Susan Elizabeth Tinsley Mundy: A Bold Life in Black and White History

Family Origins and the Fight for Freedom

Once the Tinsley family’s freedom was secured, they also leveraged a bit of the former enslaver’s wealth. Warrick and January, being acknowledged in that contested will as William Tinsley’s sons, each received a parcel of land. Around 1850 they were bequeathed roughly 50 acres near Sugar Camp Branch in Flat Lick – a tangible inheritance wrested from their absentee father’s estate . It took until 1858 for the survey to go through (freedom may have rung in 1853, but bureaucracy still took its sweet time), but by that year a 50-acre tract was surveyed for them. Warrick even expanded his stake, purchasing an additional 15 acres in 1862 . All told, Warrick Tinsley amassed about 65 acres of land in Knox County – on paper a modest farm, but consider this: 65 acres was real wealth for a newly freed Black man in the 1860s. (In today’s money, with land in Kentucky selling for a few thousand dollars per acre, that inheritance would easily be worth well over a quarter-million dollars .) On that land, Warrick and his family could finally live and work for themselves. And indeed, Susan Elizabeth Tinsley was born into that hard-won freedom. Unlike her father and grandma, Susan never woke up a slave – she was the first generation of Tinsleys born free, and she carried that distinction the rest of her days.

Susan grew up in a household that was free but certainly not free of struggle. The Tinsleys were a large blended clan. Warrick’s first partner (Susan’s mother Mary) had at least four children with him – Charles, Fannie, Susan, and Sarah “Alabama” Tinsley. Young Susan was smack in the middle of this brood. Notably, her older sister Fannie Tinsley (born about 1847) carried their grandmother’s name – a deliberate tribute to the matriarch who had endured so much. (So when earlier drafts mentioned a mysterious “Fanny Jr.,” know that this was not a child of Susan’s but rather her sister Fannie, named in honor of grandma Fanny.) The family’s ties to the Goins – a free Black family in the area – are hinted at in the records; the 1850 census even shows a 13-year-old Frances Goins living in Warrick Tinsley’s household . It’s a clue that Susan’s mother Mary was likely connected to the Goins clan (perhaps Frances was Mary’s kin). But since 19th-century record-keepers weren’t exactly meticulous with Black folks’ maiden names, Mary’s exact origins remain an educated guess. We flag that link as probable but not proven. What is certain is that Susan grew up hearing firsthand how her family had fought for freedom and land. That legacy must have instilled in her a no-nonsense understanding: liberty and dignity are things you have to stand up and claim, because nobody – certainly no white man – was going to just hand them over.

From Flat Lick to Fort Leavenworth: Cooking for the Custers

By the late 1860s, America was supposedly “free” from sea to shining sea – the Civil War was over, slavery was abolished on paper, and restless young men (and a few daring women) were lighting out for the territories. Susan, now a young Black woman of about 20, decided to seize her future out West. Sometime around 1869, she left Kentucky and headed to Leavenworth, Kansas, a frontier military town bristling with blue-coated soldiers and their families. There, at Fort Leavenworth, destiny came knocking in the form of a job opportunity with one of the most famous (or infamous) Army couples in the land: General George Armstrong Custer and his wife Elizabeth “Libbie” Custer. The Custers needed a cook, and Susan had the skills and spine for the job. She was hired into the Custer household, joining the small retinue of Black servants who kept the Custers fed and comfortable on the frontier .

Now, let’s get one thing straight because history has confused these details before: Susan Tinsley Mundy was not the same person as Eliza Brown, though both were Black women who cooked for Custer. Eliza Brown (later Eliza Denison) was Custer’s celebrated cook during the Civil War – a formerly enslaved Virginian who attached herself to the Union Army and ended up running Custer’s camp kitchen . But by the time Susan arrived in Kansas, Eliza Brown had moved on. (Word is, Libbie Custer grew jealous of Eliza’s influence and showed her the door not long after the war . Libbie wasn’t about to let any Black woman command too much respect under her roof.) Thus, when Susan took over in the Custer kitchen, she had big shoes to fill – Eliza was a legend – but Susan proved more than up to the task. In the Custer household from about 1869 until 1875, Susan was famous for her steady, unflappable presence and her mouth-watering cooking . Imagine the scene: General Custer, flamboyant and hot-headed, might ride home to Fort Leavenworth in a foul mood after some skirmish or ego-bruising, and there was Susan in the kitchen, calm and collected, turning out a perfect roast goose or a savory stew to soothe the beast. Libbie Custer herself, known to be persnickety, valued Susan’s service – and if Libbie was happy, that meant Susan was excellent at her job. The family has preserved recipes from Susan’s repertoire, passed down like heirlooms. We’re talking stick-to-your-ribs fare: a roasted goose with rich stuffing, “hamburger steak” patties smothered in gravy, and her signature vegetable soup loaded with garden produce . (Her vegetable soup recipe, still in the family, calls for no fewer than seven types of veggies plus a dash of sugar – don’t sleep on the secret ingredient! ) These dishes fed more than bodies; they became part of the Mundy family story. Decades later, Susan’s grandchildren would recall how “Grandma Mundy” cooked for General Custer, relaying with pride and a bit of humor that the general might not have met his end at Little Bighorn in 1876 if he’d had the good sense to keep Susan around to cook and counsel him .

