We’re standing on a hill in the Little Big Horn Battlefield...the Greasy Grass, Custer’s Last Stand. It’s late afternoon on a day that started sunny and is now showing the evidence and precursors of tonight and tomorrow’s change in the weather. Rotating 360 degrees here we can see five separate storms on the horizons, one for every compass point plus one. The grass is knee high and punctuated by sage in uneven clumps of green gray. With just a little imagination they become Cheyenne and Sioux warriors moving up the draws and coulées toward a destiny that will last far beyond their lifetimes. The sun is driving shafts of light through the heavy steel graya clouds and penetrate the air to provide steep stairways to the heavens.
There are others here, even though it is late September and the throngs of summer tourists are gone. There’s not many of us and for the most part it is very quiet now. A train crawls across the horizon and bellows its horn in a low moan that echoes off the bluff where Benteen and Reno held out with their troops for two days, surrounded. The occasional plains bird cries out in a long peel. But, it’s quiet.
Despite the cars and the folks gathered, there’s a sense of reverence. Yet underneath it all, beneath the high grass and the stone markers that dot the hills as far as you can see, across the Little Big Horn below and through the shade of the Cottonwood trees, I can feel the passion. It’s buried, yet alive. It’s as alive as the coming storms we see in five directions...Impending, driven, desperate, resolved, yet still alive, buried, but reaching for the shafts of light coming down from the thunderclouds.
Diane and I sit in on a lecture provided by a Crow native who is a park ranger. This is Crow land now. For an hour he inspires us with a balanced overview of the lead up to this epochal battle as well as the best researched movements of the 7th Cavalry and the various tribes who gathered here in this spiritual space. He speaks as if he were here when it happened. His knowledge is sure and confident and he is passionate about the different aspects of the battle as he describes them with words and gestures. He speaks of the principals as if he knows them. He points them out on the battlefield before us.
As much as the battle pitted the great white wave of emigrants against the various free-roaming native bands gathered here, it also featured native against native as ages old debts were being served and collected. The Crow sided with the whites and served as scouts for the cavalry. Human nature is human nature and Indians fought each other long before the whites came. The whites though, understood this early on in their conquest of the continent and used these rivalries to their advantage. Yet, no one was really winning in this day’s deadly game.
It was summer, June, and Indians from various reservations were leaving and gathering as one group. This had never happened before among their memories. Their shared destinies brought them together for one final prayer of a chance at preserving all they had been and would be going forward. From our hilltop vantage we could see. Over there lay the Hunkpapa camp. Behind the main body of the mile long village were the Blackfoot. Northern Cheyenne formed next to the Sans Arc. The Brule and Oglala camps lay right beyond the Miniconjou. The great tribes of horse-mobile plains Indians were all here, 7,000 souls of which 2,000 were warriors, defending their lifestyle to the ennd. Generals Terry, Crook, Gibbon, and of course, Custer were encircling them one last time. The armies of the whites were only a day or two away. Yet Sitting Bull had a vision of the soldiers falling into the camp upside down and dying. It was “a good day to die.”
You will note here that the white markers of the soldiers deaths, placed where they fell, occur mainly in groups of two or three, sometimes more, but mostly scattered in small groups. Men fighting and dying next to their friends, cut off from the main battalions, cut off from their homes a thousand miles or more away. They shot their horses on Last Stand Hill to give themselves some sort of breastwork against the coming onslaught. The land itself is a series of hills, valleys, coulées, draws, ravines and bluffs. Amongst it all runs the Little Big Horn. It runs through here eternally now. The Indians knew this land and how to move through it without being seen. They summoned every advantage they had and welded it to their steel resolve and passion to protect their families and way of life. They were not going to fight and run away...Not this time.
Later that evening Diane and I had dinner at the local Crow flavored restaurant a half mile from Last Stand Hill. We had Crow fry bread tacos. Advertised as the best Indian tacos in the land we found them to be as good as marketed. Fantastic! Instead of the usual peaceful and idyllic Indian flute music typical of western Indian-themed eateries, frantic and purposeful native chants echoed from the speakers. I don’t know the language of the chants, but anyone could tell they were building their passions up to a unified tribal purpose. It was not love music, it was not zenotropic seduction they were after. It was courage, unity of purpose, accountability to each other. It seemed as if the passion I felt laying a few feet under the prairie soil on the battlefield was reaching up again to those bolts of sun through their voices.
The waves of grass and the prairie sage are waving in the wind, brushing against the stone cold white markers. The sky in every direction is a collision of ghost clouds fighting silent and personal battles. A flash of lightening, silent without its thunder partner, strikes the ground at some distant hill, perhaps where Crazy Horse is buried in secrecy. Civilization lies just miles away down the lonely highway, a trucker’s headlight searching for asphalt. The lonesome coal train bellows again across the Little Big Horn calling out to the Hunkpapa who camped there once upon a time. And here on this hill, amongst the quiet that persists even in this 21st century, amidst the reverence for fallen Indian and Calvary heroes, I can feel it in my feet Passion stirs this soil.