Little Bighorn National Battlefield, Southeastern Montana, South Dakota, Deadwood, Wall
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I thought maybe it was raining when I woke up but it was just the wind through the trees. Les will have to wait for the rain in the tent experience. The sunrise was looking pretty good so we walked down the road for a few photos. Breakfast was potatoes, eggs and cheese, my personal favorite so far. We broke camp and headed for the Little Bighorn Battlefield (formerly the Custer Battlefield).
The first sensation of the battlefield is one of hmm, kinda a dinky little place to have the illustrious last stand of Custer. A little river and a couple of low ridges and some scrub brush. Not really what you’d expect from all the folklore. And it turns out that Custer, probably through no major fault of his own, happened on a much larger force of Indians than he was expecting and got his butt kicked pretty bad. It wasn’t legendary. It wasn’t particularly heroic, just a couple of bad breaks. But it was the last great Indian victory and the beginning of the end for them so it is significant. But mostly people remember it because Custer had a press machine that many politicians would envy.
We stopped into the visitor’s center where we looked through the static displays of debris from the battle and got a sense of how they think it happened. That’s the other interesting thing. It’s probably one of the most researched battles in history but they don’t really know what happened because everyone involved got killed. It’s really only been recently that they’ve done some archeology (mid 80’s) and re-looked at the Indian oral history and they’ve decided that maybe it didn’t quite happen the way they thought before. Basically, Custer expected some things to happen a certain way because that’s what happened before (like the Indians traveling in small groups and not attacking en masse) and also he was reacting to what he saw on the battlefield and what he expected his other companies to do. In the end, he was probably still screwed since he had about 300 guys and the Indians had about 2000. Still, if they had the chance to do it all over again, they might have had better luck.
We learned a lot of this from one of the rangers who gave a talk about the battle. The Indians (who were actually the Cheyenne and the Sioux under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull) were pissed off (and rightly so) because they had been given South Dakota by treaty, but then gold had been discovered in the Black Hills and in minutes, the place was crawling with white men. The Indians started raiding and the army was sent in to make them stop (rather than kick out the white guys who shouldn’t have been there). The whole western migration had been promoted by the railway owners (through the newspapers they owned) to help them make more money by selling the land they were given by the government along the railway lines. Greed, once again, conquers all.
But I digress. After the ranger talk we wandered back through the visitor center where Les was smitten by a mysterious dark-haired woman who wore Indian jewelry in her hair. But she disappeared before he could talk to her.
We wandered up to the Last Stand Hill where there is a marker over the mass graves of the dead. In typically military style, they came back and took the bodies of the officers back east for formal burial in Arlington or somewhere. The enlisted men they put in a mass grave and put a marker on it. Custer lost about 5 members of his family in the battle. His brother commanded one of his companies and another brother was along too.
Out on the battlefield they marked the locations where the soldiers fell with small white marble tombstones that read something like “Here fell a soldier of the 7th cavalry”. Soldiers didn’t wear dog tags then so they didn’t know who was who. You get a feel for where the battle took place and how they died in small clumps. As you understand the movements of the battle you can see where soldiers had massed for a final defense and where others had tried to run to join others. It is a little eerie.
We headed down the road where Maj. Reno and Benteen had fought their part in the battle. They managed to hold off the Indians until help came and “only” lost about half their soldiers. In all they lost 220 out of 700 some, which is a lot but I always thought they pretty much had got the whole 7th cavalry. But what they got was all of Custer’s direct command.
On our way around the Reno battlefield, we came across a rattlesnake. He rattled at me briefly but didn’t attack. Another tourist, Albert, decided to dork with it a little to make it rattle again. It did a little, and satisfied, he wandered off. I know his name was Albert because his wife called, Albert, stop messing with the snake, and come on!
(As an aside here, I should mention that we are traveling with the great retiree migration of ’94. All those 50-70 year-olds who buy 20 foot campers and tool around the west, do so in October because school is open and the rest of the hordes have gone. These folks can also be found at swap meets, garage sales, and feeding quarters into the slots in Reno.)
We spent most of the morning wandering around the battlefield, trying to recreate it in our minds. They do a nice job there giving you enough information to do that.
Then we headed off down Hwy 212 through the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation, then into the southeast corner of Montana. The Indian reservation was depressing as always. Clearly poor, lots of beater cars and trucks, sad looking children, the whole nine yards. We stopped in Lame Deer to look for a Post Office and got a good eyeful of life on the reservation. Not a pretty picture. It was an interesting place to go right after the battlefield. Pretty much a cause and effect thing happening there.
Southeast Montana is probably the most remote inhabited area I’ve ever seen. You go for miles and miles and see nothing, then a house or some barns. You never get more than about 10 miles before seeing one. Every once in a while, a car passes you in the other direction. We saw gobs of antelope on this road. It got so they weren’t interesting anymore. We easily saw 100 and possibly close to 200 in groups of no more than 6 or 7. At one point, we saw more antelopes than humans or cows and horses for that matter.
We passed briefly into Wyoming and then into Belle Fourche South Dakota. They didn’t even bother to mark the state border. Oh, and I should also mention that Hwy 212 is the bumpiest road we’ve been on so far, including the non paved ones.
From Belle Fourche we headed south to Spearfish. We planned to high tail it out to the Badlands to spend the night, then spend the day driving back to Wyoming through the Badlands and the Black Hills. But, as Les was looking through the AAA book for campgrounds, he noticed that Deadwood was nearby. In fact, we were just about to reach the exit for it. Deadwood is the town where Wild Bill Hickok was shot while holding the Deadman’s poker hand (black Aces and black eights). Les wanted to go but I wasn’t too keen. But he talked me into it.
I expected to find a major tourist rip-off with Wild Bill’s T-shirts etc. And there is a little of that but actually it’s kind of a cute western-style town and much to our surprise, has casinos galore. Les is a card buff and wanted to play a hand of blackjack or two. So, our quick stopover turned into 2 hours of blackjack where I managed to lose $10 and Les managed to win $35 (off an initial $13 start). We resisted the now strong urge to stay up all night playing cards (which saved me at least $200, but probably cost Les $500). It was now quite dark and we had no place to stay.
We headed down I-90 towards the Badlands. At 9:00 we were just outside of Wall (home of the world famous Wall Drug). Remembering that the last campsite we stayed at closed at 9, we figured we better go into Wall and find something. We ended up at the Arrow campground, just across the railroad tracks from some sort of industry requiring motors and pickup trucks. Our campsite had a lovely view of a rundown house and the main street of Wall. Not the sort of rustic view we had in mind but you can’t complain too much when it’s 9 pm. After a dinner of ramen and kielbasa, we got into the tent because it was getting kind of windy and cold. Tomorrow promises the second shower in two days. That ought to hold us for awhile.
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