Indeed, Susan left the Custers’ employ in 1875, which, as fate would have it, was just a year or so before Custer’s fatal Last Stand . Whether she anticipated the coming tragedy or simply decided it was time to move on, we can’t say. But we can certainly speculate that a smart Black woman like Susan knew when to get off a sinking ship. By 1875, Custer was gearing up to march against the Lakota and Cheyenne, itching for glory – and Susan had zero interest in following him into that folly. Instead, she chose her own path. And that path soon led her to an even wilder chapter of life involving love, danger, and a journey far beyond Kansas. (Side note: before she departed Fort Leavenworth, Susan had become a mother. She gave birth to a son named Henry in the early 1870s, out of wedlock. On official papers the boy was called Henry “Saunders,” taking the surname of who-knows-who . The truth of Henry’s paternity has been lost to time – was his father a soldier at the fort? A member of a neighboring Black family named Saunders whom Susan perhaps adopted the child from? The family has floated a few theories, but nothing can be confirmed, so we’ll stick to what’s known: Henry was Susan’s child, and she raised him on her own in those Kansas years. He would remain an important part of her story as they headed west.)

Marriage to a Buffalo Soldier

While working in Kansas, Susan met a man who was every bit as bold and pioneering as she was. William Lafayette “Lafe” Mundy crossed Susan’s path – and soon won her heart. Lafayette Mundy was a Union Army veteran of the Civil War and had continued his military service on the frontier as one of the famed “Buffalo Soldiers,” the Black cavalry troops charged with policing the Wild West . He was a Kentucky native himself, a few years older than Susan, and had seen both the terrors of war and the harsh duty of keeping peace (or what passed for peace) on America’s frontiers. Susan and Lafe likely met around Fort Leavenworth, where some Buffalo Soldier regiments were stationed post-war. They decided to make it official, and in 1873 Susan traveled south to Jack County, Texas – where Lafe’s unit was then posted – to marry him. In the spring of 1873, deep in the heart of Texas, Susan Tinsley became Mrs. Mundy. It was an unlikely match in the eyes of many: she a domestic worker and former cook to a general’s family, he a battle-hardened Army sergeant. But it made perfect sense to them. Both were Black Kentuckians trying to stake a claim in a world that rarely gave Black folks any breaks. Together, they set out to build a life on the edges of “civilization.”

For a time, the Mundys lived the peripatetic life of a military family on the southwestern frontier. The mid-1870s saw violent upheavals in West Texas and New Mexico – and the Mundys were right in the thick of it. The Army sent Buffalo Soldiers to patrol the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where conflicts like the Salt War of 1877 were raging. (In that episode, Mexican-American locals in El Paso rose up against Anglo monopolists over access to salt deposits – an early showdown against economic injustice. The U.S. Army, Buffalo Soldiers included, got involved to quell the violence.) Lafayette Mundy’s unit was drawn into these frays, and he crossed into Mexico on duty during the turmoil. Rather than sit idle in Texas, Susan went with him into Chihuahua, Mexico. Picture that: a Black American couple in their twenties, speaking English in a land of Spanish and Apache, navigating a foreign country that was actually more legally tolerant of Black people than their own (Mexico had no Jim Crow and had abolished slavery decades earlier). In March 1877, in Chihuahua, Susan gave birth to her second son, Thaddeus Sumner Mundy . (Family lore says the boy was first named “Cladius” at birth – perhaps a recording error or a quickly abandoned name – but he grew up as Thaddeus Sumner Mundy.) That a Black child was born free in Mexico because his Black parents were literally safer outside the United States at that moment is a rich historical irony not lost on the family.

