Little Bighorn Battlefield NHS, MT

Our plan to avoid the high winds worked, but that’s about as far as we got with plans.  Because we got to the Little Bighorn Battlefield so early in the day, we figured we would be out of there by lunchtime and would head over to the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area to see the Yellowtail Dam.  By lunchtime, we had walked around the area surrounding the visitor center, and were sitting in the little auditorium waiting for the site’s movie to start.  Tom’s phone buzzed, and it was one of his Belize clients sending him a text asking him to call her ASAP.  He texted back that he’d be a half hour since the movie was about to start, and we watched the most excellent movie…more on that later.  As we walked out of the visitor center, he called back and found out that they had a problem that needed immediate attention.  So, instead of getting some lunch and heading out on the site’s driving tour, we drove into town to find a parking place with internet where we weren’t taking up needed space for a business or a park.  Tom spent about four hours working on the problem, while I worked on the blog offline.  This was on a Friday, so he needed to get enough information from the client in Belize before the close of business so he could work on it over the weekend.

He did that, and we packed up and headed back to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.  The movie we’d watched in the morning had been a detailed dramatization of the battle, which we learned was having its anniversary just two days after we were there.  It also highlighted a few spots we hadn’t walked to in the morning, so we set out to see those spots before driving the road.  We walked to the top of the famous hill of Custer’s Last Stand, and then went to the Indian Memorial.  We’d walked around the National Cemetery in the morning, but we had learned from the movie that the entire area was basically a cemetery, since all of the soldiers were buried where they were killed, although the Indians had taken their fallen warriors.  We were planning to walk to the path that wound through most of the battlefield to see these markers, when the thunder started rumbling.  It very quickly got dark and windy, and the thunder got louder and more frequent, and we started to feel raindrops.  We abandoned the plan to walk the entire battlefield and ran for the truck.  We thought we could maybe do the drive, but the thunderstorm quickly turned into a deluge with very high winds and very low visibility because of the sheeting rain.  So, we sat in the truck and waited for it to pass.  

We never did get to drive the road, but sitting in the truck gave us time to process what we’d seen.  We’ve visited a number of historic battlefields, and the National Park Service seems to try very hard to be even handed, fair, and non-judgmental.  Of course the victors of the battle usually get top billing, but as part of American history, the losers are also fairly represented.  This site is different, because nobody won this battle, and while the US wouldn’t be what it is today without the western expansion, current understanding of basic human rights makes contemporary thinkers, if nothing else, at least feel compassion towards the Indians since not just their homes, but also their way of life were being destroyed.  Custer’s men lost this battle, with most of them killed and the rest fleeing for their lives, but the Indians also suffered many casualties, and ultimately lost the war since the white man’s retribution drove them to increasingly smaller reservations and they lost their homes and were forced to compromise to the white man’s way of life.  The movie and the entire organization and presentation of the site do a great job of making this clear.  

When we were working and realized we wouldn’t be getting to the Yellowtail Dam that day, we’d looked for camping options.  We found that all of the rivers have access sites like where we’d stayed the previous night, and we had three options along the Bighorn River between the Little Bighorn Battlefield and the Bighorn Canyon NRA.  We planned to start checking the sites out from north to south, with the backup plan of going to one of the official camping areas in the Recreation Area.  What we didn’t think about was the effect of the torrential rain on the river levels, and the first site we pulled into was already going underwater when we got there.  We drove partway in and realized we were driving in the river water, so we made a quick exit and headed towards the next access site.  The next one was also right on the river, but the boat launch was more of a ramp going down to the river, rather than a straight shot, so the river would have to rise at least a few feet before getting to the parking areas.  Even with that observation, we parked away from the river, and did the trick we’d learned in Belize of putting a substantial rock at the water line so we could look later to see if the water was rising.  We took the dogs for a walk and ate dinner, and checked the rock before bed and determined that while the water may have risen a little, we weren’t in any danger of it overflowing the banks.  Even the next morning, after another night of hard rain, the river had risen about two inches over the rock, but we still had plenty of room.