Revisionist History or the Right Thing to do? Bighorn National Monument

[Tamaroa]

Personally, I am ashamed of our treatment of the American Indian and feel some sort of recognition of their struggle is long overdue. What is the difference between this and honoring both Confederate and Union dead in the Civil War? Many of us on this board seem have a historical side to us so I'd like your thoughts.

Thanks,

Bill D.
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The following was printed in the Salt Lake Tribune.....

Revising Bighorn Heals Some Old Wounds, Opens Others


07/06/2002 - LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT, Mont. -- Libby Custer had a foreboding dream in June 1876. Her husband, the famed Civil War hero and Indian fighter Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, rode off with his 7th Cavalry never to return.




Indeed, Custer met his end June 25 along with his entire battalion -- 210 men in five companies -- when they attacked a large encampment of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians above the prairie banks of the Little Bighorn River in the Montana Territory. Quickly, the 36-year-old officer became fixed in the public imagination standing firm against a hopeless onslaught, curly yellow locks flowing down his neck and six-shooter ablaze.

But the story of Little Bighorn has many versions, and until the past decade, Indian perspectives on the bloody Northern Plains wars received scant attention at the park formerly known as Custer Battlefield National Monument. In recent years, however, the renamed park has committed itself to widening its view of history, a move culminating this fall with the belated dedication of a $2 million memorial to the American Indians who died there.

"It's highly controversial for some people. It's changing the landscape of Last Stand Hill," said park superintendent Neil Mangum. The memorial is under construction below the famous hilltop where a mass grave and stone pillar honor Custer's dead.

Bill Wells, publisher of Custer/Little Bighorn Battlefield Advocate, has publicly castigated building a memorial to the nation's military enemies on hallowed ground.

"By telling the Indians' story, the Custer buffs say, we're taking Custer and demeaning him and revising history," Mangum said. "That's not the case. We're trying to elevate the Indian side to the same level. . . . It boils down to ownership of a story. We have taken a position of absolute neutrality. We're not here to label anyone good guys or bad guys."

For those reasons, Congress changed the park's namesake from Custer to Little Bighorn in 1992 and authorized the construction of the Indian memorial. It will be dedicated Nov. 11, Veterans Day.

Architect John Collins and artist Alison Towers of Philadelphia won a juried contest and the $50,000 prize and contract to design the memorial before they ever visited the battlefield. The memorial will feature a circular depression with a cleaved wall. This gap, straddled by a pair of 32-foot posts that compose a "spirit gate," forms an axis between the cavalrymen's stone pillar and three diaphanous horsemen, each representing a tribe that fought the 7th Cavalry.

"It's designed to give the viewer a connection between the two" memorials, Mangum said. "The gate will allow the spirits to mingle in unity, peace and friendship. It will have a very powerful effect on the public and hopefully an emotional one."


Protesters' Plaque: A watershed moment in the park's interpretive role came on the anniversary of the battle in 1988 when Cheyenne protesters left a plaque beside the stone pillar atop Last Stand Hill. In welded words written by G. Magpie, the 4-by-4-foot panel reads: "In honor of our Indian patriots who fought and defeated the U.S. Cavalry. In order to save our women and children from mass murder. In doing so, preserving rights to our homelands, treaties and sovereignty."

Rather than haul the plaque to the dump, park officials displayed it in the visitors center.

"There were a lot people angry with us. We use it as an interpretive device, to show how emotionally charged the history is," Mangum said. "That event in 1988 is part of our history."

Two hundred sixty-three members of the 7th Cavalry perished on that sweltering June day 126 years ago as they commenced a campaign to force nomadic Plains Indians onto reservations to the east.

For their part, the Sioux abandoned the reservations in response to white gold seekers who trespassed into the Black Hills in violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

The men under Custer's immediate command assaulted the Indian encampment at a spot known as Medicine Tail Coulee.

The luckier half of Custer's force, led by subordinates Maj. Marcus Reno and Capt. Frederick Benteen, suffered heavy casualties attacking the other end of the encampment, then successfully defended a hilltop position.