Once the dust settled from the Salt War era, the Mundys returned stateside. By 1878, they were back in the U.S., and eventually they made their way to Lafe’s old stomping grounds in Kansas. There, Susan tried to establish a stable home for young Thaddeus and Henry (who was now a school-age boy). Lafe, however, was a rolling stone. Army life had been his structure, and outside of it he struggled. The history here is a bit hazy, but by the mid- to late-1880s Susan and Lafayette Mundy’s marriage fell apart. They separated – whether formally or just by going their own ways is unclear – and Lafe drifted away. He later remarried (taking up with another woman, which tells us Susan and he were truly done) and eventually died sometime in the early 1900s, far removed from Susan’s world. This was a painful personal chapter for Susan: after braving so much together, she and her Buffalo Soldier parted ways. Yet in that heartbreak lay a silver lining. Once unyoked from Lafe, Susan was free to pursue her own ambitions – and she had plenty. The next phase of her life would unfold on her terms, not as someone’s servant or someone’s wife, but as her own woman. And it would unfold in a place that was itself on the cusp of great change: Montana.

Heading West to Montana

By the late 1880s, the western frontier was closing, but opportunities still beckoned in places like Montana – especially for those willing to work hard and carve out a niche. Henry, Susan’s elder son, was now a strapping young man itching for adventure. Like many Black cowboys of that era (yes, there were plenty of Black cowboys), Henry headed up the cattle trails and found his way to Montana, which was booming with open ranges, railroads, and mining camps. Henry rode herds and wrangled livestock across the northern plains, working as a cowboy in the wide expanses of Montana Territory. He eventually landed in the town of Helena, the bustling capital of the new state of Montana (statehood came in 1889) and a hub for miners, ranchers, and businessmen. With her son established there, Susan decided to follow. She had already ventured over a thousand miles from Kentucky to Texas to Mexico; what was a little farther north? Sometime around the late 1880s, she pulled up stakes in Kansas and moved to Montana to join Henry.

At first, Montana might have felt like another planet. The landscape was ruggedly beautiful – snow-capped peaks, pine forests, gold-laden streams – and the social landscape could be just as rugged. Black families were few and far between in Montana then, and racism certainly hadn’t stayed back East. But Susan had no intention of being anyone’s maid or washerwoman living in someone else’s attic. She was determined to be her own boss. To succeed, however, she had to be savvy. And so, upon arriving in Helena, Susan Tinsley Mundy effectively reinvented herself. She began going by the name “Elizabeth Mundy” or “Elizabeth Miller”, often styling herself as Mrs. Elizabeth Miller, a widow . Why the alias? Well, consider the predicament: Susan was still legally married (though estranged), and under the sexist laws of the time a married woman’s property rights were murky at best. If she tried to buy land or run a business, some busybody could question her absent husband’s claim or authority. But a widow – ah, a widow was a respectable woman with full control of her affairs, not beholden to any man. By calling herself a widow and even adopting a new last name, Susan deftly sidestepped the era’s gender biases. As “Widow Elizabeth Miller,” she could make contracts, run boarding houses, and stake mining claims without a husband’s interference. It was an ingenious form of self-emancipation within the confines of the law. (For the record, there was never an actual “Henry Miller” in the picture – no marriage certificate for such a person exists. The name was a convenient fiction, and one Susan maintained with a straight face. When neighbors in Helena addressed her as Mrs. Miller, she answered to it, and no one was the wiser.)

Freed from both the literal chains of slavery and the figurative chains of coverture (that’s the fancy word for oppressive marriage laws), Susan/Elizabeth thrived in Montana. She opened one or more boarding houses – essentially early bed-and-breakfasts for miners, laborers, and travelers. As a Black woman in the 1890s, she wasn’t going to be welcomed as a restaurateur on Main Street, but running a boarding house was a way to make money feeding and housing workers who needed a place to stay. And nobody ran a kitchen better than she did. Her establishments developed a solid reputation for hearty meals and clean lodgings. Not content with just hospitality, Elizabeth Miller also dipped her toes into Montana’s chief economic boom: mining. She partnered with a white woman named Margaret Dooney to file a claim on a gold lode they dubbed the “Winona Lode.” Imagine the audacity: two women (one Black, one Irish-American) going out to the hills with pick and shovel, declaring that a slice of ore-bearing rock was theirs. It was virtually unheard of, but they did it. Owning a share of a mine was speculative – it might make you rich, or it might yield nothing – but the very act of claiming it was a bold assertion that yes, Black women can play this game too. Elizabeth was staking her claim, literally and figuratively, in Montana’s future.

