Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana

The granite shaft on Last Stand Hill was placed in 1881, five years after the battle. The names carved into it are the names of officers: Brevet Major General G. A. Custer, Captains Keogh, Yates, and Tom Custer, and the lieutenants -- Cooke, Smith, McIntosh, Calhoun, Porter, Hodgson, Sturgis, Reily, Crittenden, Harrington. Below the officers came the enlisted men, 210 of them, buried in a mass grave beneath the stone.

The monument was the Army's accounting of what had happened here. It was the Army's version of the story.

The site was first set aside as a national cemetery in 1879, three years after the battle, to protect the graves of the soldiers who had died on the ridge. For most of the next century it was called Custer Battlefield National Monument. The name said whose story it was.

In 1991, Congress authorized an Indian Memorial to stand beside the soldier monument and changed the name of the site to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. The change acknowledged what the original name had left out: that the warriors who fought here were also people with names, families, and reasons for fighting, and that the battle had two sides.

The battlefield covers about 765 acres of rolling Montana prairie. The Little Bighorn River runs along its western edge, brown and shallow in summer, the same river it was in 1876. The ridge where Custer's battalion made its last stand is still open to the sky. The white marble markers that indicate where individual soldiers fell are scattered across the hillside, each one placed where a body was found. There are also red granite markers now, placed where warriors fell.

The battle itself lasted less than an hour on the northern end of the field, where Custer's five companies were destroyed. On the southern end, where Major Reno's battalion had charged the village and been driven back across the river, the fighting lasted two days. Reno's men and Captain Benteen's command dug rifle pits on the bluffs above the river and held them until General Terry's relief column arrived on June 27. They had no water except what they could get from the river under fire. The wounded lay in the rifle pits in the heat. Nineteen of them died before the relief column arrived.

Lieutenant Edward Godfrey, who commanded Company K on Reno Hill, wrote in his account of the battle: "The excitement of the fight, the anxiety of the long waiting, and the grief for the loss of comrades had so worked upon the men that many of them were unable to restrain their tears when the relief column came in sight." Godfrey later became one of the most careful students of the battle, writing and revising his account for decades, trying to understand what had happened and why. He never arrived at a satisfactory answer.

The question of what happened on Last Stand Hill -- the sequence of events in the last hour of Custer's command -- has been debated since 1876 and has not been resolved. The Army's Court of Inquiry in 1879 examined Reno's conduct and exonerated him. It did not examine Custer's conduct, because Custer was dead. The warriors who fought here gave their accounts to journalists and historians over the following decades, and those accounts do not agree with each other in every particular, because the battle was chaotic and the men who fought it saw different parts of it from different positions.

What is not in dispute is the result. Five companies of the Seventh Cavalry, approximately 210 men, were killed on the ridge above the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. Their names are on the granite shaft. Their bodies are in the ground beneath it. The warriors who killed them were defending their families and their way of life against an Army that had come to force them onto a reservation. The warriors won the battle. The Army won the war.

The National Park Service manages the site as part of the National Park System. Visitors come from around the world to stand on Last Stand Hill and look out over the valley where the great village stood and try to understand what happened here on a June afternoon in 1876. The valley is quiet now. The grass is the same grass. The sky is the same sky. The dead are in the ground.

See also

• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (National Park Service)
• Indian Memorial at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• 1984 Archeological Survey at Crow Agency, Big Horn County