Elizabeth Bacon Custer led the Seventh Cavalry in pursuit of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne who refused to be confined to the reservation system. After her husband's column was wiped out at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876, many in the press, Army, and government criticized Custer for blundering into a massacre. President Ulysses S. Grant publicly blamed Custer for the disaster. Fearing that her husband was to be made a scapegoat by history, Libbie launched a one-woman campaign to rehabilitate her husband's image. Her assistance to the author of the first Custer biography,
Growltiger's Last Stand is "somewhat missing" after an incident involving a Siamese cat. "Growltiger's Last Stand" describes how he meets his fate when he least expects it. Besides the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical setting in "Cats" the English composer Humphrey Searle composed a musical setting of "Growltiger's Last Stand" as the second of his "Two Practical Cats" for speaker, flute, cello and guitar. In the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Cats" the poem is used nearly verbatim as the lyrics of the song, except that one stanza has been cut. The song appears as a reminiscence by "Gus the Theatre Cat", who "once played