Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
with his documents fluttering in the wind and I would think, “Where's he going now?”
Afterwards, to my great disgust, I discovered that the museum of First Ladies' dresses had
takenonlytwentyminutestoseeandmymother,brotherandsisterhadspenttherestofthe
afternoon in a Howard Johnson's restaurant eating hot fudge sundaes.
So the Custer Battlefield National Monument came as a pleasant surprise, even though it
cost three dollars to get in. There's not much to it, but then there wasn't much to the battle.
The visitors' center contained a small but absorbing museum with relics from both the In-
dians and soldiers, and a topographical model of the battlefield, which employed tiny light
bulbstoshowyouhowthebattleprogressed.Mostlythisconsistedofastringofbluelights
moving down the hill in a confident fashion and then scurrying back up the hill pursued by
a much larger number of red lights. The blue lights formed into a cluster at the top of the
hillwheretheyblinkedfuriouslyforawhile,butthenonebyonetheywinkedoutasthered
lights swarmed over them. On the model the whole thing was over in a couple of minutes;
in real life it didn't take much longer. Custer was an idiot and a brute and he deserved his
fate. His plan was to slaughter the men, women and children of the Cheyenne and Sioux
nations as they camped out beside the Little Bighorn River and it was just his bad luck that
they were much more numerous and better armed than he had reckoned. Custer and his
men fled back up the hill on which the visitors' center now stands, but there was no place
tohideandtheywerequicklyoverrun.Iwentoutsideandupashortslopetothespotwhere
Custer made his last stand and had a look around.
It occupies a bleak and treeless hill, a place where the wind never stops blowing. From the
hilltop I could see for perhaps fifty or sixty miles and there was not a tree in sight, just an
unbroken sweep of yellowish grassland rolling away to a white horizon. It was a place so
remote and lonely that I could see the wind coming before I felt it. The grass further down
the hill would begin to ripple and a moment later a gust would swirl around me and be
gone.
The site of Custer's last stand is enclosed by a black cast-iron fence. Inside this little com-
pound, about fifty yards across, are scattered white stones to mark the spots where each
soldier fell. Behind me, fifty yards or so down the far side of the hill, two white stones
stood together where a pair of soldiers had obviously made a run for it and been cut down.
No one knows where or how many Indians fell because they took their dead and injured
away with them. In fact, nobody really knows what happened there that day in June 1876
becausetheIndiansgavesuchconflictingaccountsandnoneofthewhiteparticipantslived
totell the tale. All that isknownforsureisthat Custer screwed upinamighty bigwayand
got himself and 260 men killed. Scattered as they are around such a desolate and windy
bluff, the marker stones are surprisingly, almost disturbingly, poignant. It's impossible to
