Garryowen

By editor

Garryowen, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876

There is a town in Montana named after an Irish drinking song, and the drinking song is named after a neighborhood in Limerick, and the neighborhood is named after a garden that belonged to a man named Owen, and Owen has been dead for so long that nobody remembers anything else about him except that he had a garden. This is how history works at the small end. At the large end, the song became the regimental march of the 7th United States Cavalry, and the 7th Cavalry rode to the Little Bighorn on June 22, 1876, with the regimental band playing Garryowen as the column left General Terry's camp at the Powder River. Three days later, 268 of those men were dead.

The marker here, on the ground where the battle began, records the basic facts without sentiment: Garryowen was the regimental marching song of Custer's command, the battle commenced in the valley just east of here on June 25, 1876, Reno attacked with 112 men and was outnumbered ten to one, he was forced to retreat to high ground, Benteen arrived, they held until Gibbon's column came from the north the following day. Reno and Benteen did not learn what had happened to Custer until the morning of June 27.

The song itself is older than the regiment by about a century. It came out of Garryowen, a neighborhood in Limerick, Ireland, in the late 1700s, when it was the drinking song of young men who smashed windows and knocked down watchmen and considered this a reasonable way to spend an evening. The chorus goes: "Instead of spa we'll drink brown ale / And pay the reckoning on the nail; / No man for debt shall go to gaol / From Garryowen in glory." Beethoven arranged it. Thomas Moore published it. The British Army adopted it. The Irish soldiers who came to America brought it with them.

Brevet Colonel Myles Keogh, an Irishman who had served in the Papal Guard before coming to America to fight in the Civil War, is generally credited with bringing the tune to the 7th Cavalry. Keogh was killed on Last Stand Hill on June 25, 1876. He was one of thirty-four Irish-born soldiers who died at Little Bighorn. His horse, Comanche, survived and became the only living thing found on the Custer battlefield when the army arrived two days later.

Theodore Roosevelt, who had opinions about everything and expressed them freely, called Garryowen "the greatest fighting tune in the world." The Cheyenne and Lakota who heard it played before the Washita Massacre in 1868, when Custer's regiment attacked Black Kettle's village at dawn and killed more than a hundred people, mostly women and children and old men, had a different view. For them, the sound of the tune meant soldiers were coming and the village was about to be destroyed. At the centennial commemoration of Washita in 1968, the 7th Cavalry commander presented a Garryowen badge to the Cheyenne and said the song would never again be played against their people. The promise has been kept with varying consistency in the years since.

The marker was erected by the State of Montana and stands on the east side of Garryowen Road, a quarter mile south of Interstate 90 at Exit 514. The town of Garryowen, Montana, is privately owned and consists of the Custer Battlefield Museum and the grounds around it. The museum sits on the site where Reno's battalion crossed the river and began its charge down the valley. The battle started here, in the sense that this is where the first shots were fired. It ended four miles to the north, on the ridges above the river, where Custer's five companies were overrun.

The valley between those two points is quiet now. The grass is the same grass that grew here in June 1876, long and dry in the summer heat. The river runs the same course it ran that afternoon. The cottonwoods along the bank are older than they were then but they are the same trees, or the descendants of the same trees. The song that gave this place its name is still played by military bands and Irish musicians around the world, though some of them know its history better than others.

See also

• Garryowen at Garryowen, Big Horn County (Erected by State of Montana)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Big Horn County