1984 Archeological Survey

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, Summer 1984

The grass had grown back. That was the first thing Douglas Scott noticed when he walked the ridge in the summer of 1984, metal detector in hand, headphones on. A hundred and eight years had passed since the June afternoon when the ground here was littered with the dead, and the grass had covered everything. The ridge looked peaceful. It looked like any other ridge in southeastern Montana, rolling and dry and brown at the edges, the Little Bighorn glinting in the valley below. You would not know, walking it, that anything had happened here.

But the ground knew. The ground had been keeping its records all along.

Scott was an archaeologist with the National Park Service's Midwest Archeological Center, and the fire of 1983 had given him an opportunity that no researcher had possessed before. The grass fire had burned off the vegetation across much of the battlefield, exposing the soil, and the Park Service had authorized a systematic survey before the grass grew back. Scott and his team moved across the ridge in transects, sweeping the detectors low, marking every signal with a flag. The flags multiplied. By the time the survey was complete, they had recovered more than five thousand artifacts: cartridge cases, bullets, horse equipment, uniform buttons, the small iron hardware of a catastrophe.

The cartridge cases told the story that the eyewitnesses had not been able to tell. The witnesses had been too frightened, too confused, too busy staying alive to observe the battle with any precision. Their accounts conflicted on nearly every point. But a spent cartridge case does not lie about where it was fired from. Scott's team matched individual firing pins to individual weapons, tracking the movements of specific guns across the field. A Winchester repeating rifle that fired near Medicine Tail Coulee turned up again on Calhoun Hill, then again near Last Stand Hill. The gun had moved with its owner through the whole of the fight, and now, a century later, its path could be traced in the grass.

The survey confirmed what the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors had said for decades and what the Army's official accounts had minimized: the soldiers had been encircled. The cartridge cases showed firing lines that collapsed inward, position by position, as the warriors tightened the ring. The Springfield carbine casings clustered near the high ground; the Winchester cases came from the draws and coulees below, where the warriors had worked their way up under cover. It was not a rout. It was a systematic destruction, carried out by men who knew the ground and used it.

At Calhoun Hill, excavations yielded more than three hundred artifacts, including horse tack and ammunition, marking the place where Company C made its last organized stand before the line broke. The horse skeletal remains scattered across the field, many with ballistic trauma, confirmed the accounts of soldiers shooting their mounts to form barricades. The animals had died in the same places the men had died, and the ground had held them both.

One of the survey's most precise findings came from Deep Ravine, the gully that cuts down toward the river on the west side of the ridge. The marker text on the sign at the ravine's head says that twenty-eight soldiers were buried here after the battle, but their remains have never been conclusively located. The artifacts from the ravine -- soldier accoutrements mixed with Native ammunition -- suggested a desperate retreat into the gully, a last movement toward the water that the river never allowed. The archaeology could not find the men, but it could find where they had been.

"The fire upon us was terrific," wrote Sergeant Daniel Kanipe of Company C, describing the final minutes on the ridge. He survived because he had been sent back with a message before the end. The men he left behind did not survive, and for a century their story was told only in the words of the warriors who had defeated them. The 1984 survey gave the soldiers' side of the story back, not in words but in iron and brass, in the mute testimony of things that do not forget.

See also

• 1984 Archeological Survey at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Custer Circle Project 2017 and Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• Deep Ravine at Crow Agency, Big Horn County