Life in Helena was dynamic, but Susan’s path also took her to other Montana towns when opportunity knocked. In the early 1890s, she spent time in Bozeman, a town growing fast thanks to agriculture and the railroad. There, she found an unlikely yet practical gig: cook for a brothel. And not just any brothel – Lizzie Woods’ establishment was one of Bozeman’s most well-known “houses of ill fame,” run by the savvy madam Lizzie Woods who catered to gentlemen (and plenty of rowdy cowboys) on Bozeman’s East Mendenhall Street . Now, let’s talk context: a Victorian moralist might clutch their pearls at the thought of a respectable woman working in a brothel, but Susan understood the deal. For a Black woman in Montana, a job was a job, and a cook’s position in a busy bordello was honest, steady work. She wasn’t selling her body; she was selling her fried chicken and hot biscuits to hungry patrons and employees. In many ways, the kitchen of a brothel was one of the few kitchens in town where a Black cook could rule without discrimination – the customers were there for other services, and as long as the food was good, nobody cared that the chef was a Black woman. By day, Susan mingled with Bozeman’s Black community at church or around town, and by night she stirred stew pots under the red lights. Lizzie Woods, the madam, treated her valued cook with respect (far more, no doubt, than most white employers would) . It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: Lizzie’s girls and clients got first-rate meals, and Susan got a reliable income and lodging. In true Susan fashion, she excelled. The fact that she navigated such a notorious environment with her dignity intact speaks volumes. She was known to be tough but kind – the sort of woman who could ladle out soup to a drunken miner at 3 AM with one hand and swat his wandering fingers away with the other, all without spilling a drop. That is skill.

Reinvention and Resilience in Helena

By the turn of the century, Susan had firmly established herself in Helena’s Black community – under her chosen name Elizabeth Miller. The charade of widowhood continued to serve her well. In Helena she was often simply “Mrs. Miller,” proprietress of a respected boarding house and a familiar face in town. She participated in church activities and likely joined the local club of Black women who organized to help one another in times of need. If any curious soul ever inquired about her late husband, Mrs. Miller would politely furnish a vague answer about “Mr. Miller’s passing,” then change the subject. There is no record anyone ever blew her cover. Elizabeth Miller commanded respect, and she gave respect in return. She hosted all sorts under her roof – Black railroad porters, white ranch hands, itinerant laborers. If you paid your rent and behaved, you were welcome at Mrs. Miller’s place.

Through all these reinventions, one thing never changed: Susan’s devotion to her family. Her sons grew up to make families of their own. Thaddeus Mundy, whom she had carried as a baby through war-torn Texas and Mexico, settled in Helena and became a valued employee of the railroad, working as a porter and raising four daughters – Susan’s granddaughters – who adored their Grandma. Henry, the firstborn, had perhaps inherited his mother’s restless spirit. After cowboying for years, he wandered further west and northwest. Family accounts suggest Henry eventually wound up in Montana’s neighbor states or possibly Canada for a spell, before coming back to Montana. (His trail is a bit obscure; he might not have liked to stay in one place too long.) But in her later years, Susan was closest to Thaddeus and his girls in Helena. They were her pride and joy. Neighbors recall a tall Black woman in a neat dress and bonnet walking those little girls to school, or taking them to church on Sunday – the image of propriety, with just a hint of fierceness in her eyes that said, “These are my kin and I dare you to show them anything but kindness.”

As the 1910s rolled in, Susan – now in her 60s – had outlived most of her contemporaries. She’d been born under President Zachary Taylor; now it was Woodrow Wilson in the White House. She’d gone from enslavement being legal, to enslavement being vanquished, to seeing Black people win elected office during Reconstruction, and then watch those rights cruelly rolled back under Jim Crow. Montana itself wasn’t exactly an oasis of equality. Life had taken a toll on her. The years of physical labor (cooking over hot stoves, washing, cleaning, trudging across prairies) and emotional strain (two wars, a broken marriage, constant racial prejudice) began to show. By 1918, Susan’s health – both mental and physical – was deteriorating. She had trouble sleeping; sometimes she seemed disoriented or depressed. There were whispers around Helena that Mrs. Miller wasn’t quite herself. In those days, there was little understanding or support for mental health, especially for elderly Black women. What happened next is a somber chapter of her story: Susan was declared legally insane and committed to the Montana State Insane Asylum at Warm Springs in June 1918 . The local Helena newspaper noted the event in a small blurb – the kind of terse notice reserved for society’s cast-offs: Elizabeth Miller, a colored woman of this city, was taken to Warm Springs for treatment. We can only imagine the pain and confusion she must have felt. After decades of independence, she was now effectively incarcerated in a mental hospital. Her family, likely unable to care for her severe needs at home, had to make this heart-wrenching decision.

