Aftermath and the Indian Memorial.
The victory by the combined forces of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho in the Battle at Greasy Grass on 25 June 1876 was the most decisive victory won by the Native Americans in their fight to carry on their lives on their traditional lands and in their traditional ways. It was also their last.
News of Custer’s defeat reached a disbelieving nation as people in the east prepared to celebrate the country’s centennial. The Army’s response was swift, relentless, and almost unprecedented. Less than a year later, on 5 May 1877, Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson, Nebraska.
Later that month, Sitting Bull and Chief Gall led a band of people across the border into Canada. Despite maintaining reasonably good relations with the Canadian Mounties, an aging population and dwindling bison herds prompted Chief Gall to return to the United States some time in 1880 where he too surrendered. In May 1881 he was sent to the Standing Rock Reservation with the other Hunkpapa Lakota hundreds of miles to the north and east of his sacred Black Hills.
On 19 July of the same year, Sitting Bull, followed by 186 of his followers and family also returned to the United States where he surrendered at Fort Buford (in present day North Dakota at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers). Sitting Bull was also transferred to the area near Standing Rock but was kept apart from the other Hunkpapa. The Army eventually transferred Sitting Bull and most of his band to Fort Randall (near today’s Pickstown, South Dakota) where he was held as a prisoner of war for 20 months before being returned to the Standing Rock Reservation.
Over that same four year period, troops garrisoned at nearby Fort Custer (the modern-day town of Hardin, Montana) regularly gathered remains for reburial, recovered graves, and policed the battlefield for exposed bones. In 1879, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued General Order Number 78 that designated part of what was then called the Custer Battlefield as a National Cemetery.
By 1881, a memorial was erected in honor of the Seventh U S Cavalrymen who perished on the battlefield. Prior to installing the monument, soldiers dug a trench around the base and placed into it bodies that had been found to that date.
It took just five years for the men of the 7th Cavalry who died on the field at Little Bighorn to receive their memorial. It required an additional 137 years before President George H W Bush authorized a memorial for the Native Americans warriors who died at Greasy Grass to be similarly honored.
Just 75 yards northeast of the 7th Cavalry monument, the Indian Memorial was dedicated in 2003 and completed in 2013. The monument is a circular, earthwork design carved into the prairie. For many Native Americans, the circle is symbolically sacred. It represents the sun, the moon, the cycles of the seasons, and the cycle of life to death to rebirth.
Native Americans constructed stone circles for astronomical, ritual, healing, and teaching purposes. These sacred hoops are symbols of harmony, balance, and peaceful interaction among all living beings on Earth. Built to follow a specific, basic pattern, – a stone center surrounded by an outer ring of stones with lines of rocks, or “spokes,” radiating from the center in the four cardinal directions, they serve as connecting points for Mother Earth and Father Sky with the center representing the individual’s connection to all of this.
The theme of the memorial is “Peace Through Unity” and a view of the Cavalry Memorial obelisk
is intended as a spirit gate that welcomes the slain Cavalry soldiers into the memorial circle and symbolizes the mutual understanding of the infinite that all the dead possess. This is how the Friends of the Little Bighorn Battlefield organization describes it:
The Indian Memorial will surprise you. ….. If you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t know it’s there. From the visitor center it appears to be a mound, slightly lifted above the ground. There is already prairie grass sprouting from the outside walls blending it beautifully within its environment.
You cross the street from Last Stand Hill and the first thing you come to is the wayside for Wooden Leg Hill and the Unknown Warrior marker on a distant ridge. Wooden Leg witnessed the death of an unknown warrior wearing a warbonnet when he was shot through the head.
From there you turn northwest and pass by the Horse Cemetery with the new marble marker including a 7th Cavalry Horse drawn by Park Historian, John Doerner. There is a wayside exhibit explaining the archeological dig that was conducted there. From there you follow the sidewalk to where it forks going east and west. The proper way to enter the Memorial is from the east entrance and exit from the west. As you approach the memorial it begins to swallow you into its power. It becomes taller and more mysterious. As you approach the east entrance of the Memorial you can see just above the mound the very tops of the Spirit Warriors….
When you enter the Memorial, you enter another world — somber, deep, retrospective, and sacred. The Memorial is in the shape of a perfect circle. In the center is a circle of red dirt. Around it is a circled stone walkway. On the inner walls sit panels for each tribe that fought in the battle (Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Arikara). Each tribe lists their dead and there are some pictographs.
You are immediately taken by the Spirit Warriors standing high above you to the north. The area is wide open so the Montana prairie shines through. If you turn around from the Spirit Warriors you look through a gap in the mound called the Weeping Wall. It is here that water continually trickles down into a pool representing tears for the fallen warriors and soldiers. And, centered perfectly within the Weeping Wall can be seen the 7th Cavalry Monument. This Spirit Gate welcomes the fallen soldiers to enter the Memorial and join the fallen warriors in friendship; “peace through unity.” Its symbolism is powerful in so many ways to say the least.
It is peaceful in this place, within this circle……
Some final thoughts.
Manassas. Antietam. Vicksburg. Gettysburg. Little Bighorn. These places, battlefields all, cast long shadows over American history. For many, these are sacred places. Many consider the ground itself hallowed by the blood of the people who fought and died on these fields. I have visited all of them and never in those visits did I hear the sound of gun or cannon fire. Never did I hear a whoop of victory, a howl of agony, or see the recognition of death in a ghostly soldier’s eyes.
Remove the markers and monuments and you remove the scars of battle. Remove the scars of battle and the field at Greasy Grass returns to being a rolling prairie divided at some point by a small meandering river. It becomes the place it had always been and might have always remained. That is where I find healing.