Cavalry and Devilry

August 6-7

We stopped in Hardin because it’s close to one of the most famous sites in the Western states, and maybe in the United States, the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was the subject of a Budweiser print that used to hang in bars all over the country.

Going there, I found, is an experience very much like visiting the Alamo. Errol Flynn, Richard Mulligan, Robert Shaw, and countless other actors died at the Little Bighorn. Just as Fess Parker, Sterling Hayden, John Wayne, and hundreds more died at the Alamo.

It has been fictionalized, rationalized, and lied about so often that I half expected it to be like Stonewall Jackson memorabilia in Virginia.

But the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, like the Alamo, brought this wise-ass up short.

The parking lot and visitor center are next to a National Cemetery. None of the dead from the Little Bighorn battle are buried there. Many of the graves are reburials from cemeteries at frontier forts that were closed. The identities of many of those remains are unknown.

Others are from the Spanish-American, First World, Second World, and later wars.

We saw the grave of someone whose name I know. Marcus Reno was one of Custer’s officers, who was court-martialed, essentially for surviving the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but then exonerated.

Reno led part of Custer’s command in the initial attack on the huge Indian camp. It was a diversion while Custer took a larger, though still inadequate, force to attack another part of the encampment.

Reno’s force was driven back by overwhelming numbers of Indians, who then turned their attention to Custer.

Reno fell back to join another part of Custer’s command, led by an officer named Benteen, who were holding a hill a few miles away. Many of them would die, too, in a siege that lasted about a day. 

Then all the Indians withdrew. They buried their dead and moved away.

The Seventh Cavalry dead, their scouts, and a few civilians who were with the group, are buried in a mass grave under a monument that lists their names on top of Last Stand Hill. 

Years ago, I was driving back from Mexico to Houston and stopped for the night in a small town called Beeville, not far south of San Antonio. 

The next morning, feeling really irreverent, I detoured to the Alamo. I waited outside with a small crowd of people until the place opened. I expected something really tacky, and expected to be amused.

Just outside the door of the mission church I read a sign that changed everything. “You are about to enter the Alamo Shrine. Gentlemen, please remove your hats.”

I choked down the lump in my throat and the last thing that occurred to me then was to make a wisecrack.

I had the same feeling here. After walking through the cemetery, we rested in the visitor center and saw the orientation film that discussed events leading to Great Sioux War of 1876-77 and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

I favor a theory I’ve read a couple of times about Custer’s motivation that day. 

His name already had high recognition. A victory against the Sioux, even if it was an unarmed village, would make him an even greater national hero.

It would give him a shot at the Republican nomination for the presidential race. The Republican Convention was due to begin in Kansas City about a month after Custer rode down the hill to attack the entire Sioux Nation, most of the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho.

We all know it didn’t go as Custer planned it. Almost 300 American soldiers and civilians, and many Indian scouts died there.

Marble markers all over the battlefield look like the headstones in the cemetery, but these mark where each man’s body was found. There are many on Last Stand Hill, including one in the center with Custer’s name on a black shield.

There is a ravine with many more, where an officer named Calhoun led a contingent that was wiped out.

There are other markers dotted around in the grass in twos and threes.

Many markers simply say “U.S. Soldier.” Their names are etched on a stone monument at the top of the hill, so there is a record of who died there. But private soldiers carried no personal identification so individual bodies couldn’t be identified.

Most of them are in the mass grave. The officers’ remains have been buried elsewhere. Custer’s grave, for instance, is at West Point. 

A second set of markers, dark brown and distinct from the marble, record where Indians fell. 

There is one right on the edge of the National Cemetery, for instance. It says that O Xasehe, or Cut Belly, was a Cheyenne warrior who fell at that spot on June 25, 1876, “while defending the Cheyenne way of life.”

It is estimated that 60 to 100 Indians died in the fighting.

Not far from Last Stand Hill, there is a monument to the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho who fought here.

It is a very eerie place. Broad and mostly very silent. The markers stand in grass that waves in the wind. 

We didn’t bother with any of the commercial attractions in the area and made it to Gillette shortly after three. 

I did an Internet search for places to eat and found a couple of steak houses. We got the directions to one of them and the route took us past the other one.

