Pushing Westward

Two travel days from the Black Hills to western Montana, (enroute to Glacier NP).  Took a back road to Billings instead of I-90 and stumbled across Custer Battlefield Nat’l Monument.  I’m embarrassed to admit that I thought it was somewhere in the Dakotas, not Montana.

I feel compelled to spill out some thoughts about what we saw and the impressions of the events.  So skip to the next blog post if I “wax too poetic”.

Unlike some of the Civil War Battlefields we’ve visited, there was a complete absence of the icons of other great engagements.  No cannon or glamorous monuments, no flags or glossy displays.  

Instead, a ridgeline and hillside dotted 

with small white headstones sits in the midst of hundreds of square miles of uninhabited rolling grasslands.   Each stone marking the location where one of the 263 fallen members of Custer’s 7^th Cavalry met their end.  Isolated single markers struggling up the slopes to meet small bands of five to ten Cavalrymen cut off from the main force.  Finally, at the top of a knoll, some 40 stones mark the location of the “last stand” where Custer and the remaining troopers were finally overwhelmed and died to the man.  

Standing on the ridge it was easy to sense the impending doom the small isolated groups must have felt as the over 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne swarmed across the neighboring hilltops.  It was a classic fight to the death with no chance of victory.

The Last Stand

Whatever one’s feelings about the morality of the expansionist cause that instigated this battle, you have to find yourself with at least a small lump in your throat after scanning the surrounding landscape.  Most of these men were just soldiers, not fighting for a cause, but simply because someone ordered “charge”.  And for that, they were no more.

Added more recently were small scatterings of red headstones, similarly marking the known fallen Indian warriors of that battle.   At the base of some of these stones were what appeared to be medicine bags along with an assortment of coins.  (Symbolizing what?)

Among the visitors today were a number of Native American families touring the site, likely for the same reasons as the whites… idle curiosity or deep personal interest, or maybe just because it was a beautiful day eastern Montana.  But their expressions were just a little different.  Possibly because for them, this was a place of  a great, if short-lived, victory.

Good Night from western Montana

Brad & Val

PS - Southern Montana is awesomely beautiful.