One hundred and thirty-three years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the American people continue to be fascinated by the events that took place on that grassy hillside in the Montana territory in June, 1776. An avid Civil War buff friend of mine has often described that piece of real estate as the most hallowed and haunted ground in America. Considering the psychic overburden carried by the battlefields at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor and Shilo, that’s saying something. He might have added the word “enigmatic,” for Little Big Horn. If you’ve ever stood on that ridgeline above the battlefield on a summer evening, you know what I mean. The place and the air above it seems to heave with national pathos.
A few years ago, while filming a documentary on the Crow reservation, just east of Hardin, Montana, I happened to meet a gentle giant of a man named Dan Old Elk (and many members of the Old Elk clan) who also happened to be a tribal spiritual leader. Dan and his wife Carlene have raised dozens of foster kids over the years, and while that alone would be a full-time job, Dan has also been conducting the annual Sun Dance since the 1970s. This tall, broad-shouldered man with silver braids that drop to his waist also happens to be the grandson of Curly, the last Crow scout to see Custer alive. In fact, Dan grew up on a ranch at the base of the hillside where the battle took place, and he remembers finding artifacts from the battle when he and his friends combed the hillside as kids.
As Dan knows all too well, things could have worked out differently, very differently for the Old Elk clan. In the hours before the battle, Curly, Hairy Moccasin, and White Man Runs Him, all advised The Son of the Morning Star that taking on the Sioux and Cheyenne would be disastrous. A determined Custer was so frustrated by their warnings that he relieved them of their duties. All the scouts but Mitch Boyer, the half-breed Sioux who acted as lead scout, beat cheeks. Literally. Boyer followed Custer into battle and his body was never found.
We tend to think of this epic event as happening in the dark ages of America’s past, but a sojourn into Indian Country quickly dispels that illusion. Native people have a different relationship to time than their Euro-centric compatriots. Many Crow elders today have vivid recollections of hearing their grandparents telling the story of the battle on the Greasy Grass, and to hear them retell it, you’d think you were the first to hear the news.
Paul VanDevelder’s two books on Indian Country, Coyote Warrior and Savages and Scoundrels (Yale University Press, 2009) combine to tell the story of the settling of America by Europeans from the vantage point of the tribes of the West.
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