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,
The Great Sioux Massacre shoots so he will not have to starve on an Indian Reservation. Received by his commanding officer Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, Benton is gently told his first encounter with the enemy has been disastrous but Custer confirms that he did the right thing by following Dakota's advice not to pursue the hostile party. Custer invites Benton to a dress dance held at the fort that evening and dismisses the distraught Mr. Turner by telling him that he will visit the hostile Indians who abducted his wife in the morning. Benton's fiancee Caroline Reno is at the fort, but their