Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Montana, United States
Almost three months after my move to Montana I still needed
to take care of something I had been planning on all that time, a trip back to the
Denver area to visit friends and retrieve some of my stuff from my storage unit
there. I could easily have gone in April
or May, but my excuse was my top priority was getting back into shape first and
also April and May could involve blizzards on the plains. The latter occur infrequently enough to be
more of an excuse to delay the trip a little, and strangely enough there was
snow in the mountains around the date of my departure on June 20th
and 21st. The main reason for
picking the time, though, was to combine the trip with two events on the
weekends – the Little Bighorn Battle Reenactment as part of Crow Indian Days near
the battlefield monument on the 21st and the Eastern Shoshone Pow
Wow in Fort Washakie in Wyoming the following weekend.
I had been to Little Bighorn Battlefield three times
previously, so probably wouldn’t have stopped had it not been for the special
event.
Weather was quite unsettled with
bright sunshine alternating with forebodingly dark clouds, occasional showers
and even a windy hailstorm on my two hours there – typical spring weather on
the Plains. The battlefield is, of course, where General George Armstrong
Custer and well over 200 of the soldiers under his command met their end on
June 25, 1876 against the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe tribes, the
battle reenactment coinciding roughly with the 143rd anniversary of
the event. With the scheduled reenactment, the visitor center and park road
were uncharacteristically crowded; I recall the other times I visited in 1995,
1998, and 2009 having the site practically to myself, remote a location as it
is on the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana.
So after leaving the battlefield, part of the national park
system, I followed the signs for the battle reenactment to be held on adjacent
land on the reservation only to discover as I approached that the event was
cancelled for the day because of the rain. “You can come back tomorrow if you’re
still going to be in the area.” Well, I’m
afraid I have other places to be - maybe a future year’s reenactment.
2025-05-22