Seventh Cavalry Horse Cemetery

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana

In the last minutes on Last Stand Hill, George Custer ordered the horses shot. The troopers pulled their mounts down and lay behind them, firing over the warm bodies. The horses were sorrels, most of them -- the gray horse troop had been Company E, which died in the ravine to the north. On the hill, thirty or forty men made a circle of dead horses with a diameter of about thirty feet, and fought from inside it until there was no one left to fight.

Lieutenant Charles DeRudio, who survived on Reno Hill and came to the field two days later, wrote: "Custer was lying on top of a conical hill where five or six horses lay as if to suggest a barricade. Empty shells were found behind the horses which were all sorrels of C Company."

In 1879, Captain G. K. Sanderson of the Eleventh Infantry came to the field to tidy it up. He built a mound of cordwood on the crest of the hill and filled the center with horse bones. He wrote: "I had all of the horse bones gathered together and placed in the mound where they cannot be readily disturbed by curiosity seekers." In 1881, Lieutenant Charles Roe replaced the cordwood monument with the granite shaft that stands there now, buried the Seventh Cavalry casualties around its base, and re-interred the horse bones in a trench lined with cordwood from the original monument.

The horses were forgotten after that. The trench was not on any map.

On April 9, 1941, maintenance workers digging a trench for a drainage pipe hit the cordwood lining of the horse cemetery. The wooden end gave way and about ten horse skeletons fell out. Among the bones were also human bones -- leg and arm bones, but no skulls. There was a pair of cavalry trooper's boots with a few toe bones inside. Two tin cracker boxes marked "C. L. Woodman & Co., Chicago" came out with bullet holes through them -- hardtack tins that troopers had used as breastworks in the last minutes of the fight.

Superintendent Edward Luce sealed the trench and wrote to his superiors for instructions. Lieutenant Colonel Elwood Nye, Army veterinarian, excavated further in 1946. His report has not been located.

In 2002, ground-penetrating radar found soil anomalies in the area. Archaeologists excavated for three days in late April and early May, found horse skeletal remains in two six-foot-square areas just northeast of the monument, documented and photographed everything, covered the remains with protective sheeting, and filled the site back in.

The horses are still there. They have been there since 1876.

The Seventh Cavalry's horses in 1876 were government issue, mostly purchased from contractors in Missouri and Kentucky. They were not war horses in the romantic sense. They were working animals, trained to stand under fire and carry a man at a gallop across broken ground. The sorrels of C Company that DeRudio identified on the hill were typical: medium-sized, sound, anonymous. They had no names in the official records. The Army tracked them by number, not by name.

The warriors who fought at the Little Bighorn had a different relationship with their horses. The Lakota and Cheyenne horse culture was built on generations of careful breeding and training. A warrior's horse was his partner, his wealth, and his identity. Crazy Horse's horse was a yellow pinto. Gall rode a black. The Nez Perce, who would fight the Army the following year at Bear Paw, were famous for their Appaloosa horses, bred for stamina and speed in the mountain country of the Wallowa Valley. The Army's horses were better fed and better shod, but the warriors' horses knew the country.

The 2nd Cavalry, which captured the Nez Perce horse herd at Bear Paw in September 1877, took approximately 1,100 horses. The horses were distributed among the soldiers and scouts, sold at auction, or turned loose. The Nez Perce considered this loss as devastating as the battle itself. A people without horses on the northern plains in 1877 was a people without the means to hunt, to move, or to resist.

The horses buried on Last Stand Hill were shot by their riders in the last minutes of the fight. They died doing what they had been trained to do: standing still while men fired over them. The cracker tins with bullet holes, found among the bones in 1941, are the most precise record of those last minutes -- the improvised breastworks, the dwindling ammunition, the narrowing circle. The horses were the last defense. When they were gone, there was nothing left.

See also

• Seventh Cavalry Horse Cemetery at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (National Park Service)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• 1984 Archeological Survey at Crow Agency, Big Horn County