Fire Removes
WASHINGTON - A 1983 prairie
fire has shed strong light on the
still-controversial Battle of the
Little Bighorn, where Lt. Gen.
George Armstrong Custer and
some 260 of his men made their
historic last stand and lost their
lives in 1876.
The fire was “a blessing in
disguise,” says archeologist
Richard A. Fox Jr. The flames had
laid bare the field of combat,
named after a river in
southeastern Montana. “Some of
that land was impenetrable before
the fire,” he says.
For 110 years, Custer and his
disastrous encounter with as many
as 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne
warriors have held captive the
imagination of the public. More
has been said about the struggle
than any other battle in American
history except perhaps Get
tysburg.
Controversy Still Rages
“Argument and speculation
swirl about it, partly because
Custer remains an enigma and
mysteries obscure the course of
the fight,” Robert Paul Jordan
C 19IS NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
Battle of
the Little Bighorn
June 25 1876
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Mysteries Of Little Bighorn
writes in the December National
Geographic.
“Those who rode with him to the
end left only death’s mute
testimony,” Jordan writes. “In
dian accounts varied, generally
were long in coming, and often
conveyed what the white man
wanted to hear. Even today Indian
resentment Ungers at terms such
as ‘hostile’ and at the mythology
surrounding Custer.”
But the fire that burned the grass
and sagebrush cover off the un
dulating heights and wrinkled
draws where Custer met his doom
cleared the way for two seasons of
toil by archeologists and volun
teers equipped with metal
detectors, trowels, and sieves.
The results are surprising. More
than 4,000 artifacts have been
unearthed: bullets and cartridge
cases, iron arrowheads, pieces of
firearms, buttons, a watch, and
horse trappings. The almost
complete skeleton of a trooper was
also found.
It is the first time a battlefield
has been systematically plotted
into a grid to chart a fight’s
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progress; the first time that
modem ballistic techniques have
been applied to a field of combat;
and one of the few times that
precise information has been
recorded on the location of every
relic found.
“The archeologists learned that
the soldiers were relatively
stationary, while the Indians
moved freely about as they
overran one position after
another,” Jordan writes.
Codes on one computer printout
suggest the tragic scenario of a
trooper who may have been the
last man to die in the struggle.
Archeologists speculate that In
dians fired at him with at least six
guns as he tried to escape the
waning battle. When he dropped,
they hacked at his body with
knives and hatchets. They
decapitated him.
Indians Outgunned Cavalry
Archeologists and firearms
specialists have concluded from
the evidence that the Indians
outgunned the soldiers. Custer’s
Seventh Cavalry troops carried
single-shot carbines and six-shot
Colt revolvers. Ballistic studies
show that the Indians had at least
41 kinds of firearms, including 16-
shot repeating rifles.
The investigators’ in
terpretation; “With the relative
lack of cover available to Custer
and the dispersed deployment of
his command against superior
numbers of Indians with greater
firepower, the reason for the
outcome of the battle can no longer
be significantly debated.”
The studies affirm the truth of
the legend of Last Stand Hill. One
by one, the survivors of Custer’s
five companies dropped in the
gunsmoke and confusion. As the
troopers’ fire dwindled, the
warriors, helped by women,
rushed in and finished them off
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Sitting Bull, preeminent leader of the seven bands of
Western Sioux Indians and revered medicine man, had a
prophetic vision of the defeat of George Armstrong Custer's
troops at Little Bighorn. In spite of his later billing as
“Custer's killer” Sitting Bull did not fight in the famous
battle.
with rifles, bows, clubs, and hat
chets. Most were stripped naked.
Some were mutilated.
News of the June 25 debacle
reached the American public right
after the July 4,1876, celebration of
the nation’s centennial, banging
disbelief, shock, and anger.
Nobody knows exactly how
many Indians died in the brief but
bloody battle. A good guess might
be 100, says Jordan.
“It was over,” he wntes. “But
most of all it was over for the In
dians. These people of the plains
long had been doomed by the white
man’s inexorable westward ex
pansion. The Army had per
petrated cruelties in earlier Indian
battles as savage as any inflicted
on Custer’s men. But in thrashing
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the Seventh Cavalry, the Indians
sealed their own fate. Within a
year the Army hounded most to the
hated reservations. Like the
vanishing buffalo, their way of life
was no more.”
In contrast to the Custer cultists
who revere the name of their hero,
many of today’s Native Americans
despise it. They dislike even the
name of the Custer Battlefield
National Monument; after all, it
was they who won.
“Sitting Bull National
Monument would be more ap
propriate,” says Caleb Shields,
Sioux tribal councilman at the Fort
Peck Reservation in northern
Montana, ‘or Little Bighorn
National Monument Custer is no
hereof ours.”
r
/- 29-37