On the trail of death at the Little Bighorn

In the history of American warfare, there may be no place so mournful as the site of Custer’s Last Stand.

ERIC MORTENSON Sept 9  || ABOUT HALF SHOT

“…it is my painfull duty to report that day before yesterday the twenty fifth…a great disaster overtook Gen Custer + The troops under his Command…”

June 27, 1876, handwritten message from Gen. Alfred H. Terry, commander of U.S. Army forces sent to drive a large Native American encampment back to a reservation. A scout carried Terry’s report to the nearest Army fort that had a telegraph station, but a break in the telegraph line delayed the news relay, with Army headquarters, Pres. Grant and Congress not hearing about it until July 6, when a newspaper reported it. Source: National Archives.

There’s no glory to be found here now, on this grassy brown knob dotted with a cluster of white grave markers. Only desperation and defeat walk the trail below, where a couple dozen more markers are strung out at silent, lonesome intervals. Most of the markers bear no name, telling only that a U.S. Soldier, 7th Cavalry, Fell Here June 25, 1876, when they were overwhelmed and massacred by the Lakota Sioux and their allies, the Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Custer’s Last Stand, as it came to be known. The Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana is a national monument now, as it should be, but the nature of the tribute is cloudy. You can’t be there and think it’s a monument to valor and honor. Not anymore. Even the victors lost.

Like many boys of my time, I studied war growing up, assured by books, TV and movies that American might, not to mention our principles, had saved the world more than once, and we were always on the right side of history. Frenchies, Redcoats, British again, Mexicans, Rebs, Indians, Spaniards, the Kaiser’s Huns, Nazis, Imperial Japan and Commies — they by-gawd learned not to mess with us.

And even when we lost, such as when the Indians rubbed out Custer and his 210 men, we were valiant against overwhelming odds and so on. Weren’t we?

George Armstrong Custer’s marker is the only one highlighted in black. Although often referred to as “General Custer,” he was a Lieutenant Colonel at the time of the battle. The Custer family paid a heavy price; the marker for his younger brother, Capt. Tom Custer, who won two Medals of Honor in the Civil War, is in the foreground. Their younger brother, Boston Custer, also was killed in the battle, as was a nephew, Autie Reed, and a brother-in-law, Lt. James Calhoun.

The kids of my age learned of famous battles and knew the names of warships, renowned generals and combat heroes. Custer and his Last Stand was one of those historical touchstones that everybody was familiar with.

Even in literature, authors could drop Custer’s name and trust that readers knew what they were talking about. In one of my favorite novels, Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” retired Texas Ranger Capt. Gus McCrea brings up Custer to his old friend and partner, fellow ex-Ranger Capt. Woodrow Call. Gus is mad because a surly bartender and others had disrespected he and Woodrow in a bar, didn’t even know who they were. Gus figures they weren’t famous because they didn’t get killed while fighting outlaws and Indians.

“If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years,” he tells Woodrow.

But the collective narrative moved and resettled. Custer and his troopers went from brave, doomed heroes to victims of Custer’s personal ambition and reckless hubris.

And that collective narrative changed again as our perspectives deepened, emerging as “Custer Died for Your Sins,” the 1969 book by Vine Deloria, Jr. that critically examines America’s treatment of Native Americans.

These days, Little Bighorn doesn’t seem a monument to valor. Only to sad folly.

The National Park Service site puts Little Bighorn in context:

“The Battle of the Little Bighorn has come to symbolize the clash of two vastly dissimilar cultures: the buffalo/horse culture of the northern plains tribes, and the highly industrial based culture of the United States. This battle was not an isolated confrontation, but part of a much larger strategic campaign designed to force the capitulation of the nonreservation Lakota and Cheyenne.”

Most of what I learned in school about our westward expansion scuffed over the perspective of Native people or anyone else who got in our way. Some of what we learned was true, in broad strokes, but much of the story was ignored or downright twisted. Knowing now what was left out or skirted around has made it all the more sobering to learn history anew.

