Where Custer went terribly wrong

CROW AGENCY, Montana -- George Armstrong Custer, the dashing boy general of the Union Army in the Civil War, came to a very bad end on a grassy hillside above what is now Interstate 90. That was on the morning of June 25, 1876, and today's interstate was an Indian trail from the Dakota Plains to the rich grasslands of the Yellowstone River valley. Custer's Crow scouts had seen that trail a few days earlier, and it was beaten flat by the movement of a few thousand Lakota and Sioux and Cheyenne and Blackfeet warriors and their families and their strings of spare horses. The scouts could not imagine such a vast army, and despite their best efforts at explaining what they had seen, neither could Lieutenant Colonel Custer.

The Lakota and Sioux and their allies could not imagine something, too -- that there was a man foolish enough to attack their huge force. Everyone, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, began the day laboring under monstrous misapprehensions.

Some 400,000 visitors come each year, one gathers watching them tour the five-mile-long battlefield, to make their own attempt at figuring out what went so terribly wrong. The site of Custer's Last Stand (it is not clear whether he ever had a first stand, his style was always to charge straight ahead, whether at Confederates or hapless villages of Native Americans) is an easy hour's drive from Billings, and on the direct route from the midwest to the Big Sky country. Unfortunately, by accidents of geography and politics, one enters the scene from the wrong direction, emotionally and intellectually. The route is all truck stops and traffic and barely skirts the territory of the Crow tribal casino and an uninspiring Indian souvenir store just at the entrance road. Inside the national monument, you are required to begin at the end, at the information center just downhill from the foreshortened granite obelisk that marks the graveyard of about (Army records were a little vague) 210 men under Custer's command.

If you have never visited, either read about the battle beforehand (Evan S. Connell's ``Son of the Morning Star'' is sufficiently accurate and tremendously readable) or stop briefly at the information center and pick up two publications, the battlefield official map and guide and the new (1996) ``Reno-Benteen Entrenchment Trail'' guide. Then drive directly to the east end of the battlefield, stop where Major Reno and Captain Benteen survived, study your printed matter, and start slowly back toward ``Last Stand Hill,'' and let the enormity of it begin to sink in. Remind yourself that Custer -- at best -- had seen only the fringe of the Indian encampment, south and west of the Reno=Benteen entrenchment, far below and far away.

As you drive northwest, think of Reno down in the valley, out of sight now, setting up a skirmish line so that when the boy general descended from the hills and scattered the Lakota and the Sioux (something he was well-practiced at doing), Major Reno would be there to close the trap. Notice, and Custer had no better view, that you cannot see a bit of the valley, none of the thousands of tepees, not a man of the thousands of warriors racing to their horses, many in such a hurry that they had no time for ceremony -- no paint, no prayer. Go slowly, this was no cavalry charge and never would be, just the jostling of horses and saddles, the faint clank of canteens and ammunition belts. Things fell off along the way -- bits of tack and dropped cartridges and such things that resist the elements have allowed archeologists a fair glimpse of Custer's path. He is, for the most part, east of the road, with no better view than the curious visitor has today.

It is a morbidly curious place. By the time you arrive at the very last stand, you realize what war is, a fog of misinformation and the piercing clarity of a last, brief, understanding that today is a day for dying. For all the classic paintings of the Last Stand (Budweiser beer put one in virtually every saloon in America), death was more scattered. Above and below the road, white monuments mark where one or two cavalrymen, occasionally a small unit, had their horribly personal last stand. The excellent map and brief narrative will explain what happened. The visitor will have to decide why.

By fall 1998, there will be an additional memorial on Last Stand Hill, one to the Indians who fell there (less than half as many as Seventh Cavalry officers and soldiers). A juried competition chose an earthen berm and a theme of reconciliation. Spirit posts, according to the jury, will welcome the cavalrymen to the Indian memorial. It is a very proper and very pre-millennium thought -- the ghosts of all concerned sharing a spiritual retreat, talking about the old days. It is a physically unobtrusive memorial, and has as little to say about the morning of June 25, 1776, as the granite obelisk over the mass grave of the Seventh Cavalry. What speaks, when all is said and done, are the white markers on the brown hills.

General George Crook, a veteran of wars with the Apache bands in Arizona, had been sent north to join with Custer in a pincers movement against the plains Indians. At the Rosebud, with an army of nearly 1,000 troopers and infantrymen, Crook came near to having his own ``Last Stand.''

The battlefield is something of a mirror image of the Little Bighorn. Crook was encamped on the low ground along Rosebud Creek; the Indians came down off the rolling prairie and attacked him.

The Rosebud site is lightly developed for tourism, and brochures are not always available in the honor-system boxes at the site. An excellent short history and map of the Rosebud is available at the Little Bighorn information center.

From the shallow valley of Rosebud Creek, visitors can walk and drive up the coulees. A few hundred feet above the valley floor, the broken land turns into a rolling prairie that runs out to the horizon, a horizon marked by the low hills beyond the Little Bighorn Valley. It is not difficult to imagine the emotions when Crook's troopers chased an apparently fleeing foe up the coulees and onto the plains, and then suddenly realize that these magnificent horsemen had now drawn them out, scattered the troopers, and had them at their mercy in a warfare of movement and speed.

There is no monument to Crook's 10 dead. At about the site of the first parking lot, he buried them, and then rode his force across the gravesite to obliterate it and protect it from imagined and anticipated desecration. It is worth the trouble to walk up one of the coulees and look across the rolling plain. It says clearly that you have crossed the threshold from an army encampment, down along the water, to the endless plains where the horsemen rule.

After the licking he took at the Rosebud, Crook retreated to his base on the Tongue River in present day Sheridan, Wyo., and simply went on vacation. He and his men were trout fishing and bear hunting when Custer died. Although maligned, Crook returned to his Arizona base and continued to be a relentless pacifier and persecutor of the Apache bands.

The Rosebud, even more than the Little Bighorn, is a study in the mastery of geography over ill-prepared humanity.