although it was served on the porch.

And then she also informed the guards of his kindness and to allow him to leave peacefully from the fort.

And a lot of the contact with Native Americans and the positive contact was made by the women and children.

One woman had given birth and had just about done her in.

And she was laying in bed with the baby, and it was crying.

She couldn't get it to stop.

And two or three Indian women entered.

They offered to take the child, and she was a bit reluctant.

But they quieted it, and they kind of showed her how to quiet the child.

And so she was quite grateful for that.

And it was, like I said, it was peaceful changes between the women and the children.

Ada Vogdas, who was known as a character, she swore she was just scared to death of Indians, but she wouldn't leave them alone.

She was either trying to trade something for a blanket or something.

But she invited Red Cloud, who was one of the noted Northern War Chiefs, to her house for tea.

I think a couple of other chiefs came with him, and they were just delighted with the little tidbits they got and the tea as something they had never had before.

She became friends with Red Cloud, of all people.

And so these were just, you know, they sound small to us, but it was a- Yeah, at that time.

You know, at that time, these were steps in a positive direction.

These women played an interesting role on post, and I always feel like they're so often forgotten.

But there's some excellent books out there that I would really recommend to be read.

So do you recall any that you could suggest for people to read?

Yeah.

You know, Libby wrote three books, Boots and Saddles, Tenting on the Plains and Following the Guidon, Alice Baldwin's book, and Ellen McGowan Biddle, Elizabeth Reynolds Burt.

Her husband was very well known in the military, In fact, he was still around at the turn of the century.

And Margaret Carrington and Katherine Gibson and Alice Greerson and Lydia Spencer Lane, she was down in New Mexico.

In fact, they were at a small fort.

It was in the process of being closed.

And he wrote out and left her in command of a sergeant and ten men.

And she took care of the money and everything.

And boy, she was so proud.

She said she'd have died to protect that money that she was entrusted with.

And then Patricia Y. Stallard wrote what is considered the Bible, if you can find it.

It's called Glittering Misery about what it was like.

You know, you had all this pomp and circumstances and these dances and these men.

These women love to go out and watch their husbands ride parade, you know, in late afternoon.

And listen to the band.

You know, listen to the band.

And, you know, it wasn't one of Custer's when they left the band, like the music.

The girl I left behind me.

Yeah, the girl I left behind me.

Yeah, they wrote out from Fort Abraham Lincoln to the girl I left behind me.

And sometimes, and Libby did, she wrote out a certain distance with him that time and then came back.

She said life became as quiet as death had set itself, set its seal upon the door when those men were gone.

Because you didn't know where they were, what was happening to them.

You know, they would try to comfort each other by having reading clubs or, you know, tea.

And probably Bible study.

Yeah.

And during these times, still, he wrote back to post.

Libby said we lived and died to the sound of the bugle.

But it was certainly a unique life.

Few women got to experience, and that's why by reading their accounts and the like, it's so interesting and important because this wasn't a large group of women in comparison to all the women that came west.

And so they had a really unique and different look at life and out here.

The thing with the Little Bighorn, which I found interesting too, is they had had two previous campaigns, the two previous summers.

And the men had always come home safely, and they expected them to come home safely this time.

And they didn't.

And the men did as well.

Libby went with the captain to notify these women.

She said that was her job.

She was going to try to be comfort, you know.

But then she suffered greatly later.

And, well, for instance, like with Libby, because there's a lot of people that don't like him.

Yeah.

But I've talked to very few that don't like her.

She was kind of the grace and-- She had the class.

She had the grace and class that kind of elevated him a bit too.

And I think he knew that.

I think he did too.

She is someone to be admired.

And her books are excellent reads historically and personally and timely.

And I believe her books stand the test of time.

And I feel like some of these other women's books stand the test of time, that things can be learned for endurance and loyalty and grace under pressure.

So these women were our courageous forebearers that led distinctive and unique lives.

And while they may not have been prepared for it, they endured it and they made something out of it.

And they came away with important lessons to handle the fear they sometimes had and how they soldiered on.

I go back to a statement that I made earlier that Libby said.

She said, "We lived and died to the sound of the bugles."

And they were willing to do that.

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