I’ve been to Gettysburg, where the tide of the Civil War turned, walked the Vietnam Memorial Wall, and seen the changing of the guard at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I’ve been aboard the USS Constitution — “Old Ironsides” of War of 1812 fame — and stood above the ghostly wreckage of the USS Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor. I’ve explored the USS Missouri, where the Japanese surrender took place in Tokyo Bay, ending World War II in 1945. I’ve been to the Genbaku Dome, the skeletal “Atomic Bomb Dome” ruins in Hiroshima, Japan, site of the first use of an atomic weapon.

All of them are solemn places, but Little Bighorn tops them for sheer sense of loss.

A monument stands at the top of “Last Stand Hill,” the high ground where Custer and his badly-outnumbered troops retreated as Native warriors swarmed to defend their village after the 7th Cavalry attacked. Some cavalrymen attempted to escape into the ravines and gullies of the Little Bighorn River, but were chased down and killed. Many of the bodies were stripped and mutilated. The white markers indicate where bodies were found; many were reburied elsewhere. Custer’s body was moved to West Point, the U.S. Military Academy in New York. The Sioux took their dead with them.

The desperation of Custer’s troops as they fought for their lives on the weedy slopes is palpable. So is the vengeance levied upon them.

The history is important to remember. The U.S. government reneged on an 1868 treaty and allowed gold miners and other graspers into the Black Hills of the Dakotas, which was part of the Great Sioux Reservation. An expedition headed by Custer, sent to map the area for a fort, had discovered gold. The government tried to buy the Black Hills, but the Lakota turned down the offer, and bands headed by such leaders as Sitting Bull continued following the buffalo off the reservation. By the spring of 1876, an estimated 8,000 Lakota Sioux, joined by Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho, were camped along the Little Bighorn River in Montana. The encampment included an estimated 1,500 to 1,800 warriors and was on land traditionally used by the Crow Nation, bitter enemies of the Lakotas.

Three prongs of U.S. cavalry and infantry — about 2,300 troops from Montana, Wyoming and the Dakota Territory — were sent to converge on the area, find the “hostiles” and force them back onto the reservation. Custer’s 7th Cavalry was part of an 879-man force headed by Gen. Terry.

Terry detached Custer’s force, guided by Crow and Arikara scouts, on a sweeping move to find and attack the village from the east and south, while the rest of the Army columns converged from the north in a planned “hammer and anvil” movement.

It didn’t work out that way. Custer, figuring his force had been discovered, attacked a day earlier than he’d planned and was quickly forced back and overwhelmed. Elements of the 7th Cavalry commanded by Capt. Frederick Benteen and Maj. Marcus Reno similarly retreated to high ground and took heavy losses in fighting that continued until dusk of the following day, but survived. Custer and the men with him were wiped out. The remainder of Gen. Terry’s column arrived the next day, but by then the Indian village had moved. Terry was left to his “painfull duty” of reporting the “great disaster” to his superiors.

The Sioux and their allies won a great victory that day, temporary payback for decades of treachery, theft, trespass and murder. But within a year they were back on the reservation, resigned to cultural defeat.

In 1890, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, elements of the 7th Cavalry exacted regimental revenge by murdering nearly 300 Lakota Sioux in fighting that broke out after the soldiers attempted to disarm them.

Ironies abound at the Little Bighorn. For one thing, the battlefield monument and its attached national cemetery are on Crow Nation land , traditional enemies of the Sioux. Our tour guide was Crow, and said he was descended from Goes Ahead, one of the Crow scouts who guided Custer to the Sioux village and then left the area. An Indian Memorial, intended to honor all the tribes present at the battle, no matter which side, was added to the monument in 2003.

I left the Little Bighorn feeling empty.

I recommend these two books for the perspective they provide. There is nothing else but the loss of all who Fell Here.