Deep Ravine

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana

The ravine runs north from the river, cutting through the ridge where Custer's battalion made its last stand. The Sioux called it Crazy Horse Gully. The soldiers who survived called it Deep Ravine. The men who went into it did not come out.

Toward the end of the battle on June 25, 1876, approximately forty soldiers broke from Last Stand Hill and ran for the river. They came down the slope and into the ravine in a group, then scattered. Trumpeter William G. Hardy of Company A, who survived the battle on Reno Hill and came to the field two days later with the relief column, looked down into the gully and said: "In the ravine I found most of the troop, who had used the upper sides for a kind of breastwork, falling to the bottom as they were shot down."

Twenty-eight of them -- mostly men of Company E, the Gray Horse Troop -- were found in a heap near the head of the ravine. Others lay at fifteen-yard intervals below. Major Thomas McDougal, who helped bury the dead, wrote in 1919: "In burying the men the stench was so great . . . so we had to pile large chunks of earth upon them broken off from the sides of the ravine." Lieutenant Luther Hare noted that several of the twenty-eight had been shot in the back. "From the position they were hit it was very easy for the Indians to crawl up behind them . . . and kill them."

The warriors who were there remembered it the same way. Tall Bull, Northern Cheyenne, said: "Soldiers came on foot and tried to fight through us into a deep gully, and this was the last of the fight and the men were killed in this gully." Chief Gall of the Hunkpapa Lakota described how Crazy Horse had ridden to the north end of the camp and then turned up the ravine, coming in behind the soldiers from the direction they least expected.

In 1881, when the Army returned to rebury the dead in a mass grave on Last Stand Hill, the men in the ravine were overlooked. The Army believed they had been moved. They had not been moved. They were still there, under the earth that McDougal's burial party had piled over them, under five years of grass and weather.

Archaeological surveys in 1984, 1985, and 1989 searched for the missing soldiers using modern equipment and found nothing. In 1995 and 1996, a geophysical survey detected soil anomalies and metal throughout the ravine, especially in the upper two-thirds near the headwall. The instruments said something was there. The shovels have not yet confirmed it.

The ravine is still there. The grass grows over it in summer. The question of what lies beneath it has not been answered.

The Gray Horse Troop -- Company E of the Seventh Cavalry -- was so named because its horses were all gray, a practice that made the companies easier to identify in the field. On June 25, 1876, Company E was assigned to the right wing of Custer's battalion. They were among the last to die. The gray horses were found scattered across the ridge and down into the ravine, shot by their riders for breastworks or killed in the fighting. The company lost every man.

Lieutenant Edward Godfrey, who survived the battle on Reno Hill and came to the field with the relief column, wrote in his account of the aftermath: "I counted sixty-nine dead horses on and around Custer Hill, and I was told that the number found in the ravine and along the slopes was much larger." The horses had been shot in a circle around the last position on the hill, their bodies forming a rough barricade. The men who used them as cover were dead inside the circle.

The Park Service marker at the head of the ravine says that twenty-eight soldiers were buried here. It does not say whether they are still here. The archaeology has not resolved the question. The geophysical surveys detected anomalies in the soil that could be human remains or could be the residue of the battle -- cartridge cases, horse equipment, the iron hardware of a catastrophe. The shovels have not gone in. The Park Service policy is to leave the dead where they lie unless there is a compelling reason to disturb them. The question of what constitutes a compelling reason has not been answered either.

The ravine runs about three hundred yards from the ridge down toward the river. In June it is green and overgrown, the grass tall enough to hide a man lying down. In October, when the grass dies back, you can see the cut of it from the ridge, the way it drops toward the water. The soldiers who ran into it on June 25, 1876, were running toward the river. The river was the only way out. They did not reach it.

See also

• Deep Ravine at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• 1984 Archeological Survey at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County