Grandma's Blue Dress

 

"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 friend, yet another maintenance worker at St. Lebre Mission. "Both our great-grandmas were there."

With that send-off from the two women who had given me a tour of the place, I drove west for an hour to the immense swath of prairie all around the battlefields at Little Big Horn. 

The Fourth of July should be big this year—it’s a birthday, our 250^th as a nation. Less heralded certainly but no less memorable is another: the 150^th anniversary of  “Custer’s Last Stand,” the most celebrated battle of the Indian wars, a huge win that, ironically, secured their eventual defeat.  

Just exactly why Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men all died on a hill above the Little Big Horn may never be known. His flamboyant personality long ago gave rise to the theory that, in taking the 7th Calvary where he did, when he did, he was looking for headlines. Then again, maybe he simply made a disastrous military blunder.

What resulted was a last disastrous stand on a little hill where his whole 7^th Cavalry were killed by warriors from a collection of different tribes united by the anger created by losing their world.

Capts. Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen, distinguished Civil War vets, somehow failed to come to Custer's aid. Neither were afraid of a fight. Reno and his men were battle weary. They'd already lost forty or more troops, a catastrophic number if it hadn't been for the 210 men who went to their deaths with Custer. 

Reno chose not to help Custer, even though once the guns were silenced in his own venue of the battle, he knew something was happening to the north because all that smoke and dust meant something was going on. 

But Reno didn't go. Why not? Good question. His uniform was blood-spattered from the death of a Crow scout who took a bullet to the head right beside him. Maybe he'd simply had enough killing.

Some say Reno didn't go to Custer's aid because he simply couldn't imagine his famous battlefield boss could possibly lose a fight with a bunch of wild savages; the great white general losing to hostiles was far beyond his imagination. Reno didn't go, some say, because it never dawned on him that half-naked hostiles could defeat a famous general--they were just Indians.

It was January, not June, when I stopped at Little Big Horn battlefield. I’d been there before, but this time it felt different because I’d met a woman whose great-grandma was actually there, a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress that, I was told, was still on display in the visitor’s center. They were there, across the river with thousands of others.

I couldn't get in to the Visitor’s Center see that blue dress that January morning. No one could. Covid shut the place down. I looked in the windows, but I couldn't see Judy’s great-grandma’s blue dress. I would have loved to.

But I felt a strange species of pride that great-grandma in the blue dress helped me feel. Even though I was out there on the battlefield alone, my having met the great-granddaughter of a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress who was there 150 years ago made this visit bigger, wider even than the spacious forever plains all around the battlefield.