Aunt Lillie continued, “Well after that he kept trying to get jobs with the railway, which was being built across the Midwest, and he spent quite a bit of time in Brainard, and did a bit of writing from there too. He had a new pen name, Frontier, and I kept all the clippings from the things he wrote then too.

"Most of them were in the St. Paul Pioneer, as he was a syndicated writer, and when he wrote for one paper, a lot of the others took up his work too. So that is pretty much how we kept track of him. He didn’t write often, and hardly ever came home.”

I had a look at the Pioneer columns. “He seems to spend a lot of his writing time talking about the Indians, and he didn’t seem to like them much.”

“Well, he felt sorry for them, but didn’t think they were very good people. He wrote admiringly of Indian life and lamented over what he thought was their predestined fate. He tried to get them a fair deal over their money from the government. But, he supported corralling the Indians to ease white civilization’s advancement. And he thought they were dirty, shiftless, thieving and not the sort of people you want living next door to you. I think it was a pretty typical opinion of lots of people,” Grandma said, implying that she was one who agreed with him.

“Well, he moved to Bismarck in 1873, and some people say it was because he already knew the man who wanted to start a newspaper there, Col. Lounsberry, but he also apparently had a friend called John Dunn from Brainerd who had moved there, and was encouraging him to come.”

“How do you know about Mr. Dunn?”

“Well this is taking the story on too quickly, but they were the people that got his things that were brought back from the Little Big Horn, and I wanted them for your girls to have, so I wrote them a letter - the next March it was, almost a year after Mark died.”

“What did you say?”

“Well I found out who they were because my friend Mr. Watson of La Crosse had been on the train with this John Dunn, the druggist from Bismarck, who was supposed to be Mark’s best friend. In my letter I said that I had heard that Mr. Dunn had in his possession your father’s trunk and valise and whatever it was that he left, and that I understood that he had said he wanted to send them on to his little girls, but he didn’t know where you lived.

"So I gave him our address, and said that I would be very much obliged if he would send the things on. I said I didn’t expect they were of much value, but they would be very much appreciated by you two in the future. I specifically asked for any writing that he had done, and I said there were likely to be some newspapers printed here when Brick Pomeroy was proprietor and I knew somebody who would pay money for them. I thought they might be in his trunk, and suggested that he ask Mr. Lounsberry if he knew where the trunk with the newspapers might be. I told him how sad we all were over Mark's senseless and terrible death among the Indians. And I told them that he had left two very nice little girls, aged 13 and 15. I told him that you had been living with us for about ten years, and that we were very much attached to you.”

Hannah sniffed a bit, and Cora Sue put her arm around her. “Don’t cry Grandma,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“They did know how to contact us! Col. Lounsberry certainly did. It was on the day that the Bismarck Tribune had the story that I got the telegram from the Bismarck Tribune office informing us of his death. They knew where we were. They only pretended. Anyway, you are wanting to know what I said in my letter. I told him that Mattie was a fine musician, and you were both good scholars and I told him that Mr. Bennett of the Herald had given a donation to each of you which was going to be a big help in your education. I asked them to send the trunk and things, whatever there was to me, and then I put my name and address in.”

“Did you get them?”

“No, I did not, and I can tell you that I think there is more than meets the eye in all of this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think that his last writing said things about Custer that the newspaper man and his friend in Bismarck didn’t want people to know about, and so they didn’t want us to get our hands on them. I think that man Lounsberry told him not to reply or send us his things.”

“What sort of things are you thinking?”

“Well, maybe he said that he thought that Custer was drunk. Maybe he said that he was foolish. Maybe he said that he did what he did, because of the personal glory for him, rather than taking into consideration the safety of his men. I do know what Mr. Pomeroy thought, because one of his relatives sent me a copy of his article in his new paper, called Pomeoy’s Democrat. It was just a month after the massacre. He said that Mark had been employed by him privately to send information, and that he had sent a letter saying he anticipated disaster to the troops because of their ignorance of the method of warfare and their limited numbers.”

“I know from my reading about what the scouts said, that they all told him that there were too many hostile Indians, and they didn’t have a chance,” I added. “And one of the Indians said that he drank way too much whiskey - and she implied he was drinking just as he went into the attack.”

“And you know, that sentence that they always use in articles about him -'We leave the Rosebud tomorrow and by the time this reaches you we will have met and fought the red devils with what result remains to bee seen. I go with Custer and will be at the death.' I don’t think he wrote that on June 21st, as they implied he did. I think he wrote it on the 25th just as he was going into the battle, and yet they say there was no writing from him after the 21st.  If you look carefully at his dispatch for the 21st, they were on the Powder River, not the Rosebud. And in that statement, he sounded as if he really doubted that they would survive. Up til then he had been so positive that they would have an easy time of it.”

“Do you think he had a premonition that he would die?”

“Well, here is a letter I got from him just before he left,” said Grandma. This was something entirely new to us, and she drew the envelope out of the silver tobacco box and we saw our Pa’s handwriting again for the first time in five years.

“I didn’t show you it at the time, because I thought he was fussing for nothing,” Grandma defended herself. “And then after he died, it turned out that he had nothing, and not a penny or a pencil did they send on to your girls. I think those so called friends of his in Bismarck will have his things. But I did try to get them for you.”

She was very shaken, when she took the letter out and handed it to me. I opened the letter and Cora Sue came and read it with me over my shoulder.

15th June, 1876

Dear Hannah,

I am going with Custer into the Indian war as a correspondent for the New York Herald and Chicago Tribune and I should also be doing some sketching and writing for Harper’s Weekly. We’ll be leaving in about a week’s time. But as there will be a certain risk in this sort of enterprise, I thought I would like to appraise you of what I have in mind for the girls.

I made a claim in the Black Hills, when I visited them last year, and you know they are full of gold. I don’t have the money to work it, but it should be worth something. And I also have a share in a coal mine near Bismarck, and I think that will be worth enough to educate and take care of the children. If I come through this all right, I expect we can have a good future.

I wish I could say I had been a better father to them. I seemed to always have been unfortunate as far as money matters go, all through life, and yet I preserved a healthy good nature through all my bad luck, and was just beginning to get a foot hold when stricken down by the red skins.

Give the girls a kiss from their daddy and tell them that I love them very much.

Love from Mark