Just Two Months Before Little Bighorn, Custer, Briefly In Washington, Rushes to Return West Due to "Serious Indian Difficulties"

Background

Custer, who so ardently believed in destiny, saw in the delay of a family visit, he says here, fate’s hand at work - though, considering what was to come, what he glimpsed was surely through a glass darkly. Back in Washington, DC, he writes to his cousin that he cannot meet – “fate surely intended that we are not to see each other at present” – for, he informs her, “serious Indian difficulties call me quickly to Dacotes [Dakota].” He expects to start tomorrow evening, and “as time is important” he must select the quickest route, even if it means barely having a stopover with his mother on his way west. 

But he will be back, he says ironically, in the fall, and then, unhurriedly, they will enjoy, at last, a good visit. Write him, for now, at Fort Lincoln, he closes in a rush – dashing off to Fort Lincoln, to the Dakotas, to the Great Sioux War, to his ultimate destiny on June 25th, at the Little Bighorn. He would not return from that engagement to New York, or anywhere else. Instead he would enter history in a way not even he, vainglorious and ever but once lucky, could have imagined.

Physical Description

Autograph Letter Signed (“George”), 2 pages, recto and verso, octavo, The Arlington, Washington, D.C., Sunday [April 30] 1876. To his cousin, Augusta Ward Frary.