Little Big Horn Battlefield

It wasn’t much of a campsite, mostly a place for those with boats to spend the night. RVers were lined up along the banks and I pulled in as far away as I could from the others because of Sadie. With nothing else to do for the rest of the day, I sat in the van in the shade and read a book about the Crow Indians as I’d gaze toward the mellow-flowing river. Twice I took Sadie down to the riverbank for a drink of water, which was a short 15-minute hike.

Despite the cool breeze outside Sadie preferred sleeping inside the van. Record highs were predicted for Thursday with storms and high winds moving in by late afternoon, followed by a cold front for the weekend. Just my luck that when I need to have Sadie in the van the temps rise to record level. Forecasters were predicting triple-digits for the Billings area.

I didn’t stay up past sunrise. I saw a sliver of the moon set shortly after dark, saw two deer meander past, then a feral cat strut by, and then silence overcame the camp.

25 June

It was colder overnight than expected, although it didn’t get cold until early in the morning. The sun rose after 5am, I was up an hour later, took Sadie down to the river and back for a quick drink, and moved out to the Little Big Horn Battlefield, cutting across the Crow Reservation on BIA road 313, then turning on BIA2 toward Crow Agency and then the park.

The local Billings AM station announced the death of Farah Fawcett this morning in LA after a long and very public battle with anal cancer. Her long-time partner Ryan O’Neal had asked her to marry him and they were supposed to have gotten married as soon as she recovered from her last bout, but obviously she never did. I was no big fan of her talents, but my old high school friend Jill Sabin was a big admirer of her during the late 1970s when she hit the TV screen with “Charlie’s Angels.” Farah’s death was imminent as her cancer was terminal and she was resting at home waiting to die. But at the tender age of 62 she went from blonde beauty of the late 1970s to a quickly-fading former actor 30 years later.

BIA 313 is a north-south narrow two-laner across the Crow Reservation. It meanders along Little Big Horn Creek, pass quaint trailers, fields and rocky hillsides. Other drivers were following me, surely they were all early birds to the park today. A short construction job slowed me down for a few minutes but I made it to the park at 7:50am. It was already in the 70s.

People were already meandering through the park. Although opening hours at 8am in the summer, it looked like the park opened earlier today. The parking lot filled up fast.

I watched the 8am showing of the battle movie. The small theatre was packed. It was 8:15am when I finally made it down to the Ravine trail, a .75 mile stretch of path that took visitors down to where the Lakota were hiding out for Custer’s men. After walking these grounds it’s hard to image Custer getting clobbered. He had the high ground yet he was outnumbered 1:10. The fields are now covered in wildflowers.124451
I talked briefly with an older rancher from Oregon, Bob Colter, who is traveling all the major national parks this summer. He lost his wife of 38 years this past January.

I returned to the visitor’s area to listen to the first speaker scheduled: Enos Two Bears II who spoke passionately about the new Native American memorial near the Custer Memorial. He traveled earlier this week from the Pine Ridge Reservation. Soon to be 50 years old, his brown hair hung from both sides of his head in two braids that reached down past his hips. When I spoke to him after his speech I noticed he was missing half his teeth and was smoking Marlboro cigarettes.

I liked Enos. A few other “non-tribal members” (as Whites in the audience were referred) spoke the truth when he said that the Battle of Little Big Horn was not a battle based on hate toward the Whites, but a battle to preserve the Lakota culture and lifestyle. Custer was only following orders of President Grant anyway.

Enos, understandably, is no fan of the Crow Indians, who were on Custer’s side during Little Big Horn (only to be thanked five years later by having their reservation cut in size to one-forth its size to appease ranchers in the area)

“Everytime I stop on the reservation to get gasoline, I see them looking at me as if they want to kick my ass” he said to me silently. But he also understood why the Crow names were on the memorial as the Native American Memorial is to symbolize unity and understanding of all tribes, as there were victims on all sides at the Little Big Horn massacre.

Yet Enos and the rest of the speakers were not reimbursed by the National Parks Service for their travels. Lucky for Enos he was reimbursed by a company in Billings that hires Native Americans as consultants on various projects across the West.

There were many Lakota in the audience, many staying with their immediate groups under shade trees scattered around the canopy. After Enos and a few other Lakota spoke, the audience departed, but the Lakota tribes gathered together, cheered and hugged one another. Many had traveled in their beat-up cars from their reservations in South Dakota. One car’s windshield was badly shattered on the driver’s side from a horse.

It was now getting hot. When I got back to the van at 11:30am the temperature outside was 93F. Sadie was in the shade with her water, but she was clearly stressed from the heat and panting heavily. The air conditioner didn’t help either. I drove the five-mile park road to the Breeten battle, walked the short trails there, looked over the rolling terrain and at 1pm we were on our way toward Billings and points further west via I-90.

The heat was getting to me, too, and so was the driving. Once I passed Billings I could see the forecasted cold front move in, and wind blew strongly in several gusts. But the temperature didn’t drop much. At 2pm it reached 100F and an hour later it dipped to 90F only to rise again to 93F.

The Beartooth mountains, those mountains that guard the Yellowstone to the north, were no clearly close by. The interstate was following the Yellowstone River and the old Bozeman Trail as it snaked along the valley dotted with burned-out trees along the highway, collapsed barns and crowded horse corrals in the smaller communities, and patches of blue sky interspersed with dark grey.

At the 3pm news Fox Radio reported that Michael Jackson had been rushed to an LA hospital after a heart attack. He was reportedly not breathing, which did not bode well. An Hour later he was reported dead. Admittedly no fan of “The Gloved One” despite some very good songs in the 1980s, his latter years were rather freakish. But to die so suddenly at the age of 50 from a heart attacks? This was quite a shocker!