Little Big Horn

"When you get to the visitor's center, check out the blue dress--it belonged to Judy's great-grandma," she told me, referring to a maintenance worker at the school I'd just met. "Both our great-grandmas were there." 

I couldn't get in to the visitor's center--Covid. No one could. I didn't see the dress. I'd have loved to.

But what my guide through St. Lebre mission and school had told me was enough to make the trip up the road to Little Big Horn a different experience altogether. I'd just met two women who were very proud to say that their grandmothers were there just across the river, part of the largest encampment of Native people in years, if ever, June 25, 1876, just across the river from the hill where Custer and his men died.

And they're marked, the graves of the Northern Cheyenne warriors who fell that day, distinctly marked, like this one, off the road a way but signaled by a path distinguished by a light storm the night before.

Museums can be stingy about pictures. Maybe that's why it felt a little brash of me to be snapping away out there at Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument. But I was just about totally alone. Covid kept down tourism anyway, and it was the holiday season, when most people don't wander far from home anyway. 

I can't imagine a better time to be there--when no one else is and late afternoon, right after a gentle snowfall. The battlefield is a monumental place. You can see for miles in every direction.

But then, everywhere you look there are gravestones marking the places where men--white and red--died. You don't have to look hard or far. They're there.

As is the Native measure of grief and remembrance, sacred itself, so sacred that perhaps I shouldn't have taken this picture. 

At the visitor's center there's even a national cemetery.

The Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument holds that level of awe that makes silence the mode of communication. Trust me, you can be alone at Little Big Horn and still be surrounded by those who were not--Native-American and Euro-American, still be spoken to.

The visitor's center was closed, but you can listen to the whole story on your phone as you drive through. You can hear the whole story and you stop at the places where that story happened. 

But I couldn't help remember that just an hour before, when I told my mission guide where I was going, the first thing she told me was that her grandma was there--that's how important the place, the time, the event was to her. "Our grandmas were both there," she told me, somewhere beside a tipi across the river.

An immensely awesome place.

I may not have seen the blue dress in the visitor's center that day, but it was impossible not to see a great deal in the wide open valley of the Little Big Horn.