Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

By editor

Garryowen, Big Horn County, Montana, June 1876 and after

The stone in front of the Custer Battlefield Museum in Garryowen carries an inscription that has served the United States government well for a long time: "Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God." The words are borrowed from the national Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Virginia, and they do the same work here that they do there, which is to say they are honest about what is not known while remaining respectful about what is. The soldier buried here was found near the river in June 1926, fifty years after the battle, a member of Reno's command. His name was not recorded anywhere that survived.

The marker also carries a second inscription, this one from Joe Medicine Crow, Ph.D., Crow tribal historian, who signed it "High Bird" and noted that he was the grandson of Whiteman Runs Him, one of Custer's Crow scouts. Medicine Crow's words are not about the battle. They are about something older: "When we stand side by side in the circle of no beginning and no ending, the first maker, creator of all things, is in the center. He hears the words of supplication and blesses us with his infinite love which is 'peace' itself."

The juxtaposition of these two inscriptions on a single marker is worth pausing over. One is a military formula, dignified and impersonal, designed to honor a man whose identity was lost. The other is a prayer, offered by a man whose grandfather watched the battle from a ridge and lived to tell about it. They are not in conflict. They are simply two different ways of standing in the presence of the dead.

Joe Medicine Crow was born in 1913 on the Crow Reservation at Lodge Grass, Montana. His stepgrandfather was White Man Runs Him, born around 1858 into the Big Lodge Clan of the Crow Nation, who had volunteered to serve as a scout for the United States Army in April 1876 at the age of about eighteen. White Man Runs Him was one of six Crow scouts assigned to Custer's 7th Cavalry in June of that year. He was at the Crow's Nest on the morning of June 25, when the scouts looked out across the Wolf Mountains and saw the smoke and dust of the great village in the valley below. He was there when Custer decided to attack. He survived the battle by rejoining the pack train before the final engagement, as the chief scout Mitch Boyer had ordered.

White Man Runs Him lived the rest of his life on the Crow Reservation, a few miles from the battlefield. He died in 1929 and was buried in the cemetery at Little Bighorn Battlefield. His stepgrandson Joe Medicine Crow grew up hearing his stories.

Medicine Crow went on to become the first member of the Crow tribe to earn a master's degree, in 1939, from the University of Southern California. He was appointed Crow Tribal Historian and Anthropologist in 1948. When World War II came, he served with the United States Army in Europe and completed all four of the traditional Crow requirements for the title of war chief: touching an enemy in battle, taking an enemy's weapon, leading a successful war party, and stealing an enemy's horse. He did all four things in combat in Germany and France. He was the last Crow war chief. President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

Medicine Crow died in 2016 at the age of 102. He was, as the NPS noted, the last living person with a direct oral history from a participant in the Battle of Little Bighorn. When he died, the chain of living memory that connected the present to the afternoon of June 25, 1876, was broken.

The unknown soldier found near the river in 1926 was one of the forty men killed in Reno's retreat from the valley. He had been in the ground for fifty years when he was found. The circumstances of his death are not recorded. He was a member of the 7th Cavalry, which means he was probably young, probably enlisted, and probably not from Montana. The regiment was about a third Irish-born, recruited largely from the immigrant communities of the eastern cities. He may have heard the regimental march, Garryowen, played as the column left General Terry's camp at the Powder River on June 22. He had three more days.

The marker was erected in 1995 by the Custer Battlefield Museum, which sits just off Interstate 90 at the Garryowen exit, on the ground where the battle began. The museum's founder, Christopher Kortlander, named the town after the regimental march. The town of Garryowen, Montana, is privately owned. The unknown soldier's grave is in front of the museum, marked by a stone that borrows its words from Arlington. Joe Medicine Crow's prayer is on the same stone. The river is a few hundred yards to the east.

See also

• Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Garryowen, Big Horn County (Erected 1995 by Custer Battlefield Museum, Inc.)
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Big Horn County