Reading the trail of corpses, history tells us that Custer's five companies retreated up the bluffs along the Little Bighorn's east bank, and a group of 40 holdouts, including Custer and his brother Tom, were outflanked on the top of the rise made famous as Last Stand Hill.


Stunning News: Word of the battle hit the East Coast just as the nation was celebrating its centennial and sparked a firestorm of interest. On July 6, The Salt Lake Tribune published one of the first newspaper accounts of the battle.

The already famous Custer quickly became a martyr in the cause of Manifest Destiny, but after the rise of the American Indian Movement, the nation's view of Custer changed.

"Gen. Custer is used by Hollywood or pulp writers as a villain or a hero; the man really fell somewhere in between," said Custer re-enactor Steve Alexander, who lives in George and Libby Custer's home in Monroe, Mich. "He certainly had his weaknesses and his faults, but he was no more evil than any other person who was trying to do his job at that time in history."

According to the oral tradition of the local Crow Indians, whose ancestors served under Custer as scouts, Custer was fatally injured in Medicine Tail Coulee and the notion of a "last stand" is pure conjecture and the stuff of myth, said Howard Boggess, a Crow historian living in Billings.

"That is a valid argument," said Mangum, who served as park historian before becoming superintendent in 1998. "No one knows where he was killed. We know where his body was found."

When army re-inforcements arrived two days after the battle, soldiers evacuated Reno's wounded and set about the grim task of clearing the battlefield, which became a national cemetery and tourist attraction virtually overnight.

The mutilated corpses were hastily buried where they fell, each spot marked with a broken tepee pole. If a man's identity was known, the name was written on a piece of paper, rolled into a bullet casing and lodged into the pole.

In 1881, the Army re-interred the dead in a common grave on top of Last Stand Hill, erected the monument over it and relocated some of the officers' remains to cemeteries back East. A few years later, 249 white marble headstones were erected at the spots where dead cavalrymen had been found.

There were 40 confirmed Indian deaths at Little Bighorn, although the actual number was much higher. That figure will never be known, because the Sioux and Cheyenne cleared their dead and wounded from the battlefield and many died later of their wounds.

For years, descendants of Lame White Man, a Cheyenne warrior who died fighting Custer, petitioned the government to mark the spot where he was killed, which had been marked with a rock cairn, Mangum said. The park finally erected red granite headstones commemorating fallen Indian warriors in 1999.

The first so honored were Lame White Man and Noisy Walking, a 17-year-old who took a bullet through the jaw and died later in the village. Last year, a third red-granite headstone went up on the spot where a Sioux warrior, Long Road of the Sans Arc tribe, died attacking the Reno-Benteen defensive position.

Lame White Man may have been the victim of "friendly fire" in a case of mistaken identity, historians say, but his people have another explanation for his death.

"He didn't have his hair," said Leroy White Man, a Cheyenne tribal member who portrays his grandfather Painted White Man in an annual battle re-enactment in nearby Hardin. "He had just come out of the sweat lodge. He led the suicide warriors, boys between the ages of 12 and 16. They met the brunt of the battle, while the warriors got their horses. . . . Sixteen of our warriors died."


'Counting Coup': Indian historians note these deaths were extremely hard on their respective tribes because warriors could not be replaced, while the whites had a seemingly endless supply of pioneers and soldiers. "For these young warriors, it was their last chance to count coup, so they died recklessly, foolishly," said Crow historian Elias Goes Ahead.

"Counting coup," harmlessly touching a living enemy with a stick in the heat of combat, was once an important rite of initiation for Plains Indians. In recent years, defiant young Sioux sometimes have observed the battle anniversary by tapping coup sticks on the battlefield monument. Predictably, this practice offends many people, who see it as a desecration of a grave and possibly an insult to the tradition of counting coup.

"I wish they wouldn't," Mangum said. "It's a mass grave. They were soldiers doing their job, following their culture. All graves should be respected, no matter who they are."