Fire burns away Custer’s mysteries

Press, 15 April 1987, Page 21

Fire burns away Custer’s mysteries

A 1983 prairie fire has shed strong light on the still-contro-versial Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lieutenant-Gen-eral George Armstrong Custer and 260 of his men made their historic last stand — and lost their lives — in 1876.

The fire was “a blessing in disguise,” says an archeologist

Richard A. Fox, Jun. The flames had laid bare the field of combat, named after a river in south-eastern Montana. “Some of that land was impenetrable before the fire,” he says. For 110 years, Custer and his disastrous encounter with as many as 2000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors have held cap-

tive the imagination of the public. More has been said about the struggle than any other battle in American history except perhaps Gettysburg. “Argument and speculation swirl about it, partly because Custer remains an enigma and mysteries obscure the course of the fight,” Robert Paul Jordan writes in the “National Geographic.” “Those who rode with him to the end left only death’s mute testimony,” Jordan writes. “Indian accounts varied, generally were long in coming, and often conveyed what the white man wanted to hear. Even today Indian resentment lingers at terms such as ‘hostile’ and at the mythology surrounding Custer.”

But the fire that burned the grass and sagebrush cover off the undulating heights and wrinkled draws, where Custer

met his doom, cleared the way for two seasons of toil by archeologists and volunteers equipped with metal detectors, trowels, and sieves. The results are surprising. More than 4000 artefacts have been unearthed: bullets and cartridge cases, iron arrowheads, pieces of firearms, buttons, a watch, and horse trappings. The almost complete skeleton of a trooper was also found. It is the first time a battlefield has been systematically plotted into a grid to chart a fight’s progress; the first time that modern ballistic techniques have been applied to a field of combat; and one of the few times that precise information has been recorded on the location of every relic found. “The archeologists learned that the soldiers were relatively stationary, while the Indians moved freely about as they

over-ran one position after another,” Jordan writes. Codes on one computer printout suggest the tragic scenario of a trooper who may have been the last man to die in the struggle. Archeologists speculate that Indians fired at him with at least six guns as he tried to escape the waning battle. When he dropped, they hacked at his body with knives and hatchets. They decapitated him.

Archeologists and firearms specialists have concluded from the evidence that the Indians outgunned the soldiers. Custer’s Seventh Cavalry troops carried single-shot carbines and sixshot Colt revolvers. Ballistic studies show that the Indians had at least 41 kinds of firearms, including 16-shot repeating rifles. The investigators’ interpretation: “With the relative lack of

cover available to Custer and the dispersed deployment of his command against superior numbers of Indians with greater firepower, the reason for the outcome of the battle can no longer be significantly debated.” The studies affirm the truth of the legend of Last Stand Hill. One by one, the survivors of Custer’s five companies dropped in the gunsmoke and confusion. As the troopers’ fire dwindled, the warriors, helped by women, rushed in and finished them off with rifles, bows, clubs, and hatchets. Most were stripped naked. Some were mutilated.

News of the June 25 debacle reached the American public right after the July 4, 1876, celebration of the nation’s centennial, bringing disbelief, shock, and anger.

Nobody knows exactly how many Indians died in the brief but bloody battle. A good guess might be 100, says Jordan. “It was over,” he writes. “But most of all it was over for the Indians. These people of the plains long had been doomed by the white man’s inexorable westward expansion. The Army had perpetrated cruelties in earlier Indian battles as savage as any inflicted on Custer’s men. But in thrashing the Seventh Cavalry, the Indians sealed their own fate. Within a year the Army hounded most to the hated reservations. Like the vanishing buffalo, their way of life was no more.” In contrast to the Custer cultists who revere the name of their hero, many of today’s native Americans despise it They dislike even the name of the Custer Battlefield National Monument; after all, it was they who won.

“Sitting Bull National Monument would be more appropriate,” says Caleb Shields, a Sioux tribal councilman at the Fort Peck Reservation in northern Montana, “or Little Bighorn National Monument Custer is no hero of ours.”