On his deathbed in 1866, Libbie Custer’s father, Judge Daniel Bacon, made a most unsettling observation. “Armstrong was born a soldier,” he told his daughter, “and it is better even if you sorrow your life long that he die as he would wish, a soldier.” It was not a sentiment Libbie shared. “Oh Autie,” she wrote her husband during the Civil War, “we must die together. Better the humblest life together than the loftiest, divided.”
