The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [136]
Once I had the choice of going with my mother to a museum and looking at dresses of the Presidents’ wives or staying with my dad, and I rashly chose the latter. I spent a long afternoon trailing behind him, certain that he had lost his mind. ‘Now this must be the spot where General Goober accidentally shot himself in the armpit and had to be relieved of command by Lt-Col. Bowling-alley,’ he would say as we hauled ourselves to the top of a steep summit. ‘So that means Pillock’s forces must have been regrouping over there at those trees’ – and he would point to a grove of trees three hills away and stride off with his documents fluttering in the wind and I would think, ‘Where’s he going now?’ Afterwards, to my great disgust, I discovered that the museum of First Ladies’ dresses had only taken twenty minutes to see and my mother, brother and sister had spent the rest of the afternoon in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant eating hot fudge sundaes.
So the Custer Battlefield National Monument came as a pleasant surprise. There’s not much to it, but then there wasn’t much to the battle. The visitors’ centre contained a small but absorbing museum with relics from both the Indians and soldiers, and a topographical model of the battlefield, which employed tiny light bulbs to show you how the battle progressed. Mostly this consisted of a string of blue lights moving down the hill in a confident fashion and then scurrying back up the hill pursued by a much larger number of red lights. The blue lights formed into a cluster at the top of the hill where they blinked furiously for a while, but then one by one they winked out as the red lights swarmed over them. On the model the whole thing was over in a couple of minutes; in real life it didn’t take much longer. Custer was an idiot and a brute and he deserved his fate. His plan was to slaughter the men, women and children of the Cheyenne and Sioux nations as they camped out beside the Little Bighorn River and it was just his bad luck that they were much more numerous and better armed than he had reckoned. Custer and his men fled back up the hill on which the visitors’ centre now stands, but there was no place to hide and they were quickly overrun. I went outside and up a short slope to the spot where Custer made his last stand and had a look around.
It occupies a bleak and treeless hill, a place where the wind never stops blowing. From the hilltop I could see for perhaps fifty or sixty miles and there was not a tree in sight, just an unbroken sweep of yellowish grassland rolling away to a white horizon. It was a place so remote and lonely that I could see the wind coming before I felt it. The grass further down the hill would begin to ripple and a moment later a gust would swirl around me and be gone.
The site of Custer’s last stand is enclosed by a black cast-iron fence. Inside this little compound, about fifty yards across, are scattered white stones to mark the spots where each soldier fell. Behind me, fifty yards or so down the far side of the hill, two white stones stood together where a pair of soldiers had obviously made a run for it and had been cut down. No-one knows where or how many Indians fell because they took their dead and injured away with them. In fact, nobody really knows what happened there that day in June 1876 because the Indians gave such conflicting accounts and none of the white participants lived to tell the tale. All that is known for sure is that Custer screwed up in a mighty big way and got himself and 260 other men killed.
Scattered