Battleground

Fouch photo of LBH soon after.


Sites of slaughter are not my favorite, no matter what the motivation for the killing it all seems barbaric and tragic. Custer’s Last Stand, now more tactfully known as the Battle of the Little Big Horn is THE local tourist stop, and there is a geocache there, so off we went.

When I first came here, some 45 years ago (yikes) there was a monument on the top of the hill with all the dead (whites) on it, a rather gothic black iron fence around the area where Gen. Custer fell, and then 2’ high marble tombstones placed all over the landscape where white bodies were found. This is all on a high grassy ridge to the east of the Little Big Horn River , looking down on the bottomlands. There was a museum building there then and interpreters I guess.

A quick background: Gen Custer was a brilliant but impulsive man. He led an expedition to the Black Hills in SD and found gold there. Since the Black Hills had been given to the Indians by the Fort Laramie treaty, they were rightly angry that prospectors came in droves. Atrocities on both sides followed, and Custer and the 7th Cavalry set out to either annihilate or round up the Indians and make them stay on their reservations. A large angry group from a number of different tribes was camped by the Little Big Horn. Gen. Terry, the Commander of the 7th, got lost in the breaks of the Big Horn, right here on Pocket Creek Ranch, other parts of the force got separated (hung back?) and Custer’s tiny group attacked the Indian camp. Predictably, the Indians attacked back , slaughtered Custer’s band, and went and mopped up the rest of the part of the 7th that was nearby. By the time the rest of the force arrived, the Indians were long gone. And in the end, lost the war.

There is a vast body of work about this battle, one of the few resounding white defeats. Generals were chastised, hands wrung, strategies analyzed, and people come to reenact the battle in accurately scripted and costumed detail.(although NOT on the actual battle filed) I guess playing Calvary and Indians is fun for some folks.

What struck me was what we have made of the event and the site since. Faced with utter carnage, the 7th did the best they could to bury the dead in the bony soil in the immediate aftermath. Later, the army came back and reburied, this time marking each grave with a post, and finally they dig up all they could find and put them in a mass grave on top of Last Stand Hill. There were numerous horses killed too, and they picked up their bones and put them in a sort of miniature wooden stockade. Imagine what this looked like, the whole ridge covered with white bones glistening in the hot sunshine, the bones of men, and the bones of horses. That would be a sight, a war memorial of power. But too horrible for civilized folks to see, so soon it was all cleaned up, the posts replaced with tasteful if anonymous small white headstones, and the bodies of officers dug up and taken back east to lie in civilization. Gen. Custer is buried at West Point. And a large military cemetery is part of the site, with veterans from other wars buried under orderly lines of more white tombstones. I guess it was already a gravesite, but I don’t understand burying more fallen soldiers at the site of an embarrassing and complete loss. Maybe it is considered that we lost this battle but won the war.

At the time, the battle was one more nail in the Indian’s coffin. Since the Indians stood in the way of progress, didn’t use the land “properly”, wandered “aimlessly”, didn’t understand private property, any verifiable act of violence (however justified if that is possible) was inflated by the gumment and the press. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” General Philip Sheridan.


Today, there is an Indian Memorial to those who fell “ defending their way of life”. It is a sunken stone walled area with the names of the dead by tribe, some drawn images and written descriptions of the battle and the reasons. Facing north the open side has a metal line sculpture of three mounted Indians. All black and open, the grassy hills and far away bluffs show through the figures and the wind blows through it. People come into it and are still, reading and looking.

In some places on the battlefield there are new red stone markers where Indians fell during the battle (not sure about these locations, since their dead were carried away right after the battle) and in the museum the Indians presence is equal to the Cavalry, artifacts, recollections, photographs. We overheard the ranger talk, he seemed to be “teaching the debate” ie presenting both sides of the Indian vs white question.

Since the battlefield is surrounded by the Crow Indian Reservation, the only for-pay tour guide available is run by the Crow, allied with a local community college. Also, nearly all the people working the gift shop were Indian. The Crow were not a part of the hostiles in the battle, serving instead as cavalry scouts apparently because the tribes in the hostile group were old enemies.

Also new is a road that connects Last Stand Hill with the Reno-Benteen Battlefield where the other part of the on site 7th tried to make a stand after they were cut off from Custer.

The scenery is very beautiful: the lush bottomlands where the Indians were camped are all irrigated croplands. The ridges and folds of the high ground are treeless since a fire in ?1980’s and this year all green and grassy from the rain. The reservation horses are out on these rolling hills, the Crow tribe were early and skillful adopters of the horse, and in the old days were known to be relentless horse thieves. The postcard prettiness of the place makes the visual reminders of the battle all the more poignant.