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,
5th Cavalry Regiment the Great Plains, and against the Utes in Colorado. On 8 July 1869 at the Republican River in Kansas, Cpl John Kyle made a valiant stand against attacking Indians resulting in him receiving the Medal of Honor. The 5th was then sent to Arizona, where it defeated the Apaches in 95 engagements from 1871 to 1874. Due to these actions, General William Sherman told a committee from the United States House of Representatives that "the services of the 5th Cavalry Regiment in Arizona were unequaled by that of any Cavalry Regiment." After General Custer and 264 of his men died