By command of Major-General Sheridan. J. SCHUYLER CROSBY, Brevet Lieut.-Col. A. D. C. A. A. A. General. It is expressly stated that the detachment of cavalry (escorting Brevet Major-General Eugene A. Carr, Major, Fifth Cavalry, to his regiment) was “_under the command of Brevet Lieut.-Col. Louis H. Carpenter, Captain, Tenth Cavalry_.” The records show, further, that Brevet Lieut.-Col. Louis H. Carpenter was brevetted colonel for gallant and meritorious conduct in the engagement with Indians on Beaver Creek, Kansas, October 18, 1868. This appointment was made on the recommendation of General Sheridan, and was undoubtedly conferred on this officer as being in command of the troops during the fight. Others behaved gallantly and their conduct deserved recognition, but this was the only brevet given at the time. LOUIS H. CARPENTER. CHAPTER TEN The Battle of the Washita I. Custer and the Famous Seventh Cavalry A fighter of fighters and a soldier of soldiers was that _beau sabreur_ of the American Army, George Armstrong Custer, “Old Curly” to his men, “The White Chief with the Yellow Hair,” or, more briefly, “Long Hair” to the Indians. From Bull Run to Appomattox his career was fairly meteoric. Second lieutenant in the Army of the Potomac at twenty-one, fresh from West Point, a brigadier-general at twenty-three, a major-general at twenty-four, and commander of the third cavalry division, which, in the six months preceding the downfall of the Confederacy, had taken one hundred and eleven guns, sixty-five battle-flags, and over ten thousand prisoners of war, without losing a flag or gun, and without a failure to capture whatever it went for—such was his record.[45] I have heard my father tell of the impression made by the dashing young soldier whose spirited horse ran away on Pennsylvania Avenue at the Grand Review in Washington, in spite of the efforts of his rider—a peerless horseman—to restrain him. Custer’s hat fell off, his long, yellow curls floated back in the wind, making a dashing and romantic picture. He was a man of superb physique and magnificent strength. I saw him when I was a boy, and I have never forgotten him. His devoted wife, in one of the three charming books in which she has told the deathless romance of their married life on the frontier, relates how, on one occasion, riding by her side, with his left arm he lifted her out of the saddle high in the air, held her there for a moment or two, then gently replaced her on her horse. No fatigue was too great for him to surmount, no duty, however arduous, ever caused him to give back.[46]