Small Wonders--A blizzard where the road ended

General George and Elizabeth Custer

The moon's out right now, so bright the stars are hidden in its glow. 

Be not deceived. It's winter, and that bright and shiny stillness skimming the land'll turn on us, as it has before, and whirl us all into blizzard-y madness. 

My memory may be foul, but we haven't a bender for a couple of years now, a tempest, a two or three-day massacre that stops everything dead, puts the entire region in its place and keeps us there for so long we'd feel downright imprisoned if it weren't for the madness just outside our doors and windows. 

Miss those massive blizzards, do you? Tell you what--do a little reading sometime and you'll start dreaming of daffodils. Elizabeth Custer was out here with her famous husband, late winter 1874, two years before Little Big Horn. Her rock star husband--when the man got a haircut, he liked to give his blonde locks to all the women travelling with the Seventh Cavalry--General George Custer was, as they say, under the weather, with something akin to pneumonia. 

His darling wife Elizabeth tended him faithfully--in truth the two of them, Armstrong and Libby, seemed a textbook model of wedded bliss. Yankton was a brand new town back then, its citizens recently settled. Most of the Army brass stayed at a place called The St. Charles Hotel, but the General and his sweetheart got themselves a little half-finished shack just out of town, adjacent to the place where the Seventh set up their camp. Once the snow started falling, Custer chased his men into town, telling them to knock on doors and stay with townspeople. They did. 

Some, I suppose, may have sensed it coming--the Yanktons probably, the only ones with any history here. But Libby claims in the way she wrote up the story that she had no clue what was coming. When rain turned to snow and wind started bellowing, when what they saw out there before them was a sheet of endless stinging whiteness, she knew it was no passing fancy.

Make no mistake--Libby Custer was a writer. She knew how to handle pen a good deal better than her husband, or so it seems, knew when to ride into battle. But she tended to look on the bright side of things, and describe them delightfully.  

But this storm, right here in Yankton, wore no smiley face. And the two of them--she and her sickly husband--weren't alone for most of the battering.

During the night, I was startled by hearing a dull sound, as of something falling heavily. Flying down the stairs, I found the servants prying open the frozen and snow-packed door to admit a half dozen soldiers who, becoming bewildered by the snow, had been saved by the faint light we had placed in the window. After that several, came and two were badly frozen. 

Meanwhile, she says, "The snow continued to come down in great swirling sheets, while the wind shook the loose window casings and sometimes broke in the door." Warn't fun, is what she's saying. A horse came up close and whinnied, "almost human in its appeal," she remember, so human-like, in fact, that they pried the door open only to find it was horse "peering in for help," giving her an eye she claims "haunted me long afterwards." 

Occasionally, a lost dog "lifted up a howl of distress under our window," she says. Worse, the General's beloved greyhound puppies, despite the attention the soldier specially commissioned to care for them, had frozen "one by one."

In the middle of the storm, darkness all around, the wind pummeling a cabin could hardly be a fortress until it had to be, Libby said she "realized, . . .that we were as isolated from the town, and even the camp, not a mile distant, as if we had been on an island in the river." There they were in the heart of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the tumultuous privacy of storm."

It was a blizzard, right here on April 14, 1874, just outside of Yankton, and it was beyond brutal. But today it's almost totally forgotten, buried itself by horrors General George Armstrong Custer perpetuated at the Sand Creek massacre, and then suffered himself on a hill just above the Little Big Horn. 

That unfinished two-story cabin is long gone, I'm sure, just like the St. Charles Hotel. But if it wasn't, I'm not sure if the Yankton Chamber of Commerce would put it on their webpage--you know, "George Amstrong Custer slept here." I'm dubious. 

Libby would, I'm sure. Libby remembered. Once her husband was was killed in battle, she kept putting ink on the page because she wanted so badly not to let anyone forget.

But Yankton--like all of us--was different back then, much different. It was the place where the frontier began. 

Listen. The Seventh Cavalry took a Dakota Southern train out of Sioux City and into Yankton. "After so many days in the car," Libby says, opening sentence, "we were glad to stop on an open plain." They were, she says, "about a mile from the town of Yankton," she says, and then, "where the road ended."

Get that? "Where the road ended." Right there in Yankton, she says, "the road ended."