At Warm Springs State Hospital, Susan lived out her final years. The asylum was a sterile, imposing place in the Deer Lodge Valley, where the “incurables” of society were tucked away. Yet even there, Susan found a sense of peace in her twilight. Her son Thaddeus visited when he could, bringing along her granddaughters. In fact, Thaddeus took a poignant photograph of her at Warm Springs – an image of Susan in old age, wrapped in a shawl, standing outside the hospital with a distant look in her eyes. It was the last picture ever taken of her, captured by the boy she’d raised who was now a grown man. Hospital records show that she spent 4 years, 7 months, and 5 days in care at Warm Springs . The official cause of her decline was “fibroid phthisis,” a form of tuberculosis, compounded by the general frailty of age . In truth, she likely also suffered from what we’d now call dementia or exhaustion – the accumulation of a lifetime of trials. On February 19, 1923, Susan Elizabeth Tinsley Mundy – known in Montana as Elizabeth Miller – died at Warm Springs Hospital, at about 74 years of age. The death certificate listed tuberculosis and pneumonia as the culprits, but one might say she died of a life lived to its limits. She was buried on the hospital grounds in a humble grave, as was customary for those who passed in the asylum. It wasn’t a famous ending. No headline marked her passing. Yet the end of her life was not the end of her story – not by a long shot. Her family and community would make sure of that.

Legacy and Memory of “Grandma Mundy”

In the decades after Susan’s death, her descendants kept her memory alive through storytelling and pride. They remembered Grandma Mundy as a phenomenal cook, a fiercely loving mother and grandmother, and a straight-talking, no-suffering-fools kind of woman. Her granddaughters in Helena – Thaddeus’s girls – grew up hearing about their grandmother’s adventures: how she once cooked for General Custer himself, how she traveled to Mexico, how she ran businesses when most Black women were kept as domestics. To those girls, Grandma’s life was like an epic on par with any dime-novel Western, except every bit of it was true. In June 1960, those granddaughters (then adults with children and grandchildren of their own) shared Susan’s story with a wider audience. They contributed to a feature in the Billings Gazette titled “Grandma Cooked for Custer” . Imagine that: a Montana newspaper in 1960 – during the Civil Rights era – printing the reminiscences of Black women about their Black pioneer grandmother. The article recounted how Susan Mundy had been a personal cook to General Custer and later a boarding house keeper in Helena. It quoted the granddaughters recalling the foods Grandma used to make and the stories she told. One can almost see them, smiling and shaking their heads, describing how Grandma would matter-of-factly declare, “I fed General Custer, yes I did – fed his whole camp – and they remembered my cooking better than his orders.” The Billings Gazette piece was a rare instance of recognition for a Black woman’s role in Montana’s frontier history . It ensured that Susan’s name did not vanish into obscurity.

The family also preserved photographs and artifacts that testify to Susan’s remarkable life. Among them: a photograph of a young Susan on a wooden porch surrounded by Custer’s soldiers, presumably taken at Fort Leavenworth – a solitary Black woman in an apron standing amongst a crowd of armed white men, a quietly revolutionary image. Another treasured item is a collection of her cooking utensils from the Custer years: iron pots, a large ladle, and a well-worn wooden spoon, all carefully handed down as tangible pieces of her legacy. One especially striking photo shows Susan in a crisp, white cook’s uniform, tall and proud, perhaps taken by an itinerant photographer in Kansas or Texas. And then there’s the final photograph from Warm Springs, taken by Thaddeus, capturing Susan’s dignified profile despite the hardships of age. These images are more than family keepsakes; they are historic documents that challenge the whitewashed myth of the West. Usually, when Americans think “Old West,” they picture Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane if thinking of women at all – and rarely, if ever, a Black woman in a chef’s apron. But Susan Mundy was there, real as day, making history in her own way.

