Providentially, our motel was opposite a laundromat, and I spent the morning hours catching up on three loads of washing while the kids took their time eating waffles for breakfast and watching cable television. Their favourites are Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network.
Well, I use 'favourites' loosely; that's all they are allowed to watch.
At breakfast I was interested to observe a family of Amish who had stayed at the same motel. The girls were dressed in very long pinafore skirts and blouses, the boys in trousers, shirts and braces (no belts). They were a large family, travelling back from the Yellowstone to their home in Illinois, and they were travelling in a large van, rather than the traditional black horse-drawn buggy Mr Jackson and I saw in Amish Country in Kansas back in 2010. Their family was larger than ours, however, so they would hardly have fit in one of those small traps, and I imagine horses are not considered au fait on the interstate.
When we finally were repacked and loaded into the car, we crossed yet another state border into our 9th state, Montana. Having visited historical sites related to westward expansion and the army build-up related to tensions between American settlers and American Indians, it seemed appropriate to finish this part of our trip with a stop at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, also known as the location of "Custer's Last Stand".
Around 1874 the Fort Laramie Treaty was made, promising that the Oregon Trail forts would be abandoned by the army if the Indians would cease hostilities agains settlers. Soon after that, the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, made a further treaty with the Indians to provide food, shelter and other basic necessities for all Indians who made reservation lands their home. However, any Indians who were found off the reservations would be considered hostile by the army.
This situation was further complicated when a government survey unit discovered gold in the Black Hills, in western South Dakota (now the site of Mount Rushmore). The Black Hills had been ceded to the Indians in one of the many treaties, because they were considered sacred by the Lakota. The Lakota Indians refused to hand them over when the American government tried to renegotiate the relevant treaty. But gold-hungry white men poured into the Black Hills, treaty or not, angering the Indians.
Some Indians were happy to settle in the reservations in return for sides of ham and blankets. Others resided in the reservation lands during the winters, when the snow-bound land was harsh and forbidding. Still others, notably Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, refused to enter reservation lands at all, seeing it as forsaking their culture. In the winter of 1875-6, the government failed to keep its promise of food and starving Indians left the reservations in droves.
Grant sent various cavalry units to round up the recalcitrant Indians and force them onto the reservations. Three groups of soldiers were sent from Fort Ellis in Montana, Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakotas, and Fort Fetterman in Wyoming. The Wyoming soldiers abandoned plans to meet with the other units after a large battle with Indian warriors in the north of their state rendered them unable to continue further. The other two units met near the Little Bighorn river, in what is now Crow Reservation land.
The Little Bighorn is a meandering river, whose course is marked by trees which provide the only green in a landscape of rolling golden hills and occasional sandstone cliffs. In late June of 1876, it was the location of a large but temporary Indian village comprising Indians gathered from the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes who had deserted the reservations when the promised food didn't arrive. Army intelligence estimated this village to have 700 or 800 Indians, but the real figure was closer to ten times that number.
When the 7th Cavalry units under Custer's command to the west discovered the Indian village in the morning of 25 June 1876, Custer thought that the warriors must be off on a hunting trip, because he could only see elderly people, children and women about the camp. He thought this a prime opportunity to attack the camp and hold the vulnerable Indians hostage until the warriors returned. He sent a message back to the pack train asking them to send the pack on (with its loads of ammunition) because he had found a 'big village'. The reinforcements never arrived, because the eastern cavalry units were facing their own battles with Indian warriors and one unit, under Reno, had already lost around fifty men. But it would have made little difference since Custer had been very mistaken in his assumption. 1500 to 1800 warriors were in fact sleeping late in their teepees, and when Custer tried to cross the Little Bighorn River to attack, they rose and returned fire, driving Custer's cavalry back up a nearby hill. Indian accounts tell of the soldiers falling one after another off their horses as the Indian archers counted coup on their enemy.
Without reinforcements and running low on ammunition, Custer instructed his soldiers to shoot their remaining horses and use them as a barricade to hide behind as they returned fire on the Indian warriors from the vantage of the hilltop. But they faced insurmountable resistance from desperate Indians who completely overwhelmed them in numbers. The bullets finally ran out. About 42 soldiers died at what is now known as Last Stand Hill, including Custer.
In all, Custer's hasty and ill-informed decision-making cost 210 soldiers their lives, every single man under his command. About 60 others died in skirmishes between the Indian warriors and other cavalry units, who could observe the dust and smoke of Custer's battle but do nothing to assist. Around 100 Indian warriors lost their lives in the running battles of that day and the day following.
This was a comprehensive victory for the Indian peoples, but it inspired a vehemently repressive response from the government. It was the last Indian victory of the Indian Wars. Within two years the Indian peoples across the West had either been forced onto the reservations or forced to flee the country to live in Canada. Both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse died resisting arrest on reservation lands.
The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument commemorates this battle, with white memorial stones marking the locations soldiers fell, and red memorial stones highlighting the locations particular warriors or groups of warriors died. We walked up the hill from the Visitor Centre to Last Stand Hill and then across the brow of the hill to the Native American warrior monument, which was raised 100 years after the former. The location of markers of the fallen are based on a combination of archaeological research, interviews with warriors and soldiers who survived the battles, and the locations of cedar posts that were placed by soldiers when they hastily buried the bodies of their fallen fellows in the days after the battle.
It is, perhaps, a morbid place to visit. Definitely a though-provoking one. The Ranger talk ended with a comment that stuck with me, and it is perhaps something for us to keep in mind when we are tempted to pick sides in whatever battles we observe going on around us in our own lives:
"Both sides, Indian warrior and American soldier, believed they were 'in the right' as they fought."
All people who fight do so believing their view, their ideal, their side of the argument is 'right'. But the only person who is truly righteous is Jesus Christ, and he said, "my followers do not fight for me, because my kingdom is not of this world".
We had a late lunch / early dinner at Jake's Montana Steakhouse in Billings, which was absolutely delicious, our first real non-take away meal since camp. Unfortunately, it left several of us suffering the runs, which delayed our drive to Yellowstone several times as we stopped for facilities.
In have end, we forsook a picturesque route across the park to our accommodation at West. Yellowstone for the more direct route, which turned out to be a good choice. It was after 10:30 when we arrived and Mr Jackson experienced some sudden and unexpected technical difficulties with the car just after we checked in. We thought we might be without a car for our stay at Yellowstone, which (as you can imagine caused some consternation), but the thought of three consecutive nights in the same bed overcame all our worries for the moment.
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In the morning I took the kids swimming in the hotel pool (this is definitely one of the nicer places we have stayed so far) while Mr Jackson rang our rental car company to try to sort out an alternative car or some sort of fix. We were eventually directed to take the car to a repair shop. The problem was promptly diagnosed as being caused by the car being put into 4WD unintentionally (yes, I can hear the sniggers from here, folks), a matter easily rectified. We were able to enter Yellowstone National Park, the world's first national park, around midday.
More on our Yellowstone adventures tomorrow I hope as I shall write about our two days together I think.
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