The isolation of the cavalry posts makes them quite inaccessible to travelers, and the exposure incident to meeting warlike Indians does not tempt the visits of friends or even of the venturesome tourist. Our life, therefore, was often as separate from the rest of the world as if we had been living on an island in the ocean (Custer, xxix).

This paper will examine the lives of officers' wives in the Frontier Army in order to show that these remarkable women had to adjust their entire form of being in order to succeed at what was a largely thankless and inordinately difficult task: setting up a home within a military outpost. These women were confronted by the prevailing thought of the time that held that a woman's role in society was creating a moral oasis within the home for their husband and children. Conditions in Army outposts, with the squalor, the cramped quarters, and the constant moving did not lend themselves to the separation of the public and private spheres that society dictated. The officers wives had to adjust to the Army reality in order to succeed; those that attempted to adhere to the expected codes of feminine behavior that prevailed in the late nineteenth century were doomed to lead lives of "glittering misery"

Childbirth was yet another occasion in which the officers' wives had to overcome their upbringing and the prevailing norms of the day. "Though they had been brought up in a culture that disapproved of such conduct, public 'exposure' during pregnancy became for them a rather normal occurrence" (Nacy, 76). The letters of Frontier Army wives reveal that these women remained openly a part of their garrisons' society during their pregnancy, something that would be unthinkable in the East. Additionally, during a period in which middle and upper-class women were ceasing to use midwives, officers' wives increasingly turned to this use and in fact many of them became midwives out of necessity and due to their experience in the matter (Nacy, 76). The complications associated with giving birth in the frontier, and the dismal conditions in which childbirth occurred, led many an officer's wife (and one in particular) to vehemently state "I would rather die than have another child" (Nacy, 89).

that had to be considered, in the West officers wives