Our Own Battle at Little Bighorn

When I was twelve, my family took a vacation up north to South Dakota.  The main thought was to go see Mount Rushmore, which we did, but that wasn’t the best story to come out of that trip.  No, the best story happened, when we went over to Montana to see the Little Bighorn Battlefield.

The Little Bighorn Battlefield, if you know your history, was the site of Custer’s Last Stand.  It is located in the middle of nowhere just north of Garryowen, Montana.  If you don’t remember the details of Custer’s Last Stand, it was an armed engagement between the 7^th Cavalry and the combined forces of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians.  The over-confident Custer took his 650 men up against nearly 2,500 Indian braves and was badly beaten, losing over 270 men and his own life.  Despite propaganda to the contrary, it’s historically believed that Custer’s arrogance and a series of bad choices led to one of the worst military defeats in U.S. history.

The site itself is predominantly a large, open plain.  The rolling hills are carpeted with tall prairie grass that appears brown and gold in the summer heat.  There’s a river and trees that snakes jaggedly off to the side.  To get to the site, you must take a one-lane, gravel road from the Custer National Cemetery to a little parking area near the monument commemorating the battle.  The road winds lazily through the deep grass, and due to the poor quality of the road and the number of cars trying to drive down it, it took us almost 10 minutes to get from the cemetery to the monument.

We had no sooner trekked through the grass to the monument, then my grandmother said that she didn’t feel very well.  She had been having stomach issues the whole trip, experiencing occasional bouts of diarrhea, so we decided to head back to the restrooms at the visitor center near the cemetery.  My father had just pulled the van out of the parking lot, when my grandmother said, “You'd better hurry.”  Something in the desperation or finality of her tone made my father floor it.

So, here we were, flying back down this gravel road, passing slower cars through the prairie grass on the side of the road, and my grandmother starts yelling from the back of the van, “I’m not going to make it!  I’m not going to make it!”  And my father starts yelling from the front of the van, “Yes you are!  Don’t you do that in our new van!”  Rocking and weaving, we made the drive back in just under two minutes, the van skidding to a halt in front of the restrooms.  My grandmother already had the door open before we had even stopped moving.  She bolted from the van and ran toward the restroom.  Just as she got to the door, a cleaning woman came out of the restroom, holding a mop and a roll of toilet paper.  Seeing my grandmother, she said in a thick Mexican accent, “I’m sorry, ma’am, the restroom is closed for cleaning.”  Not even slowing down, my grandmother shoved her out of the way, saying as she passed, “I don’t care, I’m going in anyway!”  I’m sure that poor cleaning woman had to earn her money that day.

So, that’s it.  That’s my memory of the Little Bighorn Battlefield.  I have been there.  I have seen it.  A little of it anyway.  I spent about two minutes at it.  Almost the same time it took for us to drive my grandmother from the battlefield back to the restroom.  And every time I think about that trip, I hear voices echoing in my head, “I’m not going to make it!”  “Yes you are!”  And she did…barely.