Where Custer last stood

Saturday, August 25, 2007

GILLETTE, WYOMING — If you were to travel straight north from here, you’d hit Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. So we’ve made some progress eastward again today, covering almost 500 kilometres from our departure point. We’re pushing it a bit, but we want to fit in all the things we hoped to see before our time is up!
One of those things was to see the battlefield of General Custer’s Last Stand, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and that’s where we got to this morning. We turned off the highway a bit before that to pick up some badly needed groceries, in a town called Columbus, as well as some fuel. When we arrived at the battlefield it was just about noon.
The sun was high in the sky and there was a searing heat outside. The truck thermometer read 92 degrees, but it felt even hotter out on the dry hilltop in the full sun. There were spiky plants and sagebrush and dry grasses all around, and a lot of dusty soil. We were advised not to stray off the pathways because we were in rattlesnake country!
At the top of the hill was a large cairn over a mass grave where the remains of almost all the soldiers who were killed that day in June 1876 are buried. General Custer’s remains were removed and are buried at West Point, but there are headstones clustered below the cairn in a fenced area marking the places where the men actually fell — including Custer — at the hands of warriors from the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. It was a pivotal event in U.S. history, when it began to dawn on the natives who had lived there for centuries that the land was never going to belong to them again.
In recognition of the fight these first peoples launched to protect their old way of life, another memorial has been added to the site with pictures and quotations from leaders such as Chief Sitting Bull, Chief Two Moon and others describing the battle from their point of view. Red granite headstones have been placed to mark the graves of native warriors, as historians have been able to discover them.
The visitor centre displayed a number of artifacts belonging to General Custer, as well as the beaded garments and implements of the native peoples who lived in the region. In the gift shop area, there were dozens and dozens of books for sale, all focusing on this one period of American history, and a battle that lasted two days!
We stopped in another gift shop down the hill that is run by native Americans, with several teepees set up outside, and a lot of colourful handicrafts inside. We even saw a basket full of arrowheads you could buy for a dollar apiece — that are made in Canada!
After we’d had some lunch, we headed off once again, in the direction of the Wyoming state line. The desert-like terrain continued, with buttes silhouetted against the sky just like every cowboy movie backdrop you’ve ever seen, and when we crossed into Wyoming we could see great patches of red and pink soil on the hillsides. They even paved the highway with stone that made the road look red!
In some of the gullies, there were clusters of green trees, but most of the land was flat and bare, except for sagebrush. When we got to Sheridan, we pulled off the highway once again, because we wanted to visit Dan’s Western and Work Wear. We were in search of an authentic cowboy hat, and this would be the ideal place to do that. We found one by the original hatmaker for the west, Stetson, and at half price to boot.
Once again on the I-90, we passed more ranches with beef cattle and horses grazing, and then another creature came into view — antelopes, by the dozen! We must have seen nearly 50 in clusters of a dozen or so in various spots, grazing amongst the sagebrush. I couldn’t resist bursting into a few bars of "Home on the Range" as we passed by.
Our campground is called Green Tree’s Crazy Woman Campground, which seemed an odd name when we read it in the Woodall’s guide, but made a bit more sense when we passed Crazy Woman Creek a few miles before our destination. After the sun set the temperature moderated quite nicely, so it should be comfortable for sleeping despite today’s being our hottest yet this trip.