Little Bighorn Battlefield

With Idaho in the rearview we plowed along I-90 all the way to the Little Bighorn Battlefield arriving in early afternoon. It is only when one takes the auto tour of the battlefield that the sheer size of the engagement and the difficult terrain on which it was fought strikes you. So much ink has been spilt over this one battle it would make a library all its own. This is in part due to the worldwide fascination with this piece of American History.

On Sunday 25 June 1876 nine days before the 100th anniversary of the birthday of the United States the battle of the Little Bighorn or, what the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho call the Battle of the Greasy Grass, took place. Major Marcus Reno’s initial engagement commenced a little after 3:00 PM on the west bank of the Little Bighorn River. By 5:30 PM that same afternoon over 350 combatants and noncombatants were dead including all five companies of the 7th Cavalry under the command of Lt. Col. Armstrong Custer. As a nation we were celebrating not only our centennial but also our place on the world’s stage as an emerging  powerhouse. By the time the news reached newspapers in the east on Tuesday 6 July a shocked and outraged nation was stunned to its core. Back on the banks of the Little Bighorn River both the combatants had left the area to nature’s magnificent solitude and majesty.

Scattered about the site there are 249 white army headstones and a smaller number of red granite Indian headstones that mark the positions where the dead fell in the battle giving the visitor a grim, sobering reality check. There are some single headstones but most are in  clusters of two or more where men died next to their comrades.

When a grass fire swept the battlefield in 1983 it laid bare an untold treasure trove of hitherto unknown archaeological evidence that helped in clearing up a lot of the mythology surrounding this event. This grass fire and the detailed archaeological fieldwork conducted in 1985 was very, very illuminating.

For the United States Army it was a lesson that a small, poorly armed enemy fighting for its homeland is capable of a powerful resistance. For the Indians it was a pyrrhic victory for in a little over a year later Crazy Horse would be dead and the majority of the bands would lay down their weapons surrendering to the US Army in and around Fort Robinson, Nebraska.