We pulled up at the Chophouse. I thought we were early. Joanna thought the place was closed. Joanna was right. The windows were papered up.

That’s how we wound up at the other place, the Prime Rib. It was fun. We shared a dozen snails and sopped up the butter with sourdough bread. That was already a lot of food, so we shared one order of New York strip. 

Here’s how we did it. It came medium rare—way too red inside for Joanna’s taste. I cut it in half and Joanna sent hers back to the kitchen to cook some more.

We shared the salad, potatoes, and string beans that came with the steak and were stuffed before it was gone. Joanna took a few ounces of her steak and some beans away in a box.

We had a California pinot noir with it. It was surprisingly light for pinot. It had a good ending, but not as much flavor up front as I like.

I lost all track of time again. I got up on Saturday morning and found out it was Sunday. I lived all day yesterday thinking it was Friday.

Enough of that. It can make my head hurt,

Sunday, the seventh, we made it to another very interesting place made famous by the movies. 

Devil’s Tower is all it’s cracked up to be. Crossing the passes in the hills, we could see the top of it miles away. 

We stopped at a scenic turnout and met a bunch of bikers in the area for the Sturgis Bike Rally this coming week. 

One of them came up to us and asked to have his picture taken with us. He said he gets his picture taken often with non-bikers. How could he know I was not a biker? The rally is the reason we are not staying in Deadwood, or even in Rapid City, but in a town a few miles south. 

I expect there are plenty of bikes on the highways here all summer long, but August is peak season. Sturgis closes its streets to cars for the bike rally in the second week of August.

According to the Park Service, there is a mass ride to Devil’s Tower on Wednesday of Rally Week. They have to make special arrangements to park all the motorcycles.

I have photo somewhere taken during a rally some years ago. It shows Lorenzo Lamas, who was a motorcycle rider in a TV series called “Renegade,” with Pee-wee Herman, whose connection with motorcycles is dancing in white platform shoes on top of a biker bar. (If you don’t now what I’m talking about, that’s OK. See “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”)

I may have lost it, though. Some weeks ago, before I left for this trip, I spilled beer on my other computer. I took it to the Great Apple Graveyard to be recycled.

We met climbers who had scaled the tower and saw several others in the process. Doesn’t it harm the rock, we asked. They showed us a removable piton that clips into a crevice and leaves no trace.

Joanna got the best shot of climbers on the Tower.

Another climber we met is a park climbing ranger. He gets to scale the mountain three or four times a week. The round trip takes about eight hours.

His companion, not a ranger, said he found the experience “terrifyingly awesome.” Now that it was over, he was glad that he did it. He might do it again some time in the future, he said, but he’s not sure about that.

The tower sits on the remains of an eroded hill. It rises more than 800 feet. People climb up through the crevices between the columns of rock. 

I got the best (only) shot of Joanna photographing the climbers.

The tower was formed by magma under the surface of the Earth. As the hot rock cooled, it cracked. At least, that’s what I remember from one of the signs along the trail.

Over millions of years, wind and water eroded the surface and left the tower exposed. You get a similar story at Stone Mountain, Georgia.

I’m more inclined to accept the Kiowa story. Seven girls were chased by a bear. They leapt onto a rock, and one of them prayed to the rock to save them. It started to grow higher. The bear tried to chase them up the rock, but kept slipping, leaving his claw marks in the stone.

My grandson Liam has a birthday later this month, so I sent him a card a little early. Devil’s Tower has its own post office.

What better place can there be to send greetings to a little devil? Especially when they’re coming from a big one.

We found a promising looking Italian retaurant in town and decided to go there for a pasta fix. That was closed, too. Restaurants around here have been really catching hell.

Rather than go back and start another Google search, we went to the one place we know was open in town, the Prime Rib.

Both times we went there, I got to park next to the fire plug and not get a ticket.

Joanna had chicken Parmagiana and I had something called chicken Italiano. The sauce was too sweet, the onions pieces too big, but the Banfi Chianti classico riserva (2012) was terrific.

I am polishing off the last of the bottle now.

And am wrapping this up, too, because it’s already too long.

Love to all and to all a good night.

Harry