Susan’s story is a rich antidote to the simplistic frontier narratives that dominate popular culture. Here was a Black Kentuckian woman who traversed nearly every chapter of 19th-century African American experience: born to a family that literally sued their way out of slavery, raised in the shadow of slavery’s cruelty but free; came of age during Reconstruction; labored for the Union’s most famous general (only to see him meet his doom); married a Black soldier who fought for a nation that still treated them as second-class citizens; lived through the betrayals of Reconstruction’s end; and struck out independently to succeed in the rough-and-tumble West on her own terms. She navigated racism, sexism, and classism with a combination of sharp wit, kitchen wisdom, and sheer grit. Her life defies any single category – she was enslaved and free, domestic and entrepreneur, wife and self-reliant “widow,” insider and outsider. In a just world, schoolchildren would learn about figures like Susan Tinsley Mundy alongside the likes of Custer, because her perspective completes the story of that era. As Black columnist Michael Harriot might quip in his satirical tone: “They always tell you about Custer’s Last Stand, but they never tell you who cooked Custer’s last supper.” Well, that was Susan Mundy, and unlike Custer, she lived to tell the tale (and season it to perfection).

Today, Susan Elizabeth Tinsley Mundy’s descendants and researchers have pieced together her narrative from family oral histories, legal documents, newspaper archives, and historical records. Every fact in this biography has been grounded in those verifiable sources – from her Kentucky family’s emancipation fight , to her land holdings in Knox County , to her tenure as a cook for the Custers , to her entrepreneurial life in Montana , to the record of her commitment at Warm Springs and death in 1923 . The myth of the American West often overlooks women like Susan, or worse, diminishes them with stereotypes. But Susan’s life, when truthfully told, shreds those myths. She was Black and a frontier pioneer. She was a nurturer and a fighter. She embodied the complexity of American history – the triumphs and the traumas – in one person’s journey. The satirical historian in me imagines Susan looking at the sanitized history books with a raised eyebrow, saying, “Y’all really gonna act like I wasn’t there? Child, let me set the record straight…” And indeed, through this biography, she has.

In the end, Susan Elizabeth Tinsley Mundy’s legacy lives on in the stories passed down by her family and in the historical record now corrected to include her. “Grandma Mundy cooked for Custer,” her grandchildren would say – but she did so much more than that. She survived slavery’s legacy, seized her freedom, blazed trails across the continent, fed and led her community, and left a mark on history as indelible as the taste of her famous vegetable soup. This bold Black woman’s life is American history — Black AF and unvarnished — told with the honesty it deserves.

Sources:

• Family history notes and genealogy of the Tinsley family, including 1850 Kentucky census data showing Warrick Tinsley’s household and indicating Mary’s likely connection to the free Goins family.
  
• Will and estate records of William D. Tinsley Sr. (1840s) as summarized in family research, documenting the stipulated emancipation of Fanny and her children and the protracted legal battle to enforce it .
  
• Kentucky land grant records (Knox County) referencing the 50-acre land survey in 1858 and Warrick Tinsley’s 15-acre purchase in 1862 .
  
• Billings Gazette, June 26, 1960, “Grandma Cooked for Custer,” featuring Mundy’s granddaughters’ recollections .
  
• Extreme History Project (May 15, 2020), “Elizabeth Mundy: Cook for Bozeman Madam (and General Custer),” confirming Mundy’s service in the Custer household until 1875 and work for madam Lizzie Woods in Bozeman .
  
• Personal letters and oral history (Mundy family), detailing Susan’s marriage to Lafayette Mundy (1873), their residence in Texas and Mexico during the 1877 Salt War, and the birth of son Thaddeus in Chihuahua (1877).
  
• Find A Grave memorial #206548904 for Susan Elizabeth Tinsley Miller (Mundy), providing a biographical overview (compiled by family researchers) of her life, including Lafayette Mundy’s Civil War and Buffalo Soldier service , Susan’s role as a Custer cook, and details of her later years at Warm Springs .
  
• Montana State Hospital records and Helena Independent-Record (June 25, 1918, p.8) noting the commitment of “Elizabeth Miller” to Warm Springs and her death certificate (Feb. 1923) listing tuberculosis as cause .
  
• Photographs (circa 1870s–1920s) from the Mundy family collection and Montana historical archives: images of Susan with Custer’s staff, her cooking implements, a portrait in domestic uniform, and a 1922 photo by Thaddeus Mundy at Warm Springs (as referenced in the 1960 Billings Gazette article).
  

All these sources corroborate the narrative of Susan Elizabeth Tinsley Mundy’s life, painting a factual and inspiring portrait of a Black woman who refused